Bottle-feeding might exacerbate these problems. As we saw, breast milk engineers a baby’s ecosystem. It provides more microbe colonists for a baby’s gut, and HMOs – those microbe-feeding sugars in breast milk – that nourish co-adapted companions like B. infantis. These abilities might overwrite any initial differences caused by a C-section birth, but “if you go for a C-section and bottle-feeding, I’d certainly say that [your baby] is on a different trajectory,” says milk expert David Mills.
