Mamels life animal

Today the Jakarta Post reported that the ministry’s nutrition education and mother and child health director Slamet Riyadi Yuwono said “Sufficient attention is needed so that the status of working mothers does not become an excuse for stopping breast-feeding.” Yuwono then urged employers to provide break time and facilities for mothers to pump and store breast milk during the work day so as to promote optimal infant nutrition and growth. Terima kasih!

Last week the internet was aflutter with reports about Curtis a man who was planning to exclusively consume his wife’s breast milk. The couple had accumulated a stockpile of frozen breast milk that was no longer needed since weaning their baby. Dr. David Katz , director of the Yale Prevention Research Center, reportedly responded by saying that "the rapid growth and brain development of early childhood is best fueled by the high-fat, energy-dense elixir of breast milk." Its reported that Katz then further explained that breast milk has less value to an already developed adult. While the second half of Katz’s response is indeed supported by data, the first half demonstrated a wide-spread misconception about the specialness of human breast milk and provided the opportunity to present the first substantive post for Mammals Suck… Milk! To cut to the chase, it turns out that human milk is indeed super special! Just like the milk of each mammalian species is super special

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The 8th International Symposium on Milk Genomics and Human Health is taking place November 15-17 in Melbourne, Australia. Looks to be a great line-up! Here's a selection of some sure to be exciting talks: Mammary gland biology: lessons from evolution- Kevin Nicholas, Deakin University, Australia Long-term effects of nutrition on mammary gland development and milk composition leading to offspring predisposition to obesity- Emmanuelle Koch, l'Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, France Milk and developmental programming -Peter Hartman, University of Western Australia Genome mining for dairy bioactives- Bill King, DSM Food Specialties, USA  

This week I discovered that back to back conferences have a multiplicative effect on my excitement about what I study. Recently the annual American Society of Primatologists meeting in Austin and the International Whey Conference in Chicago inspired the creation of this blog to showcase the many, many, MANY awesome advances in milk research with implications for nutrition, medicine, psychology, and evolutionary biology. Milk research from the molecule to the organism to the population to the taxon is not only darn cool, but is also making its way into popular science   and mainstream media . So stay tuned as this site gains some actual content in the coming weeks! Also the title of this blog is slightly misleading because technically monotremes lick.