Spring Babies and Feeding

Spring has finally arrived in the northeast! My neighbor's crocuses are shooting up their purple and white little heads. As Persephone returns from the underworld bringing fertility and life back to earth, I find myself contemplating the "most local food"(according to Michael Pollen) -- breast milk.

In my Nutrition in the Life Cycle course, taught by Jeanne Goldberg, we learned about the importance of breast milk. After reading a number of studies supporting exclusive breastfeeding for the first 6 months of life, I became a strong supporter of the practice. One interesting finding in relation to childhood obesity and breastfeeding is delayed adiposity rebound. (Adiposity rebound is when the child's growth reaches the nadir on a weight-for-height chart.) Breastfed babies are slower to gain weight which means they delay the time of their adiposity rebound. Children who go through adiposity rebound early (before 5.5 years) are more likely to be over weight or obese as they grow-up.

Gene Goldberg presented the information on breastfeeding in a very strait forward manner. We even read the February 19, 2009 New Yorker, Jill Lepore published "Baby Food: If the breast is best, why are women bottling their milk?" as a supplemental reading to understand the American history of breastfeeding and the current trend to express or pump breast milk.

This month I flipped through The Atlantic and saw "The Case Against Breast-Feeding" by Hanna Rosin. Rosin brings the nitty-gritty reality of breastfeeding into perspective. She finds research indicating that the health benefits of breastfeeding are not substantiated, highlights the physical pain and nuisance breastfeeding creates for women (especially working ones) and publicly shames the affluent suburban mothers who turn bottle feeders into pariah's of the playground.

Really, the truth lies somewhere in between. Sure there are studies that might not be well designed that find breastfeeding has an insignificant impact on the baby's overall health, but honestly, you can control for many factors such as race, socioeconomic status, income, etc and still find that breastfeeding does some good. Even the companies who make the formula know this and base their recipes on the composition of breast milk. Where Rosin does get it right, is that there aren't enough policies in place to make breastfeeding easy for working women. From a lack of adequate maternity leave to no place for working mom's to pump, the U.S. is a long way from truly promoting breastfeeding to women.

Oh, and if the well educated, middle-class Hannah Rosin is annoyed by all the promotional breastfeeding material in her pediatrician's office, she needs to toughen-up. According to Health People 2010, in 1998 only 19% of Black/African-American women breastfed for the first 6 months. For mothers with high school or some college education, in 1998 21% breastfed for the first 6 months. In order to reach the goal of 50% of mothers breastfeeding for the first 6 months by 2010, there are going to have to be repeated messages out there in the public sphere. Rather than complain about over-messaging, you could be constructive and advocate for on-site day care, longer maternity leave, and clean, quiet feeding rooms for women to either breastfeed or bottle feed their babies.

Take Action: http://www.now.org/lists/now-action-list/msg00380.html