Breast-Feeding May Not Lead to Leaner Children

Breast-feeding is widely encouraged for its many positive health effects, but the claim that it reduces the risk for childhood obesity may be going too far. A randomized trial has found that even long-term exclusive breast feeding has no effect on obesity or stature in childhood.

Researchers studied more than 13,000 breast-feeding mother-infant pairs in 31 maternity hospitals in Belarus in 1996 and 1997. About half the mothers followed a breast-feeding promotion program developed by the World Health Organization, while the rest received usual care.

At three months, 43 percent of the women in the W.H.O. program were still exclusively breast-feeding, compared with 6 percent in the control group; by six months, the figures were 7.8 percent for those in the program and 0.6 percent for the controls.

The study, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, followed the children through age 11 and found no significant effect on either weight or height. Body mass index, percent body fat and the prevalence of obesity or excess weight were slightly higher in the children breast-fed longer, but the difference was statistically insignificant.

“There are lots of good reasons to breast-feed,” said the senior author, Dr. Emily Oken, an associate professor of population medicine at Harvard, “and just because we saw no evidence for obesity doesn’t mean women should stop breast-feeding.”

News source: well.blogs.nytimes.com