Breast milk does change a bit from feeding to feeding to adapt to the needs of the nursing child, but normally these changes go unnoticed. One Arkansas mom, however, noticed a huge change in her milk after nursing her sick daughter through the night, and she shared a photo with the world to show just how amazing breast milk really is.

Mallory Smothers was packing bags of breast milk into her freezer one morning, when she noticed a bag of white milk, pumped the previous night, next to a bag of yellow milk, pumped that very morning. Many moms would likely feel immediate concern over this type of drastic change in color, but Smothers happened to have read an article from a medical journal [2] a few weeks prior, which informed her that a mother's milk adapts to meet the baby's needs, especially if they are sick. After realizing that this was what her body was doing, she took to Facebook [3] to share a photo of the two bags of milk and her own explanation of this change.

". . . When a baby nurses, it creates a vacuum in which the infant's saliva sneaks into the mother's nipple. There, it is believed that mammary gland receptors interpret the 'baby spit backwash' for bacteria and viruses and, if they detect something amiss. . . . Mom's body will actually change the milk's immunological composition. . . . look at how much more the milk I produced Friday resembles colostrum (the super milk full of antibodies and leukocytes you make during the first few days after birth) and this comes after nursing the baby with a cold all night long."

Smothers goes on to remark that the human body never ceases to amaze her, and we'd have to agree with her there!