- [Narrator] Fact of the day.
- Hello, hi, and welcome to (mumbles),
me and my (mumbles), so
today's fact of the day.
Before, women, before you start looking
and saying, "Oh, not
only does not take out
"the rubbish, he's not
breastfeeding our kids,"
let me just explain.
Male goats, male cats,
and male guinea pigs
have all been shown, on rare occasions,
to be able to produce milk, to be able
to lactate from their nipples.
If you're a male dad fruit bat, you can
lactate spontaneously, they just produce
milk as and when, the men.
The hormone that you
need in order to produce
milk is a hormone called prolactin,
and women generally have twice
as much prolactin as men,
and pregnant women have a tenfold increase
in the amount of prolactin than men do.
Now, I don't know if you've seen the film,
I think it's a son in
law goin' round to see
his parents in law, they
have a conversation,
and he basically is bragging about how
he can milk anything that has nipples,
and then the father in law says,
"I've got nipples, Greg, can you milk me?"
The answer to that would be yes.
Here are those circumstances.
So there are four, four ones that I've
found so far, so the first
one is in starvation.
So, World War II,
survivors of World War II
who have been in prison camps, either Nazi
concentration camps or Japanese POW camps
who have then come out after months and
months of starvation, when
they get adequate nutrition,
what happens is their
glands, they bounce back
much faster than their
liver does, now, the glands,
specifically pituitary
gland, which produces
and secretes prolactin,
that means you have
more prolactin in your
body because the liver
can't metabolise it, can't break it down,
so therefore you're able to secrete milk,
those men have shown that they can secrete
milk from their nipples.
The male nipple and female
nipple are basically the same,
they've both got these
things called alveoli
behind the nipple, and milk
secreting ducts as well,
where, obviously, the milk comes out of,
so that's the first situation, starvation,
then getting food, glands bounce back much
faster than the liver can break it down.
Second situation is any
damage to the liver,
so things like cirrhosis,
any damage to the liver
means that the liver then can't break down
the prolactin again, and
then you produce milk.
Third situation is that any head trauma,
head injuries which can cause
damage to the hypothalamus,
the hypothalamus produces a
hormone, a neurotransmitter
called dopamine, and dopamine
inhibits the production
of prolactin from the pituitary gland,
so if you reduce the amount of dopamine,
then you get more
prolactin, and the final way
is in the 1950s, there's
a drug called Thorazine,
which was used as an antipsychotic drug,
it was used to treat people who were
manic depressives or
who had schizophrenia,
and one of the side effects of this is it
stimulated the pituitary gland to produce
more prolactin, so all of the ways you can
get more milk production.
That's it for me, and that's in men,
that's it for me, have a great evening,
love you, bye, love
you, bye, love you, bye.
