Stuff You Should Know - How Feeding Babies Works: The Breast

Episode Date: January 3, 2017

Breast milk is considered a perfect food for infants, so much so that for the first four to six months of life, a baby can subsist on mother’s milk alone. Learn all about the most fascinating milk around and the science behind it in this episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

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Yeah, we're gonna be there on Sunday, January 15th at 1 p.m., a very rare afternoon show. Yeah. And we will be ready to go. So you guys better be drunk from the night before or getting drunk for that evening. However, it crosses over. I think it'll be proof positive

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And since this promo is petered out, it ends right now. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And this is Stuff You Should Know. Just two of us again.

That's fine. Yeah. Two dudes, four nipples. Right, totally useless nipples, though. Yeah, we did a show, Why Do Men Have Nipples, in 2013. By the way, I think we should change the name of the show to two dudes, four nipples.

Okay. You might be onto something. Yeah, and that factored in not much to this podcast, but it just. It's worth mentioning. Yeah, exactly. And you have been wanting to tackle breastfeeding. Yes.

That topic for a long time. Yeah, and as I got into it, I was like, we can't just do how breastfeeding works. It's just too unwieldy. It's got to be too parter. Yeah. And I realized that it would be folly to also name it how breastfeeding works.

So we're calling it how feeding babies works, part one and part two. Yeah. We may French it up though and call the second one part two. Who knows? Yeah, and this one is, you have been reticent to do this one

because it is fraught with anytime you're dealing with babies and moms, it is fraught with differing opinions, differing, not just among people listening and how they feel about everything, but from the medical community, differing different recommendations. Right.

So like there isn't really one set way ever. And people think like their way is the way. Yeah. Your way is not the way. There's a straight up culture war going on over it. Yeah. And that's an easy way to say it. So I see why you waited into this gently

and with some trepidation. But I feel like once we got in there, you know, we can talk about anything. Agreed, but I think I said some of that as a way of just saying, hey, if we get some stuff wrong, if you disagree with some of this stuff. Yeah.

We're just throwing it out there. Yeah. And so we're going to try our best not to mansplain because this very easily could end up being the very definition of mansplaining. What two men doing a two-part show on breast milk. Right. So we try not to do that.

So if we do, you can hold us accountable, but. Yeah, we're just trying to deliver information that we found. Yeah. None of this, I have no opinion on any of this actually. Great. You ready? Yep.

Okay. So to start, actually one of the things that inspired this was a really great article by a woman named Angela. I'm not quite sure how to say her last name. Garbus, maybe? I'm going to say Garbus. It was in The Stranger and she was breastfeeding at the time and was just fascinated by it.

So she wrote this really great article in The Stranger about breastfeeding. And one of the things she points out is that when women breastfeed, they literally, they quote, literally dissolve parts of ourselves, starting with the gluteal femoral fat, AKA our butts, and turn it into liquid to feed our babies. And your mind was blown.

Yeah. There's just a lot of, a lot of really amazing stuff. When you start to look into breastfeeding, breast milk, what the body's doing, it's pretty mind blowing actually. Every single aspect of human reproduction to me is mind blowing. Yeah, it is. And not just human, just period reproduction.

Right. Making a little thing inside of a body. PPs and we-wees. PPs and we-wees coming together to make another living thing is just one of the most amazing, miraculous things. It is pretty neat. Just unbelievable. So with breast milk, right?

There's different stages of breast milk production. There's actually, I think as far as I know, three stages of what's called lactogenesis, right? Yeah. Stage one is the, basically the pre-milk stage that happens before birth. Stage two is what's called colostrum. Yeah, which is a kind of milk.

Yeah. And not what you think of as breast milk. No, it's basically, and I'm gonna accidentally use the word designed a lot, but it's basically specifically designed to feed a baby for the first few days after its birth. Yes. And then there's the third stage, which is called milk maintenance.

But the milk is made, this is pretty nuts. So you've got these little tiny cell clusters called alveoli, right? And that's where actual milk production occurs. And in these alveoli, they basically, they have something called lactocytes. And the lactocytes go into the bloodstream and gather nutrients it needs to form the milk, right?

And depending on what is needed at any given point in time, it will retrieve those nutrients and antibodies and all that stuff and put them together and then create the milk. That's pretty awesome. So the milk is literally made from the woman's body. That's right. Okay.

It's not delivered by a guy in a white hat. Right, but there's no milk store or anything like that at any given point in time that the actual components of a woman's breast milk is different from maybe what it would be the next day or later that night or a week before. Yeah, it's amazing. It's pretty cool.

It's its own recipe on a day-to-day basis. Right. Which we'll talk more about that cool stuff later too. So it is low in fat, but really high in proteins and carbohydrates. Well, the colostrum is. Yeah, that first yellowish thick, as you call it, the thick golden liquid,

which that's a good way to describe it. If you've ever seen it, like, you know, you can just type it in and images and it'll have pictures of it next to breast milk. And you can, it's a pretty stark difference. And it looks like. But the whole point is that it's super easy to digest for a newborn baby

and gives that baby exactly what they need to get going in life. Including, you know, it gives them a head start. Right. Including having a laxative effect to get rid of that first poop, which is called the meconium, which is a, waiting on that first poop is a very big deal because then, you know, things are moving as it should.

And then, you know, then it's nothing but poop. And a breastfed baby has a little bit different poop than a formula fed baby. It's a little more yellowish than brown. And supposedly it doesn't smell quite as bad. That's what they say. I've seen that it actually smells a bit like buttermilk. I don't know.

This isn't altogether unpleasant. And because the breast milk is well absorbed, the babies who are breastfed are very rarely constipated too. Yes. So you got, that's the colostrum. And after several days, the colostrum goes away and is replaced instead by what's called mature breast milk. The good stuff.

Yeah. The stuff you think of when you think of breast milk. Yes. So it's about three to 5% fat and is chock full of minerals and vitamins. Sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, vitamins A, C and E, long chain fatty acids that are both omega-3s and omega-6s.

