A Woman Lost in the Wilderness Drank Her Own Breast Milk — Here’s Why That Was a Great Idea
A woman who went missing during a trail-running endurance event through New Zealand’s bush this weekend is making headlines for her survival skills.
Susan O’Brien was lost for just 24 hours, but sustained herself by consuming what little food and water she had on her, and drinking her own breast milk.
“I’m breastfeeding my baby so I had a bit of my milk,” O’Brien explained to Radio New Zealand News. “I thought that should help me keep going, for energy.“
While the idea may make some people squeamish, survival expert Joe Alton, MD, co-author of The Survival Medicine Handbook, says O’Brien was smart to drink her own milk. Not only did she keep her breasts from becoming engorged, which could prevent her from performing the activities she needed to survive, “drinking breast milk is a much superior recommendation than drinking your own urine, which will actually dehydrate you over time,” he tells Yahoo Health.
Research has shown that, for babies, drinking breast milk can do everything from lower the risk of asthma to help prevent infectious diseases. While you’d be hard-pressed to find an adult who drinks breast milk (though they do exist), the human-produced product can be helpful in a survival situation, says international board-certified lactation consultant Diana West, director of media relations for La Leche League International.
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“It’s sort of a no-brainer,” she tells Yahoo Health. Here’s why: Human breast milk is packed with vitamins and minerals, but also provides calories, hydration, and electrolytes. If you’re in a dire situation, you need all of those ingredients in order to remain in optimal health.
People typically stop drinking human milk at a young age, but it “remains a healthy product for any age,” says international board-certified lactation consultant Joan Younger Meek, MD, an associate dean for graduate medical education at The Florida State University College of Medicine. (The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends children be breastfed for a minimum of one year, and the World Health Organization recommend breastfeeding for at least two years.) We just stop drinking human breast milk by a certain age because we have limited quantities of it, she tells Yahoo Health.
Related: Why Women Need to Hydrate Differently Than Men
Meek says O’Brien would have been fine just drinking the water she had on-hand since she was only lost for a short period of time, but notes that her milk may have helped given her additional sugar to replenish the carbohydrates she lost during the endurance event or glycogen in her muscles. “During a period of prolonged starvation, it could be very useful and life-saving, assuming there were continued supplies of water for the lactating mother to drink in addition to the milk,” she says.
Despite O’Brien’s success, West doesn’t recommend that adults drink human milk for health reasons since “no mammal is designed to subsist on its mother’s milk after it can eat food.”
But if you’re ever lost in the wilderness …
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