Breastmilk is nature’s perfect food for an infant: It’s packed with all the nutrients they need, it offers microbes that can help create a healthy gut environment and it ensures lots of cuddly skin-to-skin time with mom. But the health implications go well beyond these obvious advantages. Here are six surprising ways that breastfeeding will benefit your baby.
1. Breastmilk offers changing nutrition as they develop

Scientists have found more than 200 different types of sugar molecules in breastmilk?a marvel, considering that cow?s milk has only 30 to 50. But what?s really cool is how the composition of the sugars changes as the baby grows. At first, many of those sugars are not meant to feed the baby, but to help good bacteria in the baby?s gut thrive and establish a healthy microbiome. But after about a month, the diversity of sugars decreases and the milk develops more fat and nutrients to help the baby grow. 2. Breastfeeding offers an immune boost

When you breastfeed, you transfer important illness-fighting antibodies to your baby, helping to build up their young immune system. But in recent years, researchers have been learning that the immune protection babies get from breastmilk doesn?t end there. A 2016 study from the University of California Riverside found that there are immune cells in breastmilk that, once inside the baby, teach the baby?s cells to develop defences against the same invaders that the mom has been exposed to. 
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