Obesity has become a frequent nutritional disorder in children. It is an important risk factor for cardiovascular disease in adulthood.
Breastfeeding’s beneficial effects on later cardiovascular risk factors including blood pressure and plasma lipid profile also assume great importance. There is a dose related response with increasing breastfeeding duration.
Recent research has in fact produced information concerning the prevention of obesity in children and adolescents. This knowledge could be translated to action for preventing obesity as a measure in communities struggling to find solutions.
What we need is to target infancy period while designing our interventions and breastfeeding could well be the first on the list of interventions. Avoidance of artificial feeding during infancy will stand critical in these efforts.
How Does Breastfeeding Play A Role In Prevention of Obesity?
There are several factors to be considered:
Breastmilk is the physiological standard for normal human infant growth and development.
Disturbed metabolism in infancy - It is now considered that exposure to excessive calories in infancy, can lead the human infant’s metabolism to respond by increasing the number of fat cells laid down in the infant’s body.
Breastmilk is a live fluid, impossible to replicate, full of activity, taste and with subtle differences in composition from feed to feed.
Programming of leptin physiology - A protein found in human milk, leptin, serves to regulate energy expenditure, and may act as a counter-regulatory hormone to insulin. It may also act as a circulating satiety factor.
Breastfeeding is an adjustable process - Baby’s feeding intakes vary according to individual needs, and the mother’s supply adjusts automatically to meet these needs, provided the baby has easy and at-need access to the breast. The breastfed baby self regulates during complementary feeding as well.
Scientific evidence
1. Liese AD et al. Inverse association of overweight and breastfeeding in 9 to 10-y-old children in Germany. INT J OBESITY 2001; 25(11): 1644-50. The researchers noted that, “a longer overall duration and duration of exclusive breastfeeding was associated significantly with decreasing prevalence of overweight”.
2. Gillman MW et al. Risk of overweight among adolescents who were breastfed as infants. JAMA 2001; 285: 2461-67. In the United States of America, a 1996-97 study of 15,341, nine to 14 years olds found ”that infants who were predominantly fed breastmilk in the first six months of life had a lower incidence of overweight 9 to 14 years later”-this lower incidence was approximately 22%.
3. Kries R von et al. Breastfeeding and obesity: cross sectional study. : cross sectional study. ADV EXP MED BIOL 2000; 478: 29-39. In Germany, the authors studied 9,206 Bavarian children at school entry in 1997. Children who had ever been breastfed had a reduction of 20% in their risk of being overweight; if they had been breastfed for six months, this figure was 35%; and there were even more pronounced effects regarding obesity, 25% and 43% respectively.
4. Armstrong J et al. Breastfeeding and lowering the risk of obesity. Lancet 2002; 359: 2003-2004. In this study researchers looked at more than 30,000 Scottish children who were either exclusively breastfed or exclusively fed formula. children who were breastfed had a 30% reduced incidence of obesity.
Related articles
REACH and breastfeeding: Breast is still the best
Breast feeding on the EU agenda
WHO European Ministerial Conference on Obesity, November 2006
