Colostrum: inoculating your newborn with living immune tissue

Colostrum is a transfer of concentrated living immune tissue into your baby's gut

Colostrum is an inoculation of your own powerful living immune tissue into your baby’s gut.

Colostrum eases out of your breast as a scant, strange, sticky elixir, an ancient and elegant extension of your own immune system. Sometimes it's clear, sometimes pale or dark yellow, sometimes amber. It's a low-dose, high impact infusion of protection in the first few days of life, kick-starting your newborn’s gut development and immunity.

From an evolutionary perspective, inoculation with this dense miracle fluid helps your baby adapt from life inside your womb to life outside your womb.

• You can find out about antenatal expression of colostrum here.

• You can find out more about colostrum here.

How much colostrum does your baby need?

Although colostrum appears thick and sticky, it’s not "hard for baby to suck out", as I’ve heard some say. It’s meant to be a tiny quantity, moving slowly through your milk ducts with baby's normal suckling. It comes out in little pearls, not gushes, because that's all your baby's gut needs in the first few days of life.

Your breasts might secrete something like 30 millilitres of colostrum in total over a 24 hour period over the first few days of your baby's life. But colostrum is on a spectrum in both volume and composition, transitioning as the hours and days pass into what's known, when your milk comes in, as transitional milk. Estimating volumes of colostrum is difficult, because of the variability. You don't need to worry about volumes - you need only offer your breasts frequently and flexibly.

Because colostrum is so concentrated, it paints baby's gut with protective antibodies, proteins and lactoferrin more effectively than it would if the colostral ingredients were contained within more copious fluid. Similarly, colostrum paints your baby's gut with bacteria, cultivating a protective gut microbiome.

• You can hear a neonatologist talk about baby's milk needs in the first days here. The transcript is here.

• You can find out about frequent and flexible breastfeeding here.

• You can find out about your milk coming in here.

What's in colostrum?

Colostrum is dense with

• Protective antibodies and white cells and a myriad other sophisticated protective factors

• Lactoferrin, which binds with available iron and deprives various bacteria of nutrients, or binds with their cell walls to break them down. Lactoferrin helps cells repel viruses and inhibits the growth of fungi including Candida albicans

• Fat-soluble vitamins and minerals

• Pre- and pro-biotic bacteria

• Oligosaccharides (which nourish the bacteria)

• Cytokines (signalling molecules which regulate inflammation)

• Hormones.

Colostrum is also relatively high in salt content, which helps protect your baby during the normal physiological dehydration of the first days of your baby's life.

Colostrum has more protein (dominated by the immune-protective secretory immunoglobulin A and lactoferrin) and less carbohydrate and fat than mature breast milk.

Colostrum might be secreted from your baby's mammary glands too!

Amazingly, for four weeks after birth, colostrum is also sometimes secreted from a baby's mammary glands. If you see a drop on your baby's nipple, you need only wipe it off gently. It's important not to irritate your baby's little nipples and mammary glands by trying to express the colostrum!

Selected references

Pang WW, Hartmann PE. Initiation of human lactation: secretory differentiation and secretory activation. Journal of Mammary Gland Biology and Neoplasia. 2007;12:211-221.