And then you also have lactose. It's the principal carbohydrate, right? Yeah. And lactose is important because it's just a huge, wonderful energy source. And it also has the proteins in it are a specific kind of protein. They're whey proteins, right?

So in cow's milk or in livestock milk, the protein's usually casein, which isn't as easy to digest in breast milk, the protein is whey, which is extremely easy to digest for human babies. And then even more interesting, Chuck, there's something called ogliosaccharides. Yeah, this is amazing.

These are sugars, like 150 or more, and they are only in human milk. Yeah. That's pretty astounding. Right, so you're thinking, well, it's neat. They're nutrients that are only found in human milk, which is for human babies, makes sense. The weirder thing, though,

is that these ogliosaccharides can't be digested by the baby. They're not actually for the baby. They're actually nutrients for the gut flora in the baby's guts, in the baby's stomach, to help it digest food even better. So it's actually food for the microbiome of the baby in the breast milk.

It's amazing. Man, I just keep wanting to drop this mic. I think you're saying ogliosaccharides. What was that? What is it? Oh, yeah, that's right. I misplaced the G. That's okay.

That happens. So I know one of the big things, too, that has been amazing you for a while, because you've dropped this fact a lot lately, is that the human body, we know how the human body fights off immunity, but something really unique happens when a mother is breastfeeding a baby,

is it's a bit of a two-way street. There's a vacuum created when the baby is breastfeeding on the nipple, and if a baby needs some sort of immunity response, boost, then the baby's saliva will actually enter back into the woman through the nipple, and mommy all of a sudden, her body says, oh, you're telling me that you need this

to fight off some sort of sickness, perhaps. So now my body will produce that, and then render it back to you. In the breast milk. Unbelievable. Yeah. It's pretty amazing. There's receptors in the mammary gland

that analyze the saliva for pathogens, and then produce antibodies as a result. That's crazy awesome. So the breast milk is chock full of nutrients, it's chock full of proteins and fats, and all this great stuff, as well as antibodies. So the baby being breastfed has this established microbiome thanks in large part to what the mom's breast milk

is giving it. Yeah, and like you said, despite all the things in the breast milk, a woman's body can also say, oh, you need this, too? Let me whip some of that up. Right, exactly. And deliver that to you, as well. Yeah.

It's pretty cool. And even cooler, well, I don't know if that's even cooler. I'm gonna keep saying that. But there's, when a woman nurses, there's basically two stages of the actual nursing. The first stuff to come out is called foremilk. It's kind of thinnish and bluish, and it's mostly water,

and it's meant for the baby's thirst. Yeah, for hydration. Right, because a baby can subsist for the first four to six months of his life solely on breast milk, doesn't even need water. It's getting it from that foremilk, and then the stuff that comes out after the foremilk is called hindmilk, and that's the creamier stuff

that's higher in fat, and that's what fills the baby up. Yeah, and so if all this talk of immunity building and stuff like that makes you think that a breast-fed baby might potentially be less susceptible to illness than a formula-fed baby, some studies show that that is possible. Every situation is different, of course. You can have breast-fed babies that get sick a lot.

You can have formula-fed babies that never get sick. There is no 100% across the board thing, but the World Health Organization and the American Academy of Pediatrics both recommend exclusive breastfeeding for at least six months because they do think it can lead to fewer illnesses, fewer hospitalizations, or at least milder illnesses. Right, and it's not just those two,

the government of the UK, Australia, Canada, Ireland, India, Japan, all of them recommend that women breastfeed exclusively for six months, right? But as Angela Garvis pointed out, though, those health outcomes, those positive health outcomes, they're relative, right? So if your baby is born in the West in a developed nation with state-of-the-art technology

and is born a relatively healthy baby, the benefits from breastfeeding are going to be much less than if you compare that baby to a baby that's born in a developing nation where the water available is impure. Yeah, a lot of disease, perhaps. And the country is generally poverty-stricken. That baby will benefit tremendously more from breastfeeding

than would the kid born in the modern, developed, richer country. Yeah, absolutely. And also, we'll see, we're gonna get into it for sure. We can't avoid it, but there's a lot of conflicting studies on breastfeeding and health outcomes and the benefits of it, but we'll wait into that later. Yes, with our Kevlar vest.

So let's talk a little bit more about some of the benefits of breastfeeding. One of them is, if you just wanna look strictly at numbers, if a woman's body produces something for free that you would normally have to purchase in a store in the form of formula, then it's just gonna be flat out cheaper. This $400 number in here is way low.

Oh, really? Yeah, it says in the U.S. families can save an average of $400 a year, even with the cost of a breast pump. Yeah, that's gotta be low, because you spend, I think the average cost of formula for a year is closer to 16 to 1,800 bucks. Wow.

And then subtract, of course, for the breast pump and stuff. But let's just say you'll save some money. Right. You'll also save having to get up and go to the kitchen to make some formula or having to wash out bottles, sterilize bottles, stuff like that.

Yeah, although I think most women probably do pump and dump in bottles. Yeah, these days. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, saving money, maybe saving a little inconvenience, that's one positive.

Yeah, the funny thing is it's this little section, this that comes from the House of Works article on breastfeeding. It makes it sound like breastfeeding's just so easy and convenient. Right. You know, like there's nothing to it. Stop complaining.

Yeah. You know? So we should talk a little bit about these two hormones that are super, super important to breastfeeding and period in life. Yeah, because these are definite benefits of breastfeeding, it's just not, you can't argue with it.

Yeah, we're talking about oxytocin and prolactin. And prolactin tells the milk, hey, make more milk. It tells the glands that it basically makes that production happen. Right. The oxytocin is what gets the breast milk to your baby. Right, milk let down is what it's called. Yeah, which is kind of a let down,

sounds like something bad. It does. So I don't know why they called it that. But yes, let down is good in this case. Right. But as long as you're feeding, breastfeeding, or you're pumping, then your body's gonna continue to release that prolactin.

And it's just sort of a feedback loop. Right, exactly. And there's this neat kind of, it's all hormonal, right? Prolactin, oxytocin, they're hormones. But there's this neat like hormonal balance where when your breast gets full, milk production slows down.

