Nurtured: Behind the Scenes Podcast

21/05/2025

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09/04/2025

The Little Things - Pictured from “Poems of Parenting”

08/04/2025

The natural term for us humans to breastfeed is anywhere between 2 and 7+ years. Some babies stop earlier, some children carry on for longer. It’s thought that the eruption of the permanent set of teeth (losing your milk teeth) influences this timescale.

Many cultures around the world breastfeed until natural term, including many women in the Western world. This age range is only surprising in cultures that interrupt breastfeeding, often without realising it or knowing which norms are biological and which are cultural.

The concentration of fats and proteins increase as the baby grows into a toddler, along with increased levels of antibacterial and antiviral components such as lysozyme, which is an anti-inflammatory, and destroys bacteria.

Lysozyme increases in concentration from about 6 months old, when babies become more independently mobile and everything (toys, sand, twigs, the cats biscuits?) goes straight in the mouth, and keeps increasing after the first year.

The concentration of Lactoferrin also increases over time. Lactoferrin inhibits the growth of some cancerous cells. It also helps our babies to absorb their own iron stores, whilst binding to the iron in our baby’s body which prevents it from being available to harmful microorganisms that need iron to survive. Lactoferrin also kills the bacteria strep mutans, which causes tooth decay and cavities.

Our body’s immune system takes around 6 years to become fully mature, so the support of the protective factors in human milk until our immune system can fully function on its own seems play a part in the timescale of natural term weaning too.

Longer term breastfeeding is also associated with reduced risk of diseases for the mother, including breast cancer.

We acknowledge that many mothers find it difficult to establish breastfeeding in the first place, that breastfeeding is a multi-layered investment on the part of a mother and that natural term feeding might not feel like - or be - a possibility for many.

Or you might simply not want to. We're not here to tell anyone what to do.

We also acknowledge that lack of information about our biology contributes to the lack of support for mothers when they want to establish - or continue - breastfeeding, but cannot find the help they need from people who understand why it matters so much, or what is normal.

Let's continue to turn that around.

More information and references about how remarkable you are at https://human-milk.com/pages/science-of-breastmilk

06/04/2025

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A message from Annette Bevan of based in Reading, Berkshire, United Kingdom. Annette and some of her teammates are advocates for letting fellow athletes both Grassroots & Professional that the game is not over for them at Motherhood. It’s only just beginning :

“Playing rugby doesn’t end when motherhood begins - if anything, it’s made me more resilient, more determined and more educated about the changes to my body and how I need to adapt my training. I’ve learnt to maximise my training time and have become the master of a superset. I’ve learnt to not be too proud to ask for help from my ‘village’ of family, friends, rugby club and teammates, who are legends for the support they provide on match days, on training nights and everything in between. And I’ve learnt you can literally push your body to do anything even if at one day postpartum you think you’ll never even be able to walk normally ever again.“

Featured are | | and at | please consider giving these ladies a follow and keeping up with their journey as they navigate rugby times and motherhood.

17/10/2024

In 1929 Ge**er began an advertising campaign to convince dieticians and pediatricians that canned baby food was just as nutritious as homemade food, and even better because it was scientifically prepared.
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As part of the campaign, doctors received free Ge**er products for patients. Ge**er also funded research touting the health benefits of their food. That research—vaguely worded and devoid of peer review—was published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, positioning it as scientific fact.
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Alongside these efforts, Ge**er stated that women who prepared their own baby food were neglecting their husbands—and babies. One 1933 ad read, “For Baby’s Sake, Stay Out of the Kitchen!”
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Alongside these efforts, Ge**er advocated for starting solids at 3 months old. And by the 1950’s—after 20 years of advertising—the average age of introducing solids fell to just 6 weeks old.💔
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Since then the medical community realized that too-early introduction of solids displaced valuable nutrition from breast milk/formula. The consensus among medical institutions today (AAP, U.S. National Institutes for Health, and World Health Organization) is that it’s best to introduce solids at 6 months old. It is at this time that most babies are developmentally ready to eat and need more iron. Conveniently, 6 months is also when babies are capable of feeding themselves.
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Baby food was invented. Mom guilt was marketed.
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There is no perfect order of introducing solids. No no need for “stages” of thickness. These were all constructs in the name of profit.
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Convenience has its place. I love a good yogurt pouch and rely on Cheerios when traveling. But the idea that real food has to be hard isn’t good for anyone. Babies don’t need banana pudding or pricey pouches—a banana is fine!
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There is a reason feeding feels complicated. Corporations spent the last century telling your grandmothers and great-grandmothers that they would be bad moms and wives if they didn’t buy pre-prepared baby food. So the next time you feel a twinge of guilt for feeding your baby YOUR way, remember that it’s not you. It’s history.

13/09/2024

We do love Bluey in our household. 🥰

let’s normalize children who need that extra comfort at night.

the hand holders to go to sleep, the midnight jump into your bed, the children that have to sleep next to you.

you are doing nothing wrong. whether your child sleeps independently or not, is not a reflection of your parenting. 🤍

08/08/2024

This! 👇👇👇

I present to you: a rant.

