Milk is a mammalian innovation. Every mammal mother, whether platypus or pangolin, human or hippo, feeds her baby by literally dissolving her own body to make a white fluid that she secretes through her nipples. The ingredients of that fluid have been tweaked and perfected through 200 million years of evolution to provide all the nutrition that infants need. Those ingredients include complex sugars called oligosaccharides. Every mammal makes them but human mothers, for some reason, churn out an exceptional variety – scientists have identified over 200 human milk oligosaccharides, or HMOs, so
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