The mother you see in the photo is Conchi García, mother, nutritionist and lactation consultant, who has allowed us to share this fun image to talk about something quite frequent during breastfeeding: the asymmetry of the breasts, or when you have one breast bigger than the other.
In one of every four nursing mothers an asymmetry of up to two sizes can occur, one breast size disparity which can be seen with the naked eye. One looks more bulky than the other, but calm, because it does not affect at all the ability to breastfeed your baby and at the end of breastfeeding everything returns to normal.
For what is this?
Milk production is regulated by the FIL (Lactation Inhibitory Factor), a protein present in breast milk whose function is, as the name suggests, inhibit production. It is activated as milk accumulates in the alveolus and decreases the rate of milk production by the alveolar cell.
If the chest does not empty, the FIL does not make more prolactin, instead when the chest is empty, the FIL is not activated and makes prolactin work to produce more milk.
Therefore, the most advisable is to breastfeed on demand, since when more breastfeeding, more milk is produced. It is not true that the breasts have to rest for them to fill again. On the contrary, if the shots are spaced, the breast will manufacture less and less milk.
In Babies and more This is a mastitis: a mother shares her painful experience for nursing mothers to get informedIt is very possible that the baby has a preferred chest, either because of the position he takes when eating or because he produces more milk than the other and has to make less effort to eat. As we saw above, the greater the suction of the baby, the more production, so that breast will make more milk and will look fuller and bulky.
Does it affect breastfeeding?
It does not affect at all the milk production or the mother's ability to breastfeed. In fact, it would be perfectly possible for the baby to feed on only one breast if, for whatever reason, the mother could not give her one of them.
At the end of the lactation period and stop producing milk, the breasts return to normal or asymmetry they had before giving birth, since as with other parts of the body, the breasts are not asymmetrical.
What I can do?
What you can do is offer the smallest chest at the beginning of the shot so that it empties it, preventing FIL from being activated and making prolactin work to produce more milk.
You can also pump milk from the smaller breast with a breast pump to increase production on that side. But carefully because if the baby does not want to take that breast, it can become congested and cause mastitis.