And then when your breast empties, milk production speeds back up. Yeah. It's pretty cool. It is. So oxytocin specifically is really amazing. That is a chemical messenger and it releases, released in the brain.

And a lot of it, I mean, it's not just something that happens with women. Oxytocin, we all have it. Yeah, it's a social promoting hormone. Yeah, exactly. And skin on skin contact is where things, is where things get really interesting. Right.

It actually triggers the release of oxytocin, right? Yeah. And there's, if there's one thing that a new mother's brain is primed to experience, it's floods of oxytocin. Yes. And they actually believe that this is the basis for the incredible mother-infant bond that occurs.

It's this huge surge of oxytocin that takes place during labor, after birth, and is sustained through skin to skin contact, including breastfeeding. Yes. And this happens, this is another pretty amazing fact. In those early stages of that flood of oxytocin, nerve junctions in parts of the mother's brain

actually reorganize and it becomes like, maternal instinct becomes hardwired at that point. Right, exactly. Like the oxytocin receptors start to spread all over the place in vast numbers, right? And so when the, these maternal behaviors, I guess you'd call it, if you want to talk about a woman,

like you're a biologist, right? The oxytocin is released, and so the pattern is reinforced. And it's like you said, like the brain is structurally reorganizing into motherhood. Yes. It's pretty astounding.

Yeah, and they recommend, like. I've said that after everything we've said. Let's say you don't breastfeed. Let's say you aren't able to breastfeed. Let's say you have adopted your child, but there's all sorts of scenarios maybe where you don't breastfeed. They still recommend that skin-on-skin contact

as soon as possible and as much as possible. And not just for mom. Dads get in on that action. There's nothing better than laying chest to chest with a newborn baby. And that skin-on-skin contact works the same way with men. It's just not quite as a robust release of oxytocin. Right, but there have been plenty of studies

that have shown that children who don't have that skin-to-skin contact don't develop as securely, and their brains don't necessarily develop as robustly or at least socially, as kids who do have the skin-to-skin contact. A lot of people take that to mean that breastfeeding is what's responsible for that. That's not the case.

Breastfeeding allows for that skin-to-skin contact. So it does allow for that oxytocin release in the child to develop more securely. But like you were saying, you can also get the same thing from holding the baby skin-to-skin without even breastfeeding. Yeah, and when this insecurity and underdevelopment occurs, it appears to be from neglect, maternal and paternal neglect,

rather than the fact that the breastfeeding is so great at it. The breastfeeding forces that, essentially. Does that make sense? Yeah. Okay, yeah. So there's even more on oxytocin, right? The oxytocin prevents... I saw a study that showed that mothers who breastfeed

had about half the levels of stress hormone release as mothers who didn't breastfeed. Yeah. It allows for imprinting, odor imprinting? Yeah, for baby and mom. Right. Like I recognize your smell. Right, the baby became accustomed to the smell

of its amniotic fluid in the womb, thanks to oxytocin. Well, the mother's breast smells similar to the smell of the amniotic fluid. So the baby is able to find the mother's nipple after being born, just from that smell, right? Yeah. All of this is fostered from oxytocin, and it's hardwired through oxytocin as well.

But our understanding of oxytocin and how it does it is we basically, you can replace oxytocin with maternal magic, right? There's like, we just don't understand how it's doing all this, we just know that it does, thanks to rodent studies. Yeah, that sounded funny, but it's true. Yeah.

And it also reduces your baby's stress hormone responses. So they've done studies where they found that in, like let's say in the continent of Africa, where mothers tend to carry their babies a lot more than like here in the United States maybe, that babies tend to cry less and are able to soothe, self soothe more and are just more soothable period. Why?

Because they're just simply held more. Yeah. They're also supposedly studies of, I think children in Eastern Europe who are raised from infancy and orphanages that had tremendous like social maladaptations and they traced it back to not having been held as children. Like that's huge, it's huge.

That's the status then. And apparently skin on skin holding is the solution to that. Yeah, in my eye, I call it skewy, skin to win. That came from our friend. We didn't make it up. That's good stuff. Except he was talking about like Friday night in a hot tub.

You guys just adapted it, right? Yeah, exactly. I got you. One of the other amazing things and then we'll probably take a break after this, but finishing up on oxytocin, I feel like we could almost do a whole podcast on oxytocin. Yeah, we really should.

The wonder hormone. Magic. But with that high level, that big rush of oxytocin, mom's priorities actually become altered and the brain says, you know what? You don't have to groom yourself and try and make yourself look a certain way to obtain a mate anymore.

Now your priority is feeding this little baby. And so it literally kind of switches that off in the brain. So mom's like, great, I don't have to, like now I groom my child, I don't have to worry about myself as much. Exactly, they're like, ugh, why is my hair so long? I'm gonna chop this off. We have a stupid necklace.

Yeah, pretty much. I don't know, it's kind of funny when you think about it, but it's almost like the body saying, take a break from that stuff, focus on BB for a little while, and maybe later on, once that oxytocin goes back down. Once you want another baby. Maybe so.

And prolactin is similar in a lot of ways. We don't wanna sell that short, but it's made in the pituitary gland in the brain. It helps people sleep, helps maintain reproductive organs, your immune system, and it's what prepares the mommy's breast to make breast milk. Right. It also, while the mom is nursing,

it is released and it has this kind of relaxing effect so that mom's just happy to sit there and breastfeed, not have to worry about getting up and doing something else. She's just content doing that. Yeah, it's all of this is designed to keep mommy kind of doped up and happy to just take care of baby. And to love that baby,

her brain is physically rewired by oxytocin to love that one baby right there. All right, before we say amazing again, we'll take a break. We'll come back right after this. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. On the podcast, HeyDudeThe90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor

stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use HeyDude as our jumping off point, we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews,

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on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So, Chuck, a lot of the talk of how magic this is, and how natural it is, and how hormonally driven all of this is has led a lot of people, and I'm sure there's a lot of women out there who have experienced a lot of difficulty with breastfeeding right from the get-go,

and probably felt a lot of frustration, shame, rejection, resentment, all sorts of seemingly horrible feelings because breastfeeding didn't come naturally. That's right. Apparently, breastfeeding is as natural a thing as it is. It's actually not, like no one walking around just naturally knows how to do it.

