A few days ago the story of a mother surprised many people who did not know that something like this could happen, by telling on the Breastfeeding Mama Talk Facebook page that for weeks she had been pumping milk for her baby and that when she took it out of the freezer she realized that her little one didn't love her, because It smelled sour and had a stale taste.
He thought that he had gotten bad, but having done all the steps correctly he decided to ask the advisors of his support group, who explained what sometimes happened, and that it was because of lipase.
What is lipase?
The lipase It is an enzyme that we have in our body, whose function is to undo the ingested fats so that we can absorb them correctly.
In the case of women, when they are producing breast milk, lipase travels from the pancreas to the mammary glands to be part of the milk the baby will receive, probably to help you digest the same fats it contains without problems. That is to say, in breast milk are fats and enzymes that will help the baby digest them.
If nothing else is extracted, the milk is frozen, and if it is removed from the freezer, it heats up quickly and is given to the baby, the taste may not be modified so much that it rejects it because in this way the lipase has little time to act .
In Babies and more 11 myths about breastfeeding that we must banish at onceNow, in some women, breast milk contains a higher concentration of lipase and that makes the fat fall apart faster, and that at the time of defrosting it the taste is already affected.
Many babies take it despite it, but there are those who reject it, as happened to his son, who was taking a bottle of freshly extracted milk without problems, but not a bottle of frozen milk.
Luckily, he was able to save all that milk
Although not for her baby, because she didn't love her, a few days ago she received the news that she had been accepted as a milk donor for the Indianapolis Breast Milk Bank, where gladly accepted all the milk I had to pasteurize it, freeze it again and take it to hospitals for all babies who may need it.
And it was that during all this time he had stored more than 800 ounces of breast milk, which are more than 23 liters of breast milk.
And how to prevent the freezing of milk from being bad?
When we say bad we mean the taste. Milk not in bad shape at all. It's just that it has acquired an unpleasant smell and taste because the fats are already broken down.
If the baby takes it well, nothing needs to be done. But if you refuse it, it is better to take action because it makes no sense to store a milk that the baby will not want to drink. To do this, the first thing to do is know if your milk contains a lot of lipase. This is basically done by testing: you take out milk, leave it for a few hours in the fridge (to give room for the lipase to act, in case when making definitive extractions it does not freeze at the moment), at night you freeze it, you leave it for a few days and then take it out.
If you try it and smell it, you realize that it does not seem appetizing, your milk is high in lipase. If that doesn't happen, you don't need to do anything.
Thus, if milk has a high concentration of this enzyme, what you need to do is blanch breast milk before freezing, which is a process that eliminates part of that lipase concentration.
To blanch it, just extract the milk and heat it in a saucepan until bubbles begin to appear in the milk that is in contact with the walls of the saucepan. It is then thrown into the container where it is to be stored and quickly cooled on contact with cold water and ice. Once cold, it is labeled and it is stored in the freezer.
Following this process, defrosting it will have a taste much more similar to that of freshly extracted milk, and the baby will not reject it for its taste or smell.
In Babies and more "My breastfeeding was not easy": seven testimonies of mothers who make visible the problems that may arise with breastfeedingPhotos | Breastfeeding Mama Talk, iStock
In Babies and more | Manually extracted breast milk seems to have more fat than when it is extracted with breast pump, Why using the breast pump to know how much milk is produced makes no sense, Great reaction of the flight attendants when seeing a mother of triplets pump milk in the airplane
