Are you delivering powerful stem cells that are going forth and acting as “internal repair agents” within your baby’s growing and developing body each time you nurse her?

As the most perfect and complete nutrition for infants, breastmilk is already seen one of the most powerful foods on the planet. Breastfed babies benefit from increased immunities, healthier development, reduced lifetime risks for many chronic diseases, and even mom benefits similarly from producing breastmilk and breastfeeding a baby.

Now, breastmilk may become medicine as scientists at the University of Western Australia have discovered the existence of pluripotent stem cells in the liquid gold.

First a little genetics: while there are different types of stem cells, “pluripotent” cells behave like the most powerful stem cells: embryonic stem cells. In theory, these are the cells from which all of the bone, organ and tissue cells in your body are differentiated into everything you need to be you. Problem is they behave so wildly that scientists have yet to learn how to control them and keep them from causing harm, such as cancer, something they’ve observed in research labs. Embryonic stem cells are also controversial because embryos must be destroyed to harvest them.

Pluripotent cells, however, are a little less unruly, and scientists have been able to coax them into being other types of cells, including bone, fat, liver or brain cells, to name a few. This new finding, which will be presented at the 7th International Breastfeeding and Lactation Symposium next April in Vienna, Austria, may hold a new path for developing much needed therapies, such as combating cancer.

And along the way, researchers may well indeed unlock new information about the role of these cells in the ongoing growth and development of babies post-birth, further increasing the essential need for women to breastfeed or feed breastmilk to their babies. One question these researchers continue to explore is whether these pluripotent stem cells are acting like “internal repair mechanisms” within babies as they continue their growth and development.

What do you think of this new information? Are you adding this finding to your list of reasons that the US Surgeon General and the CDC already articulated earlier this year that culturally we need to recognize the essential health value of breastmilk and breastfeeding and support women in all ways possible as they strive to nurse their babies? How will you share this news with a pregnant woman that you know?