It takes some practice, you have to learn how to do it first. Yeah, like sometimes the breast milk won't come in for a few days, like ideally you want to be breastfeeding like within a few hours if you can. One hour, within the first hour is what's recommended. Yeah, and if that doesn't happen, at least get that ski we going. Right, yeah, yeah.

But sometimes it takes a few days for the breast milk to come in. There are conditions where breast milk may never come in. Right. What I would advise is to stay off the mommy blogs. They can be helpful, but they can also really be tough on a new mother. Yeah, if you feel like you don't measure up

to some breastfeeding ideal. There's a lot of judgment going on. Even if you just look up, like breast milk didn't come in, you'll find some women that say, yeah, sometimes that happens and other women say, like you just gave up, you got lazy with it, and you didn't work at it. Right, apparently the recommendations that I found,

and I didn't find them judgmentally. They seem to come from a non-judgmental place. Places I saw them, right? Was keep trying, basically. I'm sure that there is some line and every mother has her own line. Once she gets to that line, just done. But apparently if your milk isn't coming in,

the best way to get it to come in is to keep nursing. Yes. To keep getting the breast milk flowing because it's eventually gonna get the prolactin going, and the prolactin's going to get the milk in, and it's gonna get the oxytocin going, and the oxytocin's going to let the milk down. So just trying to breastfeed apparently

is the best fix for breastfeeding problems. Right. Another thing to do is to reach out to what's called a lactation consultant. Yeah, there are professionals out there who will advise you. I mean, there are all kinds of services they can help you with.

Everything from advising you, or counseling you, to literally showing you different methods, which we'll get to on how to literally physically breastfeed, like how to hold the baby, how to do all that stuff. It's sort of like a coach in a way. Coach and counselor, I think, is a good way to put it. And they can really, really help. And don't hesitate to reach out.

Like it doesn't mean that you're not a good mom, or that things aren't coming naturally to you, so something is wrong with you. Yeah, this one. That shame needs to get out of your head. I know. It needs to get out of society. Yeah, but it's tough, you know.

Right after you have a baby, there's, you know, I mean, we should do one on postpartum depression too. It's, sometimes you are at the whims of what your body and your hormones are doing, you know. And someone who might normally not feel those things feels those things. Right. And then you add on top these social expectations.

Yeah. From friends and neighbors, and the nurses, and the doctor, and everybody will just shut up. Yeah. You know? Oh, you're not breastfeeding. Yeah, there's this really. That kind of line.

There's this great article that Hannah Rosen wrote. It was published in The Atlantic in 2009 called The Case Against Breastfeeding. Yeah, very controversial. And she, just some of the stuff she mentions, just some of the casual vibing out. That a mom encounters when she says she doesn't breastfeed. And just, there's a lot of social pressure to breastfeed.

Yeah. If you've chosen to breastfeed, and you're having trouble with it, what we're saying is, is there's, yeah, go find a lactation consultant. That's fine. Yeah. At the same time, make sure you're also

in close contact with your doctor. Yeah. Or your child's doctor, because if your breast milk isn't coming, your baby still needs to eat something. Sure. Right? So your doctor will be able to tell you,

well, you might want to go buy some human milk, or you might want to introduce your baby to formula, while you're also nursing too, or trying to nurse to get your breast milk coming so that your baby has enough nutrients and calories and everything. Yeah. Or if it's not coming in as much,

like some women might not go to the doctor, like, because they're producing breast milk, but they're not producing enough on a daily basis. Right. There are cases where a baby is hospitalized, and they found that the baby is actually suffering some from a form of dehydration. Hypernatremia.

Yeah. Which is like a solute imbalance. Yeah. That a baby can die from. Yeah. And yeah, it comes from basically women being so thoroughly scared off from formula, or shamed away from formula, that their baby's not getting enough milk,

but they are afraid to supplement it with anything, like formula. Yeah. So the baby ends up in dire straits. Hey, I want to take this chance to recommend another podcast. We're talking about Judgy People. One Bad Mother.

Great, great mom. Actually, Parenting Podcast. It's called One Bad Mother, but plenty of dads listen as well. And it is on the Max Fun Network, and our friend, my friend Teresa Thorn, and Biz Ellis, her co-host. It's just a great, fun, funny podcast.

Nice. Very supportive, not judgmental. And I was a guest. Oh. And told a bit of my adoption story a while ago. I can't remember when it was. Was it last year? I can't remember that, yeah.

It was obviously, it was sometime after mid-summer last year. Do you remember the name of the episode or the number? No. People are going to want to know. You can Google it. Okay. Google that junk. But anyway, One Bad Mother is great.

And fine, if it's not them, just find some good resource that is trustworthy, and that you feel good about. Yeah. Yeah. So with all that said, here's how to breastfeed. It's easy. All right, Josh, just took his shirt off.

It's a little weird. You know, it's funny. Like some of these, I was going through like, making the actual, like hand motions and everything. Yeah. Yeah. Some of it's tough to visualize, but others. And Yumi walked through and she's like,

why are you cradling a loaf of rye bread? And why is it crying? You could make rye cry. That's pretty powerful. So apparently the latch is everything, right? The baby's got a latch on. And like you said, that vacuum has to be formed. And to form the vacuum, the baby's got to get

a big old mouthful of boob, nipple. Specifically. So when you're getting the baby to latch, you grab the breast around the nipple, around the areolae. And you basically tickle the baby's mouth with your nipple. And she's like, okay, I'm open and wide. And you take the bottom of her jaw

and put it underneath your breast. Apparently, or underneath your nipple, I'm sorry. Also don't listen to me. And then you move her head forward onto, so that the top of her mouth is now on the nipple and taking in at least one to one and a half inches of areolae as well. Yeah, isn't the idea that baby comes to mommy,

mommy doesn't like kneel down or lean over to baby? Right. Isn't that how it goes? That's what I saw. Okay. There are various types of holds. The suplex, the figure four. No, sorry.

