Men Are Drinking Breast Milk to Build Muscle

In general, women tend to have the monopoly on experimenting with bizarre beauty trends and going to strange or drastic lengths to achieve aesthetic perfection, but that doesn’t mean men aren’t willing to try out some weird fads in the name of physical excellence, like drinking breast milk.

Indeed, it would seem some men are drinking actual, human breast milk in an attempt to build muscle. The New York Post attributes the trend to the Netflix docuseries (Un)well, in which amateur body builder Jameson “JJ” Ritenour procures the substance from a donor in the hope of bulking up.

Why? “If I wanna grow and be the best that I can, I’m going to eat like a baby,” Ritenour explains in the series.

Experts seem willing to entertain this logic to a certain extent. “I think the idea behind drinking breast milk for muscle growth is that it’s incredibly calorie and nutrient dense, and it has some additional healthy substances,” sports dietician Brian St. Pierre told Men’s Health, explaining that the substance “is designed to rapidly grow a human baby, so maybe people think a similar effect will happen to fully grown humans?”

However, it seems there’s little evidence to suggest breast milk is actually doing much to help body builders bulk up. According to Bruce German, a professor of food and chemistry at the University of California, Davis, milk made for human infants has a relatively poor nutritional composition that makes it “not particularly valuable for athletes.”

Meanwhile, breast milk could actually be doing more harm than good. Since most breast milk-producing women in anyone’s life are probably using that breast milk to feed an infant, grown men looking to procure breast milk for their own body-building needs are often left to sketchy sources from shady corners of the internet.

In short, maybe leave the baby food to the babies and go drink a protein shake or something.

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