The University of California, San Diego recently launched The Human Milk Institute aimed at addressing questions and learning more about the basic process of breast milk.

Christina Chambers is a co-director at the institute and sat down with “Inside the Issues” host Alex Cohen. 

“There is so much to be learned about why [breast milk] is so good for babies in their early months of life,” she said. 

Chambers noted that the idea behind the institute has been in the works for a long time.

“My colleagues and I at UC San Diego have been engaged in this kind of work for many years, but we really didn’t have, either at our university or anywhere in the world, a concentrated effort to better understand good things about human milk and understand how it works so well,” she said, adding that she’s worked on trying to provide better information to pregnant women and breastfeeding women for her entire career. 

“When it comes to having information about exposures [to medications]… there is almost no data,” she said as an example of questions that come up for those who breastfeed. “And so it leads to this terrible situation where people have to make a choice of saying, ‘I’ll either not take a needed medication or I will not breastfeed.’ And neither of those is a good choice.”

The Human Milk Institute consists of 3 components: the scientific core, a first-of-its-kind donor milk bank called the University of California Health Milk Bank, and the research biorepository where people give samples of their breast and answer questions about their lifestyles and the children to help with the research. 

Chambers says one of the goals of the institute is to create a culture more supportive of breastfeeding. “We need to have a better understanding of what the [barriers of breastfeeding] are… and how we can overcome them,” she said.

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