Well, what about the men that drink breast milk to look good?
I was watching the Netflix documentary, (Un)Well, and one of the episodes, Bulking Up With Breast Milk, was about…just that! Adult men scouring their nursing wives’ breasts for extra milk – they call it liquid gold – after the baby is done feeding. Or not.
And for those that don’t have the milkable woman at home, they spend a lot of time on the internet trying to buy some human milk – bodily fluid…people! – from total strangers.
When I was nursing my baby years ago, I curiously tasted my breast milk, wondering why baby clamoured for it so much. Totally disgusting. It tasted like oral rehydration salts (ORS)!
So, you can imagine my face as I worked though that episode, seeing men put breast milk in their protein shakes, eat it with their cereal, use it to make smoothies, even whipping it in their eggs. All for…? Looks. Pure and simple. To get muscles that women like, faster; to have virility and vitality; to be super humans of sorts.
One of them even swears by it, because he believes it suppressed his prostate cancer. He has been drinking breast milk for 20 years now. So, don’t look at women, all ‘judgy’ and questioning. Every gender has its issues driven by the need to be desired by the other gender at some level.
Apparently, if you want those Popeye arms, just substitute his spinach with breast milk. Some body builders have a ‘breast milk pusher’ somewhere on the internet with a freezer full of boob juice for sale.
While many women donate to neonatal ICUs for premature babies struggling with a regular supply of breast milk, many others cater to these men obsessed with looking and feeling good.
Here is the thing about breast milk; just like it is not advisable to drink unpasteurised milk straight from a cow’s teats unless you are a calf, due to the many diseases you can catch from that, breast milk too is divinely designed for babies. It naturally contains some bacteria that is actually necessary for developing the baby’s gut and to shape its immunity and food tastes, according to a doctor on the documentary.
But there is higher risk of contamination when the milk is pumped for later use or shipment.
“In fact, some of the samples had such high bacterial concentrations, closer to something like…sewer water,” Dr Sarah Keim, an epidemiologist at Nationwide Children’s hospital, said in the documentary about the contamination in the shipped breast milk samples they bought online and tested. Others tasted positive for salmonella.
But well, to each, their own… So, as you sip on your breast milk, allow us to stick our merkins on in peace too. It has become a world of ‘the end justifies the means’, after all.
carol@observer.ug
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