The bacteria in breast milk find their way into a newborn’s gastrointestinal tract, helping to determine the composition of the child’s microbiome, according to a recent 12-month study that looked at 107 healthy mother/child pairs. Among the study’s finding:

• The investigation analyzed maternal breast milk, a mother’s areolar skin, and infants’ stool using RNA gene sequencing.
• There was a closer correlation between a newborn’s gut microbes and their mother’s milk than with a randomly selected mother.
• Neonates who breastfed enough to obtain 75% or more of their milk from their mothers were found that have derived 27.7% of their gut bacteria from that breast milk on average, and 10.3% from areolar skin.