(Carried over from the article on our Home page)

Breastfeeding is not just another lifestyle choice, like choosing baby furniture or a car seat.  There are significant differences between breastfed babies and babies who are not breastfed.

Breastfeeding boosts babies immune systems; protects against some chronic diseases (including some cancers); saves money for families and societies; saves lives by preventing illness or decreasing symptoms; and may even have a protective affects against SIDS.

As researcher and pediatrician Allan S. Cunningham writes in the anthology Breastfeeding: Biocultural Perspectives: "We now know that although the differences between illness and mortality rates are narrower in industrial nations compared with poor countries, there are still real differences between breastfed and bottle-fed infants.  Every organ system is affected by the differences between infant formula and human milk.  It is time to review the facts."

Why Breastfeed? (cont.)

There are a vast number of reasons to breastfeed your baby.  That's why we strongly advocate giving your baby the greatest gift you can give...your breast milk.

Designed for Human Babies

Since it is designed for human babies, human milk provides all the nutrients a baby needs in exactly the right proportions.  Since it is made specifically for the human infant, mother's milk digests more completely than foreign substances such as infant formulas, which are made from cow's milk, soy products, or other mixtures.  Protein, one of the most important nutrients in milk, varies greatly from one species to another.  Foreign proteins can cause allergies, especially in young infants.  The protein in human milk forms a smaller curd in the baby's stomach and is easier to digest than the protein in formulas based on cow's milk.  Human infants don't need as much protein as a growing calf, which doubles its weight in two months, gaining as much as 65 pounds.

Brain Growth & DHA

Brain growth, rather than body growth, is essential for human infants.  Recent discoveries show the vital role that docosohexanoic acid (DHA) and arachidonic acid (A) play in the development of the eyes and the brain.  Such discoveries have led to recommendations to add DHA to infant formulas.  However, babies benefit more from DHA received from human milk than from formula supplemented with DHA.  Colostrum (the milk made in the early days of a baby's life) contains high concentrations of AA and DHA.  So newborn infants benefit at a time when large amounts of such fatty acids accumulate in the central nervous system, particularly in the retina.  

The presence of DHA and AA in human milk may also be one of the reasons that breastfed babies develop better language skills and have higher IQs as they grow.  A May 2002 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association confirmed and expanded on what many previous studies had shown.  Breastfed babies have higher IQs, with a 'dose response' that lasts into early adulthood.  This study was controlled for other factors that might have affected intelligence, such as parents' level of education, mothers' smoking, and infant birth weight.

Dose Response

Breastfeeding offers the greatest protection from illness when babies are receiving human milk alone; this protection declines in proportion to the amount of supplements, such as formula, cow's milk, or solid foods, they receive.  Babies also receive more benefits the longer they are breastfed.  Scientific studies call this effect a "dose response".

One study showed that once even small amounts of supplemental formula or other foods are given to a baby, the bacterial profile of the breastfed baby  begins to resemble that of the formula-fed infant, where beneficial bacteria are no longer dominant.

Some conditions that show a dose response to breastfeeding are: childhood leukemia and lymphoma, ear infections, respiratory infections, diarrhea, Haemophilus influenzae (HIB), meeting developmental milestones, obesity and overweight, and breast cancer among mothers who breastfeed their babies.

Cancer Fighter

"Human milk kills cancer cells" -- it may sound like an unlikely premise for a Hollywood thriller, but a team of researchers in Sweden isolated a pair of substances in human milk that killed all kinds of cancer cells in their experiments.  One of the substances appears to be alpha-lactalbumin, one of the most abundant proteins found in human milk.

In the laboratory, these substances killed cells from cancers of the lung, throat, kidney, colon, and bladder, as well as lymphoma cells, leukemia cells, and pneumococcus bacteria.  The researchers theorize that human milk may protect breastfed babies from cancer by destroying pre-cancerous cells in the baby's body before they have a chance to grow into a malignancy.  While that theory has not been proven, research has consistently shown that breastfeeding protects mothers and babies from some forms of cancer.  Other researchers have observed similar results under laboratory conditions:  human milk killed or neutralized chlamydia spores, HIV, and some types of bacteria.

Protection from cancer lasts well into childhood and even into adulthood.  Hodgkin's disease, leukemia, lymphoma, and even gastric cancer have all been shown to be reduced in individuals who were breastfed.  Human milk has a wide array of antimicrobial activity and appears to stimulate the infant's immune system.

