Giving your baby morning breastmilk at bedtime might be ruining his sleep
Human breast milk is more than a meal?it?s also a clock, providing time-of-day information to infants. The composition of breast milk changes across the day, giving energizing morning milk a different cocktail of ingredients than soothing evening milk. Researchers believe this ?chrononutrition? may help program infants? emerging circadian biology, the internal timekeeper that allows babies to distinguish day from night.
What happens, though, when babies drink milk that does not come directly from the breast, but is pumped at different times of day and stored in advance of feeding" Scientists have rarely considered the potential effects of ?mistimed? milk on infants? development, but the implications are potentially far-reaching.
As psychologists who study the biology of parenting, we teamed up with Laura Glynn, Caroline Steele and Caroline Bixby to investigate the evidence for breast milk as a timekeeper. Body clocks over the course of the day
Sleep, eating and energy levels all show circadian rhythms, which means they follow a daily cycle. As any parent who has sleepwalked through a 3 a.m. feeding knows, infants are not born with these rhythms fully set. Instead, their sense of day and night develops over the first weeks and months of life, thanks to cues like sunlight and darkness.
Babies vary: Some show predictable circadian fluctuations in hormones linked with alertness, sleep and appetite, and can sleep for long stretches shortly after birth, whereas others seem t...
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