That's a professional. That's wrestling. Sleeper hold. The cradle position, that is one of them. That's when you have the baby on your forearm, her head in the crook of your arm and support the bottom with the other hand, then pull little baby close to you belly to belly,

which is a great thing with her ear, shoulder and hip and a straight line. Yep. So that's the cradle. The football. Yeah, I call it the Heisman. The Heisman. So you're laying on your back, right?

Is that what I'm getting here? Who me? Right, well, the mom. Oh, okay. And then there's a pillow very close to your side with your baby on top. And I think you're both facing in opposite directions, right? Or you're facing one another,

but you're pointing in opposite directions, yeah. Okay. And you just lift your baby's head up to your breast from the side. And that's really good if you had a caesarean section because I'm guessing you don't want a baby anywhere near your belly after that. Yeah, the football and I couldn't picture in my head

as much, so that one was a little less clear. Oh, okay. The baby's facing this way and I'm facing that way. Gotcha. And nothing's coming out. It's getting very disturbing in here. Then you have the old side lie. Poor baby's just getting a lot of hair in her mouth.

God. The side lie, not the same thing as the side eye. That's much different. This is also good if you've had a C-section or if you want to rest if you're worn out while you nurse. So this is when you lie on your side, place your head on a pillow as mom and pull the baby in close to you

and use your arm to support her little baby bottom, which is adorable, and use your other hand to bring your breast up to the baby's mouth. Right. So I think that one makes sense to me. Yeah, all of them made sense to me. Well, I practiced that. You had a loaf of bread.

I did not. So again, if this isn't working at first, don't worry. Don't be discouraged, don't take it like your baby doesn't like you or is rejecting you. That's right. It's not the case. Try, try again. Try, try again.

But also again, if you reach your limit, well, then come up with plan B or go with plan B. Yeah. Like no judgment. Yeah, and here's a pretty amazing fact. If you have adopted your baby or if you used to surrogate or if you were female partners and new mothers, you can actually point as if you didn't give birth

to the baby. Right. Yeah. You can actually induce lactation with a lot of time and patience, not always, but it is possible to breastfeed a baby that you did not bear. Bear. Which is astounding.

Yes. Yeah. Like there's a lot of techniques you can use. Hand massages help quite a bit. Yeah. You want to try hand expressing like eight to 12 times a day. Like shadow puppets?

Basically, squeezing shadow puppets. Okay. And you can also take something called, I love this word, galactogogs. Yeah. That totally sounds like a video game from the 80s. Right. Yeah.

It's a type of chemical that spurs a woman's body to start creating breast milk, right? Yeah. And there's some that have been proven through scientific study, drugs like metaclopramide, right? Yeah. Then apparently there's herbs that anecdotally work wonders, including fenugreek.

Yeah. And they have quite as much evidence-based efficacy, but they may still work for you, so we're trying. Yeah. And I think if you watch a lot of Gilmore Girls, that might help. Yeah. Maybe pop in steel magnolias.

Sure. Any mother-centric plot line. Right. Actually not. Mommy dearest. Yeah. I was about to say psycho mommy dearest. You might want to stay away from those.

Should we take another break? Oh, sure. All right. Let's do it. Come on in. Come on in. Where are we? Come on in.

On the podcast, Hey Dude The 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in

as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man.

And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So Chuck, let's say you've decided to breastfeed.

Yes. How long should you breastfeed for? Well, that's up to you as an individual, obviously. Like we said, experts do recommend that first four to six months is pretty key. And that doesn't mean it has to be exclusive. If you want to augment with formula, you can do that. It's everyone's decision to make on their own.

And then there was that lady. Remember that one lady made a lot of news because she was on the cover. I should have looked this up. She was on the cover of some magazine. So Time or Newsweek? Yeah, with a much older, like a four or five-year-old. I couldn't remember the age of her son that was breastfeeding

and got a lot of flack for that. It was like an article on attachment parenting, I think, that Dr. Sears stuff. I can't remember exactly. I should have looked that up. But I'm pretty sure it was either Time or Newsweek. But anyway, to make the point, some women have done that. They breastfeed to their point where their kid is coming up

and saying, hey, mom, I would love some food from your breast. If you're doing that, you want to make sure that your kid is eating plenty of other stuff as well. Because the point of breastfeeding or breast milk is that it can sustain a child exclusively for the first four to six months of his or her life. After that, you have to start supplementing either with formula or solid foods.

And the rule of thumb that I saw when knowing whether or not the baby was ready to start trying solid foods is if he or she is coordinated enough to let you know when she's full, then you could try to start supplementing with solids. But you can breastfeed exclusively up to four to six months. After that, you just physically can't. There's not enough nutrients for you

to produce to sustain your kid with breast milk alone after six months of age. We've mentioned pumping a couple of times. We'll get more into that in part two. But if you live under a rock and you don't know what that is, that means you are just storing your breast milk. You're using a device, a machine, I guess you want to call it, to store your breast milk for later.

It means you like to have a drink once a while, so lay off. Well, we'll get to that, too. But as far as storage goes, here's the deal. It depends on what kind of fridge, freezer you store the breast milk in and how often that is opened. Oh, is that right? Yeah, so if you have one of those, if you have a small, old-school fridge

that has the little freezer section in the top of it, that is the shortest amount of time. That is only two weeks of storage, even if it's in the freezer. If you have a separate freezer within that fridge, like the little freezer on the bottom or whatever, you can store it as long as three to six months. If you have a deep freezer in the garage. Right, with a body in it.

Keep your dead bodies. Like Bernie. Or you keep your delivered steak subscription service and dead bodies. So you bought off of some guy's pickup truck. You can actually store it in the deep, deep freezer six to 12 months, even though they say it's past six months, it's not optimal.

So I think if you were, the zombie apocalypse happened and you have some 12-month-old frozen solid breast milk, you can try and use that. Yeah, we'll give our thumbs up on that one. In room temperature, apparently, if it's a coolish room and it's not the heat of summer with no AC, we're talking about six hours, which is longer than I thought. And then up to five days in a fridge,

although that's not optimal supposedly after about three days. And you just want to make sure in the fridge and anywhere, really, everything is super, super clean. You've got a bottle cap on there. They're all. Yeah, everything is really, really, especially early in BB's life.

