Mamels life animal

Getting the Message via Milk We can imagine hormones are like a Facebook status post. Just as a Facebook status will only show up in the newsfeed of certain friends (I still don’t get the FB algorithm for this), hormone messages are only received by tissues that have the right receptors. In this way, specialized glands secrete a hormone to convey the body’s “status,” and the “friended” tissues—those with the receptor—are updated. This is known as the endocrine system. “Endo” of course is a Latin derivative meaning ‘within’ our own bodies. Images from Purves et al., Life: The Science of Biology, 4th Edition But what about hormones we get from someone else… like from our mother through her milk? This system is clearly not endocrine… the hormones are coming from another body via her mammary glands during lactation. For this reason they are termed “lactocrine” and the numerous bioactives in milk, including proteins, peptides, and steroids, might be messages from mother to baby. when I was

Mother’s milk is more than a food full of essential nutrients and more than a medicine packed with protective immunofactors. Mother’s milk contains signals- hormones of maternal origin- that influence infant metabolism, neurobiology, and behavior. Profs  Frank “Skip” Bartol and Carol Bagnell coined the term “lactocrine programming” to describe the effects of these hormones in the baby. Wonderfully covered  by Carl Zimmer for the NYT , is  the sequel to our 2011 monkey milk cortisol paper .  And like all self-respecting sequels, we had to pack in more special effects (new predictors & outcomes!), an expanded cast of characters (N>100!), and an extended run-time (longitudinal data!). Monkey Milk Cortisol Reloaded original photo by Alex Georgiev In other words, we collected milk at multiple time-points across lactation, measured FOOD & SIGNAL in milk (available milk energy AND cortisol) and correlated these milk features with infant growth AND temperament. And th