Let’s face it, our bodies are weird sometimes. They do weird things, and occasionally in miraculous ways. I mean, my body can somehow stand up to 45 minutes of being put in a series of different stress positions if I call it “doing yoga” and think it’s “for my health.”
And my body isn’t even meant to produce new life! The things a body than can host and develop a new life can do just amazes me. But producing blue milk is a new one for most of us.
Normally, the milk that we are all familiar with is as white as a fresh snowfall.
This, of course, would be cow’s milk that most people chuck into their favorite cereal or dunk their favorite Oreos into.
The only other colors of milk that I’ve ever experienced are chocolate and strawberry.
These really are the flavors of childhood.
I can remember the days coming home from school and mixing together my own Nesquik potion.
In other parts of the world, they’re on a whole new level of milk.
They basically come in every color and flavor you can imagine.
Blue milk is the sort of thing you don’t really see outside of science-fiction movies.
And even then it doesn’t look too appetizing. But, if you have to live on your aunt and uncle’s moisture farm on Tatooine, then I guess you have to drink the weird blue milk they serve, even if, quite frankly, it looks like Uncle Owen has had about enough of Aunt Beru’s blue milk nonsense.
But one young mother discovered some real, non- Star Wars blue milk recently, and it’s both cool and weird.
And we’re not talking cow’s or goat’s milk here.
What you’re about to read will either come as a shock to you or it’s something that you’ve maybe even experienced before yourself.
Jody Danielle Fisher, a British mother, was startled to find her own body producing blue milk one day.
And it’s not like this was a normal occurrence, obviously. Up until then, as far as we know, she was producing normal, white/off-white milk.
The big change before the blue milk showed up was that her baby had received her one-year vaccinations.
As if we need to give people anymore reasons to be wary of getting their children vaccinated.
She even posted a pic to show how her milk had changed in just a few days.
So, now we all have to ask, how the heck does a baby getting vaccinated turn a mother’s milk blue? Are they even related?
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Well, Jody sure thinks so.
She suspects that her body knows what’s going on with her baby’s body.
She thinks that antibodies are the cause of the milk’s new hue. “It’s blue from all the antibodies my body is producing as it thinks she’s sick with what she was vaccinated against,” she wrote on Facebook . “When she feeds her saliva sends signals to my body to produce more milk with specific antibodies!”
Naturally, not everybody thought this was a good thing.
Because this is the internet, the anti-vaxxer crowd felt the need to weigh in, suggesting that the milk turned blue because “Your body is telling you that you just poisoned your baby…and now it’s compensating.”
But what do the experts say? Could her baby’s vaccinations actually have caused Jody’s milk to turn blue?
The truth is a bit murky, unfortunately. The color of breast milk can change for a few reasons, even down to time of day, according to Nancy Hurst of the Texas Children’s Pavilion for Women in Houston.
“The blueish color is most noticeable during the first few minutes of milk expression,” she told Romper . “A blueish tint in expressed breast milk is mainly due to the foremilk composition and how the light refracts off it.”
What you’re eating can also affect the color of your breast milk.
Lactation consultant Karen Meade explained that “a lactating parent who has eaten lots of green, leafy vegetables may notice a change in milk color as might one who has been ingesting foods containing artificial coloring agents,” in that same Romper article.
So this could be down to blue Gatorade, if Jody had been downing that recently.
However, it’s also not impossible that antibodies could be at work here.
The matter just hasn’t been studied enough to say for sure. “While there is still so much that we don’t know about human milk, we do know that breast milk comes in a wide variety of colors and consistencies. The vast majority of those differences are normal,” lactation consultant Barbara Cohen told Parents.com .
However, for Jody, the anecdotal evidence is clear.
“My milk isn’t this color from what I’ve eaten (not had anything artificially coloured/no supplements/no green vegetables), my milk is only ever this colour when my daughter has been sick…it’s never been like it when she’s [been] well,” she wrote.
And she’s not having it with the anti-vaxxers: “Don’t come on my post preaching about not having vaccinations and them being poisonous,” she wrote. “I hope your child(ren) never becomes ill with anything serious or doesn’t pass it on to a poor baby waiting to have their immunizations because you don’t believe in vaccinations!”
h/t: Facebook
