eli5: do boobs actually hold liquid milk or are they like camel humps?
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Neither of those.
A camel’s hump is made of fat and contains nutrient. Basically, it’s a thick grease with nourishing elements inside. When the camel needs energy, that fat is burned the same way any fat is burned like when, say, an obese person stops eating.
A woman’s breast contains several little things called “mammary glands”. Those produce the milk that they exude, they “sweat” milk. There are pipes, called “ducts” linking these glands to the nipple, ending in a single pipe which itself ends in the nipple. *Edit : as one redditor replied, the nipple itself doesn’t end in a duct, there is no tube running through it like there is, say, in a penis : it’s simply a porous bit of meat which lets milk flow through.*
So it’s not really a bag full of liquid and rather more like a sponge next to a pipe. The milk is produced inside this sponge by using food : elements the woman’s body already contains because she ate them are used to produce the milk, which is made of water, fat and proteins *edit : and sugar ! Very important*. There isn’t much capacity inside the breast to contain the milk, it is rather a direct process : milk is produced and expelled from the body. Women who do not have something to suck the milk out can feel pain because of this and a stale, inedible kind of cream cheese is then stuck inside the breast, which must be expelled before it rots.
This sponge, the mammary glands, are woken up by a kind of message inside the body. This “wake-up !” message is brought to them by hormones, which are special liquids flowing in our bodies to give our organs messages : there is a hormone to tell you to feel good, a hormone to tell you to feel hungry, a hormone to tell you that you need to flush because there’s too much sugar in your blood, and of course a hormone to tell a woman’s breast to produce milk. This hormone is called “prolactin”.
Interestingly, another one, “oxytocin”, is also used for lactation and this hormone is the “well-being” hormone, the hormone which makes us happy.
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