Decrease in Breast Cancer for Mothers

Breastfeeding is one of many controllable factors that reduce the risk of breast cancer.  According to Dr. Alicia Dermer, "Breastfeeding from 6 to 24 months throughout a mother's reproductive lifetime may reduce the risk of breast cancer by 11 to 25 percent" (Michels 2001).  Breastfeeding also protects women against cancers of the ovaries and uterus.

Health Benefits for Babies

Although breastfeeding is a matter of life and death for babies in developing countries, researchers have found that breastfeeding provides significant health benefits for babies in industrialized communities as well.  No matter where babies live, or what their family's economical conditions, they are less likely to contract respiratory and gastrointestinal diseases, or even more serious diseases such as pneumonia, sepsis, gastroenteritis, and meningitis.  When breastfed babies do get sick, their symptoms are milder than those of formula-fed babies.  Because of the reduction in frequency and severity of illness, sick baby medical visits are also reduced.

Breastfeeding mothers notice that older babies who are receiving solid foods along with breastfeeding often refuse solids and revert to exclusive breastfeeding when they are ill.  Babies do this partly for emotional comfort, but also because human milk is gentler to their ailing stomachs.

The milk made in the early days after birth, or colostrum, has been shown to protect against inflammation in the baby's intestines, which protects against infections-- an effect that is especially important for premature babies, who are more vulnerable to infections.

Research has shown for decades that breastfed babies suffer less often from diarrhea and have less severe symptoms when they do.  When diarrhea becomes severe, babies can die, even in developed countries.  Breastfed babies are much less likely to die from diarrhea than formula-fed babies, and the protection extends into early childhood.

Breastfeeding also protects against respiratory infections.  Formula-fed infants have five times as many lower respiratory tract infections as breastfed babies, are twice as likely to have their first ear infection in the first six months, and have double the hospitalizations for respiratory infections.  The milk made by mothers of newborns who are ill contains higher levels of antibodies than milk from mothers whose babies are well.  In families where other factors that contribute to respiratory illness are present, such as parental smoking and the presence of young siblings, breastfeeding's protective effect is even more important.

Emotional Benefits

The benefits of breastfeeding go far beyond the physical.  The breastfed infant also benefits emotionally.  Nursing is a source of great comfort and security for babies.  The skin-to-skin contact stimulates the baby and enhances bonding.  Most breastfed babies cry less because they are held more.  Breastfeeding requires that a mother learn to read and respond to her baby's cues, and this helps babies organize their behavior and learn to trust themselves and others.  Many mothers will agree that for them, the emotional benefits of breastfeeding are the most important.

Costs

Breastfeeding saves money.  It costs much less to feed a breastfeeding mother with healthy food than it does to purchase special food for her baby.  Additional savings come from the greatly reduced illnesses and hospitalizations of breastfed babies.  It can be difficult to measure the precise savings, however, based on conclusions drawn from studies of women in governmental programs such as the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program, estimates of savings per family were between $200-$800 depending partly on the length of time the baby was breastfed.

Weight Loss and Exercise

Weight loss after pregnancy is a concern to mothers.  During pregnancy, a mother gains several extra pounds of body fat specifically to protect her milk supply during the first year.  Studies have shown that breastfeeding mothers had lost more weight without dieting by the time their babies were six months old than a comparable group of bottle-feeding mothers who had been eating less.  Another study found that women's usual tendency to store fat in their thighs was reduced when they were breastfeeding.

While regular exercise does slightly change the composition of breast milk, babies do not seem to be affected.  Not surprisingly, exercise among lactating women has been significantly associated with psychosocial well being and cardiovascular fitness.

Concern over rapid loss of body fat may increase the concentration of environmental contaminants in human milk should be alleviated.  While a breastfeeding mother should maintain a healthy diet while attempting to lose weight, a recent study indicates that weight loss during lactation did not increase contaminant exposure of infants.

Benefits for the World

The benefits of breastfeeding go beyond the individual mother and her child.  Breastfeeding is the most ecologically sound form of infant feeding.  Human milk is not produced and packaged in a factory, so it does not increase pollution of air, water, and land.  Human milk fed straight from the original containers doesn't require electricity or gas to heat it up or to clean the containers.  Breastfeeding does not create waste in the form of used bottles, nipples, and packaging.

Breastfeeding affects world economics as well as world ecology.  When more mothers breastfeed, it saves huge amounts of government money spent on subsidies for artificial feeding.  It has been estimated that 29 million dollars would be saved annually in the United States if women receiving supplemental formula with governmental assistance would breastfeed for just one month.  Women all over the world who breastfeed their babies enrich their local economies by reducing health care costs and conserving energy.