My fiancee is pregnant and I was wondering if I could benefit from her breast milk? I know breast milk contains colostrum. Would I make good gains from drinking a cup or so of this a day or am I an idiot?
LOL. I love this question---I have a buddy from college who swears by putting his wifes breast milk in his coffee every day as long as she was lactating. He went so far as to try to get her to milk out a bit so he could freeze it and have it later when she wasn't lactating. He was a nice guy, but seriously weird when it came to lactation. I wonder if thats why she divorced him?
You arent' going to get shit from the colostrum in human milk as an adult other than protein. Colostrum is an old school "muscle builder" that has long been proven not to do anything. The thing is colostrum---the antibody rich milk produced for the initial 24 hours after birth cant be absorbed by an adult. The biological purpose of colostrum is to provide antibodies (along with a few minor growh factors) to neonates that will then provide them with a means of defending themselves against disease while their own immune system develops. In certian animals---humans, elephants, some nonhuman primates, the majority of the antibodies cross the placenta to the offspring while the baby is in the uterus. They do not absolutely have to have colostrum to survive once they are born. In other animals, like horses very few antibodies cross the placenta into the baby. These animals must have colostrum within the first 24 hours after birth or else they will effectively not have a functioning immune system. Failure of passive transfer is a serious medical condition in horses that often results in death.
The 24 hour window is very important because its that time that the relatively large protein structure (this is relatively speaking) can cross the intestinal lining into the blood stream without being digested. After that time frame, the mucosa of the digestive lining changes, decreasing the mucosal permiability to the proteins allowing the digestive enzymes/acid within the stomach to simply break the protein structures up. Its basically a protein source becuase as an adult you'll digest it before you absorb anything useful from it.
