What are the benefits of breast milk?

Key points:

1. Ideal Nutrition for Babies: Breast milk provides essential nutrients, strengthens organs, and protects against diseases and infections, supporting optimal brain development.
2. Health Benefits for Mothers: Breastfeeding aids recovery, weight loss, hormonal health, lowers cancer risk, and fosters emotional bonding with the baby.
3. Eco-Friendly and Cost-Effective: Breastfeeding is convenient, always ready, and requires no monetary cost, benefiting both the environment and finances.

Breast milk is a great gift of nature. Not only does it provide adequate and personalized nutrition for your little one, but it also helps to strengthen the emotional bond between you and your baby; it provides complete nutrition in every way.

The composition of breast milk is ideal for babies, since it reduces the risk of acquiring diseases and infections, and contains all the nutrients that a baby’s brain requires! By consuming your milk, the eyes, heart, intestines, and virtually every other organ in your baby’s body receives the benefits to work at their full potential. That is not all, breast milk contains antibodies and prebiotics that allow a good digestion and protect against gastrointestinal diseases such as diarrhea, constipation, and vomiting. It also prevents ear infections, pneumonia, meningitis, the development of allergic reactions, obesity, type 1 and 2 diabetes, childhood leukemia, and more. That’s just wonderful! Breast milk also helps promote bonding and helps with physical development, as breastfeeding contributes to the appropriate growth of your baby’s jaw and facial muscles.

As a mom, you also get great benefits from breastfeeding. Postpartum recovery is faster, it helps you lose the weight you gained during pregnancy, and it contributes to the quick return of the uterus to its normal size. Furthermore, your hormonal health improves, it lowers the risk of breast and ovarian cancer, and it prevents postpartum depression. It is highly convenient, as it is ready whenever you need to feed your baby, and it’s always at the right temperature. Also, we can’t leave out the fact that it is affordable, since there is no monetary cost, and, given its nature, its use is eco-friendly.

As we can see, breastfeeding is beneficial for both you and your baby, psychologically and physically! For this reason, the World Health Organization recommends that our babies should consume only breast milk during their first 6 months of life and then continue drinking it along with complementary foods at least until 24 months of age. Though every mother’s decision is personal and nobody has the right to put pressure on you to do something you don’t want to do, breastfeeding has so many benefits that it is definitely worth trying.