Breast milk sharing is thriving in central Florida, especially among high income, college educated white women. That’s according to a new study out of UCF.
Research shows breast milk helps boost a baby’s immune system. Not all women can produce their own milk, so sharing is an alternative. And study co-author Shannon Carter says they found the buying and selling of breast milk was rare.
“So the Internet is used sometimes to facilitate milk sharing, sometimes people networked through their own communities and they didn’t use the Internet and sometimes milk sharing was in the form of cross-nursing, where a woman breast feeds another baby,” said Carter.
Carter says UCF plans to do more research on breast milk sharing in African-American and Hispanic communities. The university is also planning a pilot study to test bacteria levels in shared milk to see how safe it is.
The study was based on online surveys from nearly four hundred people.