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Life Sciences => Physiology & Medicine => Topic started by: neilep on 22/08/2005 22:14:37

Title: Liquid Milky IN, Pasty Poo OUT !! Why ?
Post by: neilep on 22/08/2005 22:14:37
This is question number three in a series of 470 baby related questions  !!

Dearest Medical Experts,

Why does baby drink liquidity milk and then poo pasty poo ?...where does the paste come from ?..Believe me, I know where it exits !!!..pooooooo !!

cheers

Neil




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Title: Re: Liquid Milky IN, Pasty Poo OUT !! Why ?
Post by: ukmicky on 23/08/2005 01:22:05
Neil
There's only one thing worse the the poo of a newborn baby, and that the sick that goes down youre back when you wind them. the smell stays with you all day.
Title: Re: Liquid Milky IN, Pasty Poo OUT !! Why ?
Post by: neilep on 23/08/2005 02:51:08
Ahh...Baby Sick !!..T'is a joy to behold !...There's nothing quite like it.....welcome back Michael...glad you had a happy holiday.

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Title: Re: Liquid Milky IN, Pasty Poo OUT !! Why ?
Post by: daveshorts on 23/08/2005 23:55:47
I don't know about newborns, and I guess that someone more qualified than a physicist will correct me, but I think adult poo is coloured by broken down blood cells which is what gives it the dark colour, and has a significant proportion of stomach wall cells (the stomach is so good at digesting things it digests itself, so the walls have to continually regrow very rapidly. People who have been starved still poo a bit, made up of these cells. I guess the pleasent paste is something to do with this...
Title: Re: Liquid Milky IN, Pasty Poo OUT !! Why ?
Post by: neilep on 24/08/2005 16:00:32
Thanks Dave...sounds totally plausible......I subsequently thought that after all the liquid goodness of the milk has been digested then perhaps all that is lefty is a pastey goo........what would happen if you just boiled away some milk, the water would evaporate leaving what I wonder ?...hmmmm!!...as a firm believer in empirical study I may get wifey to express into a pan for me to boil.....I'll tell her to go on all fours and I'll milk her like the moo moo she is !!!![:D]

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Title: Re: Liquid Milky IN, Pasty Poo OUT !! Why ?
Post by: rosy on 26/08/2005 22:23:26
My guess assumption would be that it's related to the fact that stomach acid is pretty acidic and milk proteins get denatured and go lumpy- I'm pretty sure that's what happens when milk curdles if you add an acid (try vinager, or even orange juice, and milk sometime).
So anything that isn't absorbed through the gut wall (and that's going to include most of the water) will come out the other end rather lumpier than it went in.

No evidence, pure guess work!
Title: Re: Liquid Milky IN, Pasty Poo OUT !! Why ?
Post by: chris on 27/08/2005 11:55:43
You're all correct.

Newborn babies all produce poo, despite not having eaten anything beforehand. This is 'meconium' and is the foetal equivalent of 'builder's rubble' left behind in the intestines after the assembly process has been completed. It's mucus and sloughed off dead cells. Babies usually wait until they are 'out' before deploying this delight for their parents, but occasionally, for instance if they become distressed in utero during a prolonged labour, they can despatch it internally and then helpfully 'breathe' it in, causing respiratory difficulties when they are finally born.

When they are first born, babies' guts are sterile. They pick up from the immediate environment the intestinal bugs that will colonise and become their bacterial 'fingerprint', which is actually as unique to each person as their genetic fingerprint. These bugs live in harmony with the intestine, kept in check by the immune system. They do a very important job of taking up space and hence preventing pathogenic (harmful) bacteria from colonising and causing disease. To use a Cambridgeshire analogy, it's rather like building a house on a patch of land to prevent a travelling community settling there !

For babies that pop out the normal way, their first taste of life is a mouthful of muck from their mother's perineum which provides liberal doses of skin organisms, coliforms, anaerobes, yeasts and other commensal bacteria. The benefit of this rather gross sounding bacterial baptism is that the kinds of bacteria that grow well in the mother's gut on the diet she eats will probably be ideal for the baby too, as he os she will ultimately end up eating much of the same things as the mother.

But, to begin with, these microbes are only present in tiny numbers, so babies' faeces are essentially sterile - you could eat them if you wanted - and they are also odour free. Indeed, the smell of a turd is the kind contribution of the bacteria inhabiting it.

As to the colour, the stuff that comes out the back end is brown due to the presence of a substance called stercobilin. This is a breakdown product of a chemical in bile called bilirubin which has been further modified by intestinal bugs. When babies are first born, enzymes in the liver (which produces bile) are not very effective at producing bilirubin (which is why some newborns develop jaundice for a short while until their livers begin to work more efficiently) and so not much ends up in the intestine. Over several weeks, as the amount of bilirubin released into the gut increases, and the number of bugs capable of turning the bilirubin into stercobilin goes up, slowly a baby's nappy begins to turn brown, and develops a wonderful aroma...

But what about babies that get wrenched out by Caesarian ? Well, unlike their colleagues who become intimately acquainted with the insides of their mothers' vaginas, caesarian-babies first tastes of the open world are dribs and drabs of hospital-acquired bugs like Clostridia and Staphs, meaning that they don't assemble the same effective bacterial defense as a baby born vaginally. Studies comparing babies born by Caesarian or the vaginal route have found a much higher incidence of subsequent allergies and diarrhoeal episodes following Caesarian that babies delivered the more traditional way. It has also not gone unnoticed that asthma (another allergic condition) is about ten times more common now than in the past, so perhaps this rise is being fuelled by Caesarians performed for convenience ?

Many people view elective (as opposed to emergency or 'necessary') Caesarian section as a quick, safe and convenient way to dispense with the unpredictability and nuisance aspect of childbirth. But what they don't realise in making this decision is that not only are they subjecting themselves to major abdominal surgery (with all the attendant risks including bleeding, infection, pain, subsequent bowel adhesions, subsequent uterine rupture), they may also be condemning their child to a future plagued by allergies.


"I never forget a face, but in your case I'll make an exception"
 - Groucho Marx
Title: Re: Liquid Milky IN, Pasty Poo OUT !! Why ?
Post by: neilep on 27/08/2005 16:15:24
WOO !..thanks Chris...as you know our baby was born via C-section out of necessity,(of course when I say OUR baby, I mean wifey and I, not YOU and I, though It would be an honour to be the father of our child Chris !)....errrhm...anyway, fortunately we have not noticed any diarrhoeal episodes and he seems very healthy. Perhaps my Jimmy boy can be the first Naked Scientist work-in-progress and I can post hourly reports 24 hours a day forever !!( joke...bad joke I know)

Thank you sir for your words of wisdom.



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