You want everything really, really, really clean. So one of the reasons, one of the big reasons that a lot of women pump is because they want a breastfeed, but they also either want to or need to get back to work. And this raises a big issue as far as breastfeeding goes. There's this really great New Republic review of a book called Lactivism. And the reviewer is named Katherine Joyce.

And she points out that it's great that the World Health Organization and the American Academy of Pediatrics and all of these guys say women should breastfeed exclusively for at least the first six months. But that demand, it puts a burden on basically no one except for the mom. Yes.

And then simultaneously, we're saying, breastfeed for six months and get back to work because we've got an economy to keep going. Yeah, or you have rent to pay. Yeah, or get back to work because your family needs it. Right. And so Angela Garbus points out basically everything about breastfeeding is at odds with holding down

full-time work. That breastfeeding for the first few months can take eight hours a day of time easily. But hey, go work for eight hours on top of that. Right. And she says, I think quite reasonably, that if we're telling people, for telling mothers, hey, you should breastfeed exclusively for six months,

then they should also be given six months of paid maternity leave at a minimum. And that that should be enshrined in American law. It may sound radical to a lot of Americans. In fact, America is the only developed nation that doesn't guarantee paid time off for mothers. Yeah. There's not a day of paid time off

that a mother gets guaranteed under federal law in the United States. It's the only developed nation that doesn't have that law. It's one of only two nations that doesn't have it. The other one is Papua New Guinea. In Papua New Guinea, 85% of the people who live there make their subsistence off of agriculture. They don't need to have a law like that.

Yeah, it's pretty amazing. That's amazing, too, but in the opposite way. Bad amazing. Yeah, I mean, these days, there are a lot of jobs that are way more flexible as far as working from home or having lactation rooms. Agreed, true. Flexible scheduling, a lot of companies

have made it much easier for you with a combination of pumping and dumping to still be able to do that. But if you're not lucky enough to be in one of those scenarios and if you've got a job that's like, nope, don't do that here or no, you've got to cut, well, yeah. They have to allow some break time and they have to provide some private place. But there's no specifications that it can't be

some old shower stall or something like that. And of course, that's just the law. That doesn't mean every company absolutely does this across the board. There are people that run afoul of the law. You're right, and it is getting better, though. It is getting better. Among employers, but in the United States,

there's the Family Leave Act of 1993 and it does guarantee 12 weeks of unpaid maternity leave. Yeah, but your family might not be able to afford that. So that equals like no maternity time. Yeah, and they've found across the board that higher income families breastfeed longer. Right. It's just the way it is.

Yeah. Here's some more stats for you if you want to talk about how long to breastfeed. Most women stop within the first year. In 2013, the CDC said 77% of American women breastfed from birth at that rate since birth and then after six months that dropped to 16%. Right.

But you make a big point. Well, you didn't make the point. You sourced these points. I arranged them to make points. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now you make a point that it's, A, it depends on where you live in the world. In Africa, on the continent, 87% of women

breastfed beyond 12 months. So it definitely depends on where you are and you make the point, which is what I was getting to, is that a lot of these stats kind of stink because they're old. Man, they stink. And outnumbered. Contradictory.

Contradictory. So it's really hard to kind of get great percentages on this stuff, but everything that we looked at does say that breastfeeding is on the rise. Sure. In what, the last probably 20 years. Yeah, and that it's on the rise, especially among older, white, educated,

wealthier women. For all the reasons we talked about. Yeah. Yeah. So let's pull out of Bummer'sville for a second, Chuck. Okay. And talk about the food. Talk about food.

Yes, like what a mom eats if the mom is producing this milk, it would make sense in turn that the milk will end up, because we said each recipe each day can be a little bit different. Right. And if you had general sal's chicken the night before, your breast milk might be a little spicier. Yeah, there's actually,

there's a study back in the 70s at the University of Manitoba that took breast milk from women and had like a flavor, a professional tasting panel. Did an episode on those. Sample them, and one of the women had eaten spicy food the night before, and hers was described as hot and peppery.

Pretty neat. It is pretty neat. And then this one woman, and she's not the only one of course, but it's a lady named Julia Minella of the Monal Chemical Census Center in Philadelphia, said that she thinks, and a lot of people agree, that these early flavor profiles

that the baby experiences develop taste preferences for later in life. Right. That makes sense to me. Yeah. I see no reason why that should not be true. No, no, I don't know that it's proven though, but it does make a lot of sense.

Yeah. So when you're breastfeeding the rule of thumb that I've seen is that you want to eat about 500 more calories a day than you were before you were pregnant. Yeah. Right? Potato chips, candy bars.

No, you want to avoid that kind of stuff. Oh, man. Right. You actually want to avoid junk food. Instead, you want to eat the good stuff. That's right. The stuff that's good for you, the stuff that's whole,

the stuff that's chock full of like good vitamins, and is nutritious. AKA the food you should eat, period. Right. But all that stuff is going to pass right through you into your baby in the form of your milk. And so it's the stuff you eat is like a gift to your baby. It's like passing that really great food along.

That's right. Sometimes like something that might give mom and baby problems if you eat like Brussels sprouts or cabbage or things that might make you a little gassy broccoli. Everyone has different things that make them gasier. Whatever that is for you, that could cause some trouble. What else?

Anything like heavy and additives or dyes. Yeah. Like we were talking about, like non-whole foods could produce a little bit more issues for you and baby, both. Onions, garlic, citrus, corn. Is no good or just trickier. All of these things can, they can produce problems, right? So if you've noticed that your baby after eating,

shortly after eating is drawing her legs up to her stomach and screaming. That's colic. It's probably because your baby has gas. You wanna figure out what it is that you're eating that is giving your baby gas. There's also other things that you can pass on to your baby that the baby doesn't want

that can result in an unhappy baby. Caffeine that can pop up not just in coffee, but also things like Coke and chocolate and all sorts of stuff. There's also worries that babies can actually develop food allergies, which is entirely possible. That usually is sourced back to milk.

