"breast milk" news and stories

I guess I missed this over the summer, though I can't imagine how something so strange could have slipped through my Google Reader! Apparently, a dairy farm in France offers cheese made from human breast milk.

I'm not entirely sure that I believe this, but a web site for the farm, Le Petit Singly, does exist in French. There's a post about it on Why Travel to France from last June, as well as a mentioning of that post here on Serious Eats -- but neither confirms the existence. According to a Wikipedia post, breast milk was sometimes consumed in the ancient world in fertility cults, and it's thinner and sweeter than milk from other mammals.

So if it does exist, there are certainly some questions to address. Firstly, would you taste it? And how would you eat it -- plain? On crackers? Would it mean an entire line of human breast milk products are on the horizon?

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Stonyfield Farms is looking to make yogurt even healthier. In Canada, their Organic YoBaby Plus Fruit & Cereal Yogurt, made for infants and toddlers, is now fortified with MEG-3 brand omega-3, giving it the same heart-healthy fatty acids that are found in foods like fish. Omega-3 is also found in breast milk in the same concentration that Stonyfield is using in its yogurt; it was likely the inspiration for the idea to add MEG-3 to the product in the first place, as soft yogurts are considered to be a good "transition" to solid foods.

Yogurt isn't the only food to recently gain the benefits of omega-3s. Some research is being done with pork and omega-3s. The question is whether the infusion of the fatty acid into other foods will be able to reproduce all the health benefits of the naturally occurring acids in fish.

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A Spanish biotech company, Puleva Biotech, has isolated and categorized the types of probiotic bacteria in breast milk in an attempt to determine the source and nature of its health benefits to children. The company says that breast milk was previously considered to be sterile, but it has isolated more than 3,000 types of bacteria in their samples. They report that they have determined the health benefits of 4 of these types and the company has come up with a unique way to use them: in yogurt.

The company has developed a yogurt, Puvela Max Defenses, that is enriched with these four strains of probiotic bacteria. Aimed at  children between the ages of four and twelve, the yogurt is intended to provide the some same health benefits to these older children that they received as infants. The four types of bacteria promote a healthy intestine, stimulate the immune system and aid in the body's absorption of vitamins and minerals.