Kati Kim nursed her two children to keep them alive while stranded in the mountains. If she had access to her own breast mik (for example, she had a pump), could she have essentially nursed herself? Or would the consumption of her milk made for no net gain in calories? 
IMHO, it would be a net loss over time.
Sure, if she had breast milk present that was leaking out, it’d be best for her to consume it rather than let it be wasted. But the act of consuming it would stimulate production of more milk, which would tax her resources. It takes energy to produce milk, then she’d burn a bit more energy digesting it (not a lot, but some).
Better to let milk production shut down, and have her body reabsorb the fluids and nutrients. At least if she were alone. Having kids with her would of course change her survival goals.
I agree with the doc. It’s widely suggested that women consume 1200 more calories a day than normal for their weight while they’re breastfeeding. (It’s generally expressed as “600 more calories a day than when you’re pregnant” and pregnancy recommendations are for 600 more a day than normal). Many women even lose weight while nursing while following these guidelines.
Clearly, it takes a lot of calories to make breastmilk. Best to stop nipple stimulation to make your milk dry up.
That’s fighting STARVATION. Fighting *hunger *is a different thing. If she’s overweight and knows rescue is on the way within the next few days, melting snow for fresh water and drinking breastmilk to keep her hunger pains away might make a great diet plan!
Does anybody else remember studying a bizarre post-apocalyptic scenario in grade school in which the “correct” answer was that the nursing mother was supposed to suckle everybody in the bomb shelter? Or maybe it was a lifeboat. I can’t have dreamed that, it was just too bizarre for me to make up on my own. Even as a fourth-grader I thought it made no sense, since the food energy in milk doesn’t come from nowhere. I can only imagine somebody must have been smoking opium while reading The Grapes of Wrath.
Some women have direct access to their own breast milk without a pump. I’ve seen it done.
Saving someone’s life by breastfeeding is an old concept, e.g. “Roman Charity”.
The problem you get into is if the woman herself doesn’t have much food. Not just calories, but calcium, protein, etc. have to come from somewhere. If they’re not eaten, to a great extent, the woman’s body will take it from her bones, teeth, muscles, etc. To an extent. After that, you get a whole lot depleted from the woman and crappy milk to boot.
If the woman drinks her own milk, with calcium leeched from her bones, there’s still a net loss, because the body can only absorb about a third of the calcium from your food. So if her body pulls, say, 80 mg of calcium out of her bones to make 1 serving of milk, drinking that milk will only get 25 mg put back into her bones when she drinks it. Sure, she can probably stand to do this for a little bit, but I wouldn’t rely on it too long, like I said before.
There’s an old wives’ tale that you lose one tooth for every child. Perhaps it might actually have been correct when our diets were poorer than today, as minerals were taken out of the teeth and put into the milk.
Basically, in a starvation situation, you’d slowly be feeding your kids your own body, in a way. Kinda gross, if you think about it too long.
I’ve heard tales like this from the illegal boat crossings to Puerto Rico from the Dominican Republic - situations when the boats are adrift and the passengers are dying of thirst. No way of knowing whether it’s actually true, though.
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There’s an old wives’ tale that you lose one tooth for every child. Perhaps it might actually have been correct when our diets were poorer than today, as minerals were taken out of the teeth and put into the milk.
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Even today, it is widely claimed (in for instance the baby-care handbook I’m reading now) that having babies is a real strain on a woman’s teeth - that basically any existing mouth problem often escalates with pregnancy and nursing.
This thread reminds me of “The Grapes of Wrath”.
It reminds me of a story by Guy de Maupassant.
Wow Bib, that’s… Really disturbing.
And the old wives’ tale that you can’t get pregnant while breastfeeding may have been true when the breastfeeding took so much out of an already undernourished woman that she wouldn’t be fertile?
Is the question mark indicating a desired response? If so, yes, I think that’s a fair guess. Prolactin inhibits estrogen’s effects on the female cycle, but estrogen is stored in fat cells, and if there’s enough of them, it “tells” the body that maybe you could stand to pump out another kid while nursing this one. That is, excess estrogen in fat stores will trigger the cycle leading to ovulation, despite the presence of prolactin from breastfeeding.
The contraceptive benefits of breastfeeding are more true of exclusive on-demand breastfeeding than partial breastfeeding or breastfeeding by the clock, and most true when the baby is still waking at night for two feedings. As soon as you introduce solids, skip a few hours between nursings or otherwise “tell” your body that the infant isn’t relying on you as his sole source of nutrition, all bets are off. It’s not something I would rely on for birth control, unless it really didn’t matter if I got pregnant again.
Bib, I think your lifeboat story was a way of suggesting cannibalism-by-proxy. They wouldn’t carve up and eat the lactating woman directly, but drinking her milk would allow them to consume her body indirectly.