Baby's BM from BM (bowel movement from breast milk)?

Factual Questions
1

So this is something I’ve been curious about, and was slightly touched upon (ewww) in this thread: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=249367

Newborn babies generally aren’t on fiber-rich diets, but almost exclusively on breast milk or formula. So where does their poop come from? I know that if I’m on a liquid diet (like when I’m sick with the flu, for example) and I’m not taking in any solids, I’m also not pushing out any solids. So where does their poop come from? Are there solids in the breast milk that they’re aggregating?

2

If you checked the link that I posted in that thread, you’d have seen that breast milk is 4.2% fat, 1.1% protein, and 7.0% lactose for a total solids content of 12.3%. Quite a bit, actually.

3

In the stomach and small intestine, the body adds liquid to mashed food to make it easier to be digested. After the nutrients are removed from mashed food in the small intestine, the leftover glop is passed along to the large intestive which removes any excess fluid. Since milk is not 100% nutritive, the same process that removes liquid from left-over bran flakes also removes liquid from the undigested milk. With normal digestion, more of the milk is digested and less of the liquid is re-absorbed (since it does not stay in the colon long enough to have more liquid removed). In the case of lactose intolerance, I would suppose that there is more undigested material from which the liquid can be removed in the large intestine, leaving more solid material to come out the other end.

4

It is true that a breast-fed baby doesn’t poop very much.

But of course a baby’s digestion is not 100% efficient, and milk is not 100% digestible. Sometimes babies poop curds of undigested milk. But in general a breast fed baby is going to have infrequent small poops, usually loose and yellowy, and the poops won’t really smell like poop. When you put the kid on solid food, watch out. The variety, quantity, and stinkiness of the poop goes up dramatically.

Yes, I have a new baby…How’d you know? :confused:

5

As long as your baby is nursing, you will find the task of diaper changing to be relatively innocuous. It doesn’t look really disgusting and hardly has any odor at all.

If you switch baby to drinking formula, though, break out the gas masks.

:eek: