The arrival of a newborn is always a blessing for parents. Babies are believed to be a great gift from God.

Precious as parents find them, it’s always very vital for mothers to provide the best nutrition for babies—breast milk.

The benefits of breastfeeding are tremendous and these include; a strong immune system that prevents newborns from contracting diseases.

The immune system is built when a mother who has just given birth begins to recover and builds up her resistance to diseases and infections. This protective resistance is passed to the baby from the breast milk formed as antibody. Thus, breastfeeding provides babies with ongoing sources of antibodies, which a baby’s immune system hasn’t developed.

Breast milk protects an infant’s digestive system against a diarrheic type of condition.

The close contact of a baby to its mother during breastfeeding does provide a vaccine of safe bacteria which a baby needs to colonize intestinal gut. Certain micro-organisms provide basic material needed in manufacturing vitamins as well as food digestion as an infant matures.

Babies are not supposed to be allergic to a mother’s breast milk. Through breastfeeding, an infant is protected against allergic reactions and provides an infant with a substance called Secretory IGA. It is an immunoglobulin found in breast milk and colostrums, preventing absorption of foreign molecules when an infant still has an immature immune system.

Today, it’s a common phenomenon to question people who still follow tradition, or those who show increased interest in breastfeeding.

Just two decades ago, mothers were fond of breastfeeding infants for a year or two and sometimes longer. Some mothers actually stopped when they realized that another baby was on the way.

Today, due to paucity of time and as a matter of convenience, some mothers choose to shift to powdered, bottled milk as a substitute for breast milk. Young mothers are mistakenly led to believe that powdered, bottled milk does very well as a replacement for breast milk.  It emphatically does not! 

Nothing can duplicate the properties of breast milk, no matter how many vitamins, minerals and supplements are added to what is basically a chemical formulation.

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