You might not be lactose intolerant, but your baby might be. All this stuff you can figure out on your own very easily doing a very simple at home experiment. Take whatever food you think is making your baby unhappy and remove it from your diet for about a week. See if that clears it up. If it doesn't, it wasn't that food,

you can reintroduce that food. Yeah, it's like with any food allergy, it's just called an elimination diet and you get rid of the stuff until you see a change. If it doesn't change, you move on to the next thing. And mom's usually pretty in tune with baby and ideally. And so an elimination diet is pretty, I don't wanna say easy,

because it is time consuming and you should keep records of things, but it's fairly intuitive, I think, is what I was looking for. Yes. So apparently they used to tell moms, drink a bunch of beer, because it'll aid in milk production. Did they really?

That sounds so true. It's ridiculous. All right, so it must be true. Yeah, so they realized that, no, you should probably not do that. Not only does it not aid in milk production, but apparently the blood alcohol content that you have about the same percentage

is past long to your breast milk. So the blood alcohol content of your breast milk is pretty much the same as your blood alcohol level at any given point. Yeah, which is super low. Unless you've been drinking, then it's super high. And then you're getting poor baby blitzed by breastfeeding drunk.

You would have to drink a lot. I don't know that that's the case, man. No, it's absolutely the case. Like your blood alcohol content, even if you're ripped is still super, super low, as far as a percentage of alcohol in your blood. But we're talking about little people that weigh like eight pounds.

Oh, no, no, no, no, I'm not recommending it. I'm just saying it's not like you're giving your kid a shot of booze if you've, you know, it's still. A shot of booze. And this is another one of those things that, like if you look at 10 different places, you're gonna get 10 different opinions, even from doctors.

Sure. I saw one doctor was like, you know what? This is one of those things that just makes it even harder for a woman is to tell her she shouldn't even have a glass of wine when she's breastfeeding. Right. So really, I like, I literally looked at like four different things and they all said something different. What I did see was there's a direct correlation

between the amount that you're drinking and whether or not you're drinking it with food, just like with the blood alcohol that's in it, levels it has to do with the mom's weight and like the amount of fat. Oh, that makes sense. Like where alcohol is stored. Sure. So there's a lot of factors that go into it.

The American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Drugs considers alcohol compatible with breastfeeding. So they said you don't have to abstain, but everything I read says like keep it in check and maybe don't like drink the wine while you're breastfeeding or within a couple of hours. Like maybe have the glass of wine after you've breastfed and put baby down for the night.

So the rule of thumb I saw was two hours before the alcohol is out of your system, which means if you're breastfeeding every two hours, you've got to either pump and dump or hand express or yeah, time it so that it's not, yeah, you're not passing it along. And this is after, you know, nine months of probably abstaining from alcohol too.

Yeah, yeah. Hey, I mean, I don't blame anybody for being like, I'm having a glass of wine. Yeah. You know. People always say a glass of wine. Why didn't some people say, I'm having a Scotch. I'm having a fifth of Scotch.

No, don't have a fifth. Do you have an insuchant attitude towards smoking and breastfeeding? Who me? Well, I mean, I think you shouldn't smoke, period. I think that's true. So I guess you could say that in keeping with that, I would say you shouldn't smoke and breastfeed.

Yeah, apparently the nicotine is not good for milk production. It diminishes milk production. Yes, just on the practical level, you're not doing yourself any favors. It reduces the amount of vitamin C present in your breast milk, it can increase nausea in the baby. That alone, that's sad.

Yes. And plus, not to mention, if you're actually smoking around the baby, come on. And then there's that woman in Arizona. Do you remember her? No. The mom who got just hugely, massively in trouble because she took her baby to the hospital.

It was like, something's wrong with my baby. And the doctors tested it and were like, that's weird, your baby has a lot of cocaine in his system right now. Oh, yeah, I remember. And the idea why, have you been doing cocaine? Well, yeah, I did, but I... What's that got to do with my baby?

Right, are you breastfeeding? And she was like, yes, I am. Well, you passed the cocaine on to your baby. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, the old days of walking around baby on breast with a cigarette in one hand and a scotch on the other. And a bump of coke in your nose. Those days are long gone.

Sure, the 70s are over. We know better at this point. I was not breastfed, by the way. I'm pretty sure I was actually. Now that you say that, I'm not, I don't know. Yeah. I feel securely attached. Yeah, my mommy actually told me this just like

in the last six or eight years even. Oh, yeah. And I was like, huh, did you know? How did she tell you? I don't remember. I think it was on my birthday card. Your birthday card. Happy birthday, and by the way.

No, I can't remember, it just came up. And I was like, oh, I didn't know that. And she said, yeah, you know, I was her third kid. Didn't have a lot of help from my dad. So she was managing a three-year-old and a six-year-old. And I think had a rough time breastfeeding my brother, because my brother said she just wasn't organized enough. Oh, is that right?

No, I'm just joking. You know, Scott, though, that would be a joke. Right, yeah. Scott would have been like, here, let me hand express this for later, I'll feed myself. I think had a rough time breastfeeding Scott, and then I think just sort of decided like, yeah, I got too much going on.

Going with the formula for BB Chuck. And it was also at a time in the early 70s, like starting in the 50s through the 70s and 80s, even to a certain degree, there was a bigger move toward formula feeding. Oh, yeah. And away from breastfeeding, because the notion was like,

this science has finally figured it out. You don't need to breastfeed, because we have this wonderful new thing called formula, which the name formula just cracks me up, that that's what it's called, that they didn't think of some name. I know, it's like the most generic clinical term they could have come up with.

Like, hey, we came up with this formula that meant express milk. What should we call it? Formula. Originally it was called formula X, but they thought that was too sinister. Well, that makes more sense even than just formula. It's like, hey, we got this new recipe for chicken.

