Breast milk naturally reaches the child, and therefore mothers do not worry that their child will remain hungry. But there are situations when the mother needs to leave or go to work, and then the question of how to provide the child with breast milk for the time when natural feeding is unavailable becomes urgent. Many solve this problem by switching to artificial feeding for this period, but as practice shows, the child later does not want to switch to breast milk after sweet, flavored cereals. There is a way out – to drain the milk and store it properly as long as necessary to minimize the loss of taste and, most importantly, nutritional qualities of this natural product. Let’s analyze how to properly store breast milk.
How long can breast milk be stored? In conditions of deep freezing, milk will be stored for about 3 months.
Breast milk has no analogues in its composition, and its main components are antibodies that preserve its freshness and beneficial qualities. It is thanks to them that you can store breast milk for several hours and even days in the refrigerator, observing all the rules for storing this product.
- at room temperature, breast milk can be stored for 10 hours, while the air temperature in the room should not rise above +20-22 degrees;
- in a cool room with a temperature of +15-17 degrees, you can store breast milk for up to a day;
- in warm conditions with a temperature above +24 degrees, breast milk should be stored for no longer than 3-4 hours.
Many young mothers ask how to properly and how much to store expressed breast milk in order to preserve all the nutritional and beneficial properties in it.
A refrigerator is suitable for long-term storage of breast milk, and if you set the temperature in the chamber no higher than +4 degrees, you can keep the freshness of expressed milk for 5-7 days.
If you need to save food for the baby for a longer period, you can store breast milk in the freezer. Special bags with a hermetic fastener are used for this purpose. To do this, the temperature in the refrigerator is set to no higher than -15 degrees, and in the quick freeze mode, milk can be stored for up to 3 months.
Another popular way to store breast milk on the road, where there is no opportunity to be alone and feed the baby, is a special cooler bag. The temperature inside the chamber is +2-5 degrees and in such conditions breast milk can be stored for up to 24 hours. If there is no special cooler bag, and you need to properly store breast milk for several hours in the heat or on a trip, you should make it yourself. For these purposes, a thermos wrapped in a towel with ice is suitable, in this form you can properly preserve all the nutritional properties of breast milk, as in the refrigerator, for up to 3-4 hours.