What does "overfeeding a baby" even mean?

Like, can the people who tell parents that they're overfeeding actually justify what this means and why it would be a problem?

Responsive feeding is normal, healthy, and good. It helps with appetite and metabolic regulation, relational health (which is the basis of good mental health later in life), sleep, pain, etc.

Breastfed babies feed AT LEAST 8-12 times a day, which is every 2-3 hours, and often will feed more often than that.

Feeding to sleep is a normal physiological process - there are hormones such as cholecystokinin that actually facilitate it, which is why it works so well.
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Breastfeeding reduces the risk of adult obesity, diabetes, and metabolic dysfunction - including those babies who gain heaps of weight breastfeeding. So it's not like someone can say that "overfeeding" a directly breastfed baby is going to lead to health issues later.

Can some babies get stomach pain if the amount of lactose they're ingesting overwhelms their natural lactase enzymes? Yes. Is this the same as "overfeeding"? No.

Answer me this: how can someone look at a chonky baby, with chubby thighs and wrist rolls, and not sigh in contentment?

04/08/2024

It's World Breastfeeding Week! TLC Theresa Lactation Consultant and I discuss the origins of ⁠World Breastfeeding Week⁠, which takes place 1-7 August each year, what it's about and why we still need this global event.

https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/nurtureddoctors/episodes/30--Welcome-to-World-Breastfeeding-Week--with-TLC-Theresa-Lactation-Consultant-e2mpubf

21/07/2024

Slightly late to the party and slightly longer than 50 minutes 😅 : Our 50 for 50 contribution for Birth Trauma Awareness week, thanks to Birth Trauma Aotearoa.

TLC Theresa Lactation Consultant and I share our experiences and thoughts on the impacts of birth trauma and the spillover effects on the rest of our life journey as parents.

Slightly late to the party and slightly longer than 50 minutes : our 50 for 50 contribution for Birth Trauma Awareness week, thanks to Birth Trauma Aotearoa. Theresa and I share our experiences and thoughts on the impact of birth trauma. Podcast recommendations: The Midwives' Cauldron Kathleen Kenda...

07/06/2024

This message is more relevant than ever, in our current climate of inadequate health funding that continually gets eroded one way or another. Sometimes there's no more "efficiency" to be gained, we simply need more boots on the ground, not more bureaucracy telling us to do it faster.

Humans are messy and life is complicated. So many patients just want to have enough time with their doctors to be heard and to have enough time to figure out where they are and what can be done. So many doctors want to have the time to spend with their patients to listen to their stories, figure things out, and to have the time to explain properly what we think is going on and what can (or can't) be done about it.

Being trained to do the job better than what is possible under our current system is a recipe for moral injury. People being promised to expect more than what the system is actually resourced to deliver is frustrating and a travesty.

Today is day.
I, like many other have already posted today about wearing crazy socks to help bring about awareness for and more specifically 🥼🩺

As I lie here on the couch absentmindedly scrolling (yep, I do that too 🤷🏼‍♀️) I can’t help but think about the complicated relationship that many of my colleagues have with this day.

I get it, when management put out a box of donuts 🍩 and say “happy crazy socks for docs day!” Yet don’t pay any attention to safe working hours, wellbeing focussed leadership or creating a compassionate workplace culture… this day falls short of the mark.

But that doesn’t make it redundant.

Personally, I choose to see this day for what its intention has always been.
Connecting through vulnerability.
Highlighting our humanity.
And most importantly, the profound desire to change the way our profession treats our own.

Dr Geoff Toogood started out of his own experience of what it means to feel alone and to struggle with mental ill health in medicine.

I know that struggle too.
I know what it feels like to feel so suffocated by the thought that I was meant to help others… I wasn’t meant to need help myself.
I know what it feels like to not know how or where to turn to for help because I didn’t want to burden a colleague.
I know what it’s like to hold a deep fear that if I were to reach out for help, it could mean judgement, criticism or even the end of my medical career.
I know what it’s like to feel alone in Medicine.

So here I am with no socks now, figuratively laid bare.
Telling you that this day is not just about the socks. It’s not just about the morning teas. It’s not just about the hashtag or social media posts.
It’s about the doctors like me, who are just as human as you are. Who are not immune from life’s struggles. Who give tirelessly, and sometimes don’t know how or when to stop giving. Who every now and then need a reminder to give to ourselves too.

It’s about not feeling so alone.

So if you’re a doctor like me- this day, and every day, you are not alone.

Emily x

03/06/2024

Just binged this short free webinar series - highly recommend!
The deadline is 10/6 (hence me binging over the long weekend lol 😅)

Topics / speakers:
- Trauma and breastfeeding - Kathleen Kendall-Tackett
- Understanding the biology of lactation: Challenging old paradigms to improve breastfeeding outcomes - Wendy Ingman
- Nursing strikes: Child development, child temperament and breastfeeding - Jan Tedder

March 6th - June 6th 2024

18/05/2024