PREVENTING FOOD SENSITIVITY: BREAST-FEEDING

A baby’s immune system is not fully developed at birth. To protect it against infection in the first few months of life, a mother’s milk contains antibodies to commonly found bacteria and viruses, and the baby’s gut is ‘leaky’ to allow these antibodies through into the bloodstream. Because the gut is so permeable, undigested food molecules also get into the blood in far greater quantity than in an older child or adult. At the same time, the control reactions that regulate damaging immune reactions are not yet up-and-running. In particular, the system that prevents the manufacture of IgE to harmless antigens is not fully effective.

Any food that the baby eats or drinks during the first three months of life will be absorbed into the bloodstream in appreciable quantities. Some unknown mechanism prevents a baby from mounting a damaging immune reaction against the proteins in its mother’s milk – although there may be cases of babies being allergic to their mother’s breast milk, these are extremely rare. Presumably the process by which the baby learns to tolerate the breast-milk proteins happens before birth, while the baby is still in the womb.

*321\180\8*

Related Posts:

• APPENDIX VII: BOTTLED WATER
• STAGE 3 – RIGOROUS ELIMINATION DIET: THE EXCLUSION PHASE
• FOOD PROBLEMS IN CHILDREN: DIARRHOEA IN BABIES AND CHILDREN
• FOOD INTOLERANCE: STAPLE CROPS

This entry was posted on Monday, April 20th, 2009 at 12:33 pm and is filed under Allergies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Tags: Allergies

Leave One

You must be logged in to post a comment.