A new study shows that milk from mothers who have been breastfeeding their infants for more than a year is richer in fat and energy than milk from moms who have been breastfeeding for just a few months, authors said. The study is the first to look at the nutritional value of breast milk after prolonged breastfeeding, a member of the team told Reuters Health. "It might be that because the infant is breastfed less times a day, the milk is more concentrated," he noted in an e-mail interview. The authors compared milk from 27 women who had been nursing for two to six months and 34 mothers who had been nursing for 12 to 39 months. They report, in the journal Pediatrics, that the average fat content of milk from the shorter-duration breastfeeding group was just over 7 percent, compared to about 11 percent from the longer-duration group. A liter of milk from the women breastfeeding for a shorter period of time contained about 740 calories, compared to 880 for the women who had been breastfeeding for a year or longer. --More 2252 Local Time 1952 GMT
