Zinc - baby gets enough zinc through breast milk.

Zinc is a wonderful and important mineral. Interestingly enough supplementation of zinc to breast feed mums doesn't seem to increase zinc in the breast milk. (1 and 2). This would imply that either diet provides mums with enough zinc or zinc is taken out of body stores and into breast milk. I suspect the latter - because this is what happens with calcium and magnesium, and atomically zinc is a similar metal.

So breast feed infants should have enough zinc (although there seems to always be a exception to the rule). So make sure you breast feed your baby - even if it is preterm.

Some research has just (January 2010) been published that looked at preterm babies. These babies were either feed a multivitamin or a multivitamin plus zinc. The multi plus zinc had higher hemoglobin and zinc plasma levels at the end of the trial. Also the zinc group grew significantly longer than the multivitamin group over the 6 week. This sounds positive........................


 scroll down















and some more













I just have two questions:
Why isn't it standard that preterm infants get a multivitamin and a multimineral

And more importantly - would it not be better if this money went into supporting breast feeding which provides all the nutrients!