Why can’t we add all the nutrients that breastmilk has to normal cow milk the same way we add calcium or things like that?
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Some babies have an intolerance to formula and the mother can’t produce enough milk to keep them well fed. Cows milk has too many minerals and can cause internal bleeding in babies.
Breast milk contains the mothers antibodies, so it gives protection to the baby for a few months.
Mother’s produce milk tied to the babies needs. The saliva from the baby is received by the mother, and this allows the milk to adapt specially to the nutritional requirements of the individual baby.
Interestingly if the mother had twins and uses one breast for each, the milk will have different nutrients for each baby.
It’s quite remarkable.
Breast milk is valued because it is tailored from that mother to that child to help their body grow and building nutrients, resistances and immunities that the specific mother’s body deemed worthwhile for them to have.
So it can provide specific help that other babies might not need or ever utilize as well as compliment any lacking nutrition that was missed out on by that specific baby in uterus. It usually has a higher absorption rate than synthetic versions because the nutrients are more accessible without requiring to change their forms or any added preservatives or pasteurizing to make a commercially viable long shelf-life product etc
You can potentially add all the nutrition in breastmilk, but there are also antibodies which fight infection and bacteria which help in digestion.
You can make a baby perfectly healthy on specific formula tailored for it. You can’t necessarily replicate the antibodies, bacterium and such that help the babies very new immune system learn of threats. If a mother gave birth to a baby and immediately abandoned it, they’d likely live a healthy life in the end with formula, but the mother’s milk makes that a little more likely.
We can, it’s called formula. It contains all the nutrients a growing baby will need. But there is one thing in breast milk that we can’t replicate. Breast milk contains the mother’s antibodies, which gives the baby protection for 6 months to a year. This slowly wears off, which is why its important to get vaccinated.
I assume you mean *human* breastmilk, and the reason for its value is quite simple really: 1) it’s rare already. It’s pretty much only produced by lactating mothers and lactating mothers only (usually) do that while nursing and 2) it’s incredibly personalized – each baby, at any given suckling, has a direct and near immediate impact on the exact composition and formula (pun not intended, but it’s still nice it worked out that way) of the milk it is receiving. The composition changes in direct response to immediate need, such that a baby suckling and someone else suckling, less than 5 minutes apart would receive milk with a composition so different that it *might* even affect the taste.
TL;DR: Rarity and personalization.
The casein/whey ratio is different in cows milk. If you look at the ingredients to formula you’ll see there’s whey protein added to try and get that ratio closer to what it is in breastmilk (and it’s still not perfect). There’s also chemicals in breast milk that we haven’t been able to replicate for formula yet (leptin is one example)
Also in premature babies, breast milk specifically protects against certain intestinal infections that can turn deadly
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