One of the most extraordinary features of early life is that nursing mothers produce over two hundred kinds of complex sugars—the formal name is oligosaccharides—in their milk that their babies cannot digest because humans lack the necessary enzymes. The oligosaccharides are produced purely for the benefit of the baby’s gut microbes—as bribes, in effect. As well as nurturing symbiotic bacteria, breast milk is full of antibodies. There is some evidence that a nursing mother absorbs a little of her suckling baby’s saliva through her breast ducts and that this is analyzed by her immune system,
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