Alondra Cadena, an Ecuadorian psychologist and mother, shared on social media one of the unexpected problems she has faced while breastfeeding. The content creator said that her baby began rejecting the breast milk she had stored in the freezer and, after wondering about it for a while, she decided to try a very simple test: taste it herself.
On camera, she tested two samples. The freshly expressed milk tasted somewhere between sweet and salty. So far, so normal.
Then she tried the milk she had stored in the freezer, and her expression changed instantly: “Yuck! No wonder my baby hates this milk”, she exclaimed.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that her milk has gone bad. According to Alondra, her milk has “excess lipase”. This is an enzyme that occurs naturally in human milk, helps break down fats, and produces a more bitter, metallic taste. It can remain active after the milk is expressed and become much more noticeable after refrigeration or freezing.
Now she will have to change the way she stores future milk. As she explained in the video, if she confirms that this is the problem, she plans to heat the milk to about 60 °C before freezing it, a process intended to reduce the activity of the enzymes responsible for changing the fats and prevent the taste from changing so much during storage.
Poor, poor baby.