What do you call it? A new recipe? Right here. That's a good point. Anyway. But that whole push, starting in, well, it was previous to the 50s, we'll talk more about it in part two,

but there was a lot of pushback that came out as a result of this trend toward formulas, right? Yes. And there were actually groups that are called lactivist groups that started beginning with the La Leche League, which was established in the 50s in the States among a group of Catholic moms

who decided that it was their biblical right, their biblical heritage to breastfeed their babies. And that that was what God wanted them to do. And the La Leche League is still around today. It's one of the most prominent lactivist groups around. They're very active in public awareness, teaching breastfeeding classes, all that stuff. But they grew out of this group of Catholic moms

in the 50s who actually took their name from a shrine down in Jacksonville. Oh, really? Yeah, Jacksonville, Florida. Jacksonville, Florida, yeah. The name of the shrine is called Nuestra Signora de La Leche y Buen Parto, which means Our Lady of Happy Delivery and Plentiful Milk.

Yeah, and they published in 1958 a very famous pamphlet called The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding that eventually became a book and it was very, very popular. It's now in six languages and it's eighth edition. And also in the 70s, we've talked about Hannah Rosen before. She said there were other groups that were a little, little more hip than the LLL that came out. And she said notably one in Boston.

Do you know the name of this one? I don't know that they had a name. They had, they created a- Which is sort of a movement. Yeah, they wrote a book called Our Bodies Ourselves. Right. And that was basically the foundation for what she calls the second wave of lactivism.

Yeah, and she said they were just, she said, quote, were more groovy types than the LLL moms, slouchy jeans, clogs, bandanas, holding back their waist-length hair. She said, but the two movements grew out of the common frustration and anger of this condescending medical establishment, this paternalistic, non-informative,

judgmental group of men basically. Who are just like, just do what we tell you. You don't need to ask questions, just trust us. Pretty much. And these groups came out and said, you know what? These are our bodies and our decisions. I don't think beer aids in milk production. So they took their,

well, I guess they're a womanly art of breastfeeding. And they kept it, they took it back, they yanked it back. And so the lactivism has always had this kind of tinge of moral authority because of the religious roots of the La Leche League and radicalism, because it was both waves came counter to the medical establishment at the time. So there's a lot of current understanding

of breastfeeding is not necessarily based on accurate scientific information, right? Yes. We already talked about how the benefits of breastfeeding are fairly relative. But there's also a lot of misinformation or misunderstanding about how, like what breastfeeding and breast milk can do for a developing baby.

Yeah, there's a lot of correlative effects that it's tough to put the hard science behind. Because as Hannah Rosen says, it's tough to do a really ideal study because what you would have to do for it to stand up to scientific rigor would be to divide up two groups of mothers and say you breastfeed, you don't.

And then measure the outcomes for years and you can't do that. You can't tell a woman not to breastfeed for the sake of this study. So what they end up doing is they just look at observational studies where they look at differences in the two populations over the years. And this is where you get that skewed perception

or where you can get a skewed perception because they may be looking at US mothers of a certain social strata. Well, yeah, there's all sorts of confounding factors that are variables, right? That women who tend to breastfeed these days, again, tend to be from a wealthier family. So they maybe can stay at home more

or they have more money available for preventative healthcare measures. There's a lot of other things that could be accounting for these better health outcomes that studies have found but have been able to say, yes, this is directly because these babies were breastfed. The problem is that these studies that say, hey, these breastfed babies had these amazing increases

in IQ, that's what gets reported through lazy scientific reporting. It hits the popular media. And then all of a sudden that's gospel fact. And if you don't breastfeed your baby, you're a horrible mom. Yeah, in 2007, the World Health Organization did a survey of all this literature and they looked at the big five claims

about benefits of breastfeeding. Lowers cholesterol, lowers blood pressure, lowers risk of obesity, lowers risk of type two diabetes and increases cognitive ability. And they didn't find a lot of hard scientific support for one through four, but they did see, like you said, that there was a correlation between an increased IQ.

Right, but they found it was a relatively small increase. But if you're one of those like dog eat dog, enroll my kid in preschool before she's even born type of parents, you'd be like, I'll take those extra five IQ points, sure. Yeah. So this is part one, but before we go, Chuck, do you have anything else?

You know what, for part one, since we talked about breastfeeding at work and stuff, I feel like we would be remiss if we did not mention Donald Trump, remember that? No, what? That scene. In two, about five years ago, he was in a deposition in one of the opposing attorneys,

Elizabeth Beck went to pump breast milk in this deposition. And he got up and said, you're disgusting, you're disgusting, and he got out of the room. And this was a very, I can't believe you don't remember this. It was a huge deal, or a huge deal. And she says, Elizabeth Beck from her side said, he called me, there's nothing disgusting about this. He can't say that to a woman who's breastfeeding

or pumping or doing whatever, no matter where it is. And then Trump and his general counsel, what was his name, Alan Garten, they contend like, sure, he said she was disgusting. He said, but like, they didn't deny that. He said, but this is not about breastfeeding. They said that she was in a deposition, right in the middle of the deposition,

this is a quote, attempting to breastfeed to pump in the middle of a deposition with five lawyers and was not excusing herself. And he claimed that Beck orchestrated this thought because she ran out of questions, didn't know what to do. And so she just like pulled this breast pumping move. The old breast pumping move. So, you know, those are the two sides of the story.

I'm not gonna comment one way or the other, other than saying, you should never use the word disgusting when a woman is breastfeeding or pumping or anything. Yeah. And he said, I'm gonna be president one day and she was like, no, you're not. Like, I don't care what the circumstance, don't say that. Even if you think it's inappropriate,

I'm not even gonna say whether, you know, I'm not getting way in on that. But if you think it's inappropriate, then you say, hey, maybe I think this is inappropriate. Don't say you're disgusting. Yeah. Not, not right. I agree.

That's as political as I'm gonna get on this one. And that is feeding your baby part one. Man, this one is robust. Yeah, that's just part one. So be sure to join us for part two. Do we have a listener mailer? These things so thoroughly can join that they can't be separated by listener mail.

Yeah, let's skip the listener mail on this one. Okay, good idea. All right, well join us for How Feeding Babies Works, part two, coming at ya soon. And in the meantime, if you wanna get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at S.Y.S.K. Podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuffyoushouldknow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com.

And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands

give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.