Milk, Density, and What No One Told You
blog 3 of
This Might Be Dense:
and other stories about your girls
Welcome to This Might Be Dense: and other stories about your girls.
This blog series pulls the curtain back on a part of the body that’s been so sexualized, it’s still censored: on social media, in schools, and even in medical conversations. And yet, over half a million women die each year from breast cancer.
Censoring information about women’s bodies doesn’t protect us: it endangers us.
So, this series is both personal and practical.
It’s a love letter. A rage howl. A guidebook.
It’s a reminder that ya girls were never meant to be a mystery, especially to you.
What if you’d known what your breasts were made of before the pain?
Before the clogs, the letdown shards, the lactation curveballs. Before the pads. The pressure. The quiet panic.
Before the guilt of not making “enough.” Before the fear of making too much and not being able to stop.
Dense breasts matter at mammograms, sure. But they also matter when your milk comes in like a tsunami… or barely at all.
Because your tissue type influences how your body lactates, and most of us don’t learn that until it’s too late to do anything but wonder what went wrong.
If you had dense breasts, maybe you produced enough for triplets but spent your entire postpartum experience in pain.
If you had fattier breasts, maybe you felt like your body betrayed you, even though it was doing exactly what it was built to do.
We should know this stuff sooner.
We should be told what’s in our bodies before they’re swollen, infected, exhausted, or silently grieving.
So Do Dense Breasts Make More Milk?
Short answer? They can.
Dense breast tissue contains more milk-producing lobules so in theory, yes: more glandular tissue can equal higher capacity for milk production.
But production isn’t just about capacity. It’s about removal and drainage and hormonal sensitivity, all of which are also affected by dense tissue.
Dense breasts can:
Be more hormonally reactive (making letdown more painful or unpredictable)
Be harder to fully drain (increasing the risk of clogged ducts)
Stay “on” longer (leading to prolonged lactation after weaning)
Respond differently to prolactin or oxytocin
Be more prone to mastitis, engorgement, or uneven supply
So yes, some women with dense breasts experience overproduction, oversupply, and oversaturation but others still struggle because physiology is only one piece of the puzzle.
How your body responds, how your baby latches, how you’re supported postpartum… all of that matters, too.
And What About the Fatty Girls?
Let’s talk about the other side of the spectrum.
Women with fattier breasts are often the ones told to try harder. Nurse more. Drink tea. Cry it out. Feel guilty.
But if your breasts are made up of more adipose tissue and less glandular, of course your milk storage and production capacity will be different. That’s not failure. That’s physiology.
And the shame around “not making enough” is often a direct result of not being told what’s actually going on inside your body.
This isn’t about blaming your tissue type; it’s about naming it, understanding it, and making space for all kinds of experiences so you don’t feel like your story is a deviation from the norm.
(Especially when there’s no real “norm” to begin with.)
Why Don’t We See a Breast Specialist During Pregnancy?
We’re tracked constantly in pregnancy. Cervical dilation is measured. Uterine size is charted. Protein in urine, blood pressure spikes, fetal movement — all monitored, documented, discussed.
And yet… breasts?
The very organs responsible for feeding a newborn human? Those are expected to know what to do.
No one teaches you how they change, no one screens them, no one tells you what kind of tissue you have or how that might affect your breastfeeding experience.
You don’t get support unless something goes wrong, and even then, it’s often minimal.
It’s not just a gap in care. It’s a reflection of how women’s bodies are treated in medicine:
We are expected to show up, do the job, and stay quiet afterward.
No preparation.
No plan.
No postpartum support unless there’s a crisis.
And somehow, we’re supposed to feel grateful for being monitored at all.
This isn’t just an oversight; it’s a blueprint.
It mirrors the broader pattern of how women are treated within patriarchal systems: praised for our utility, ignored in our suffering, discarded when the work is done.
the sacred made disposable
There was a time, in early matriarchal societies, when women were revered for their creative power: birth was mysterious and divine and the ability to nourish life from one’s own body was considered holy.
But when patriarchy took hold, it didn’t just erase that reverence, it buried it.
It wrapped the sacred in shame, turned mystery into embarrassment, made power into visible and invisible labor, turned the act of feeding a baby into a flashpoint for judgment, modesty, and monetization.
The leaking breast went from divine to indecent. The postpartum body became invisible unless it “bounced back” (or is picked apart for not “bouncing back”). The milk that built civilizations turned into a symbol for unpaid labor, taken for granted, completely misunderstood.
And still, no one tells us what our breasts are made of. Not before the clogs. Not before the breakdown. Not before the biopsy.
final thoughts: the hypothesis lives
There’s so much we don’t know — and so much we’ve never been taught — about the connection between breast density and lactation.
But we don’t have to wait for permission to be curious.
Or for a research paper to validate what we’ve lived through.
If you had low supply, you deserved to know what might’ve contributed to that.
If you had too much milk and not enough support, you deserved care before you hit a crisis point.
If you’re still sorting through what your postpartum body meant, means, or holds, that’s not failure: that’s humanity.
This blog is a hypothesis, yes. But it’s also a reclaiming.
Because your girls aren’t just functional. They aren’t decoration. They aren’t shameful or sacred only when convenient.
They are part of you, and they’re worth knowing.
If this post helped you feel more informed, keep going. This Might Be Dense: And Other Stories About Your Girls is a full series: part practical guide, part personal reclamation, all grounded in research, rage, and reverence.
🧬 Understand breast tissue types
🍼 Explore milk, hormones & density (current post)
🔥 Learn how to manage pain & fibrocystic changes
📊 Decode your BI-RADS score and risk
🩻 Know your imaging options & how to advocate
💬 Say the quiet parts out loud
🌍 Understand environmental exposures & plastic’s impact
👐 Get the breast ritual PDF to care for your girls
YOU DESERVE TO KNOW YOUR BODY BEFORE ANYONE ELSE DEFINES IT FOR YOU.
