For many years, a dangerous measure has been carried out in the maternity of many hospitals to "help" mothers to make their children more calm: give them a bottle while the mother does not have the rise of milk.
Mothers have often been urged to accept it: "Give him a bottle, woman, so he is calmer and then, when the milk goes up, he already breastfeeds him"; but often it has also been done behind the back of their mothers: "Take handsome, so you are calmer and your mother too ... take this little milk that your mother will soon be able to give you the tit, when the milk rises."
This second bottle is known as "pirate bottle", and is the culprit (along with the other, which is given with the consent of the mother), of many cases of cow's milk protein allergy.
Do they really give bottles because the milk has not risen?
I was doing the kangaroo method with my middle child in the hospital, in the neonatal unit, for having been born prematurely, when next to me they put a woman who had just been a mother whose baby needed specialized care.
They asked him if he wanted to breastfeed, and he said yes, so they helped him to breastfeed him. After a while, the nurse approached him with a bottle and said: "Okay, very well. Now, since you still have no milk, you have to give this bottle to eat."
I was very surprised for two reasons: one, that women do not have milk just after giving birth, but they have colostrum (which is much better than giving them no milk), and two, that babies who bottle feed and then breastfeed have increased risk of cow's milk protein allergy.
Do they really give bottles without the mother finding out?
Yes, really. I hope it's a disused practice, but there are many women who explain that they took their babies and realized that they had given them that bottle.
Some explain that it was directly there where the baby was and caught them giving him a bottle, and others say that they returned the baby so calm and relaxed, that when he went to breastfeed he rejected it and that, when asked, they confessed to having done it.
And why is it dangerous?
Because cow's milk, like many other foods, has no species specificity and cannot be considered a food that we humans naturally accept because it does. We are not predisposed to tolerate it (its proteins are strange to us), so we have to get used to it from the moment we ingest it for the first time. And some of us get used to it, but others don't.
How oral tolerance occurs
The intestinal immune system has the mission of defending ourselves against those substances that are dangerous or foreign, so when we consume something, it starts to analyze what comes to it and assess whether there is any danger and should activate or not the immune response.
When a food arrives for the first time, with its unknown proteins and microorganisms, the intestine decides what to do. If you consider these antigens as "friends", despite being strangers, it is said that there has been a oral tolerance (The baby consumes the antigens, those substances that are not part of the body and are foreign, but the intestine accepts them).
This tolerance is based on multiple factors difficult to explain, because it is not yet known very well what it responds to. It is said that tolerance depends on the genetic predisposition, the nature of the antigen, the amount of antigen the baby receives, the frequency with which it is administered, the age when consumed for the first time, the immunological state of the baby (if it is with gastroenteritis), if the mother consumed that pregnant food, if she consumed it while breastfeeding, etc.
How intolerance or allergy occurs
Well, sometimes, all these factors mean that instead of tolerance, the opposite situation appears: that the body, when receiving certain substances that it does not know, consider them enemies and act against them. It is when the IgE immunoglobilin is secreted and allergy symptoms appear. When we talk about milk, we talk about Cow Milk Protein Allergy (APLV).
And you will ask yourself: "Ok, but why does the intestine of these babies decide that it does not accept the proteins of cow's milk? Well, among other factors (of those mentioned), because the amount of milk they consume is enough to cause a answer but insufficient for tolerance.
It is known that people, babies, can be classified into two types based on their genetic inheritance, as far as allergies are concerned: atopic and the non atopic.
Non-atopics would be children with little predisposition to suffer from an allergy, and atopics would be those who are most at risk of any allergy, probably because the father and / or mother are allergic to something (it does not have to be to milk ).
Atopics are babies also known as "altorresponders", which means that they have an immune intestinal system that responds by acting against a food if it does not receive it in a more or less high amount. How high? It depends. It depends on the threshold of each baby, but atopic babies have a high threshold compared to non-atopic babies, who with a small amount already tolerate a food.
Thus, when a newborn receives cow's milk for the first time through infant formula in a bottle, an induction of IgE antibodies occurs; and in a second exposure the difference occurs: the "bas-responders" accept the food even if they take it in small quantities and the "altorresponders", or atopic ones, begin to reject it, because their intestine secretes even more IgE.
And this is about the pirate bottle?
So is. The pirate bottle and bottles as a supplement for the first few days, when the baby eats very little, they do not cause any problems in non-atopic babies, but they can induce allergy in atopic babies because their administration is not continued: the baby receives little, an amount lower than its tolerance threshold, and instead of accepting milk, rejects it.
If from the beginning they are given a bottle and every time they are hungry they are given another, and so on, on demand, throughout the day, the amount of milk is high and it is much more difficult for the baby to develop allergy despite be "correspondent".
But if you only give a bottle every now and then and most of the food is breast milk, or if you give a bottle the first few days and then stop taking them because they are breastfed, the risk is much higher.
So it is time for the "pirate bottle" of the maternity wards to be eliminated, for the bottle to be removed by protocol after caesarean section (there are also hospitals that give a bottle after the caesarean section due to the separation between mother and baby) and only use of formula milk, if the baby will be breastfed, when it is very clear that its use is necessary (If you have lost weight because breastfeeding is not effective and you have to nurture the baby as soon as possible).
