No, really – I mean ‘good for you’ .. if you’re a woman, that is.
Now, the world’s women have known that breastfeeding is good for their babies for millennia – since the first woman had the first baby, in fact.  We’ve known this because babies have a regrettable tendency to die if you don’t feed them, and let’s face it, until very recently breast milk wasn’t a choice, it was all there was. Human babies don’t tend to do well on, say, dog’s milk. Or cow’s milk, sheep’s milk, goat’s milk, or even mare’s milk, come to that. Once they’re past a certain age they can manage on it, of course, but newborns? Not so much. They might have done pretty nicely on ape’s milk, but good luck with milking that chimp.
However, when the very first baby milk formula was invented, things changed. Suddenly there was a choice, and provided your baby wasn’t allergic to it, baby formula based on cow’s milk appeared to be a very good alternative. Many women chose not to breast feed at all, but fed their child solely on ‘baby milk’ – and of course, for some, powdered baby milk was a lifesaver. Maybe Mum didn’t produce enough milk. Maybe she was on toxic drugs. Maybe she had inverted nipples, or for one of a hundred other reasons, chose to feed her baby with breast milk replacement formula.
The companies that produced baby milk put out some very convincing propaganda, too, to persuade ‘on the fence’ mothers to climb down on their side, and – reprehensibly – they also introduced rural parents in third world countries to the magic tins, which caused a lot of illness and death, because of course, people living in those areas often don’t have access to clean water, let alone sterilising equipment.
But anyway. I digress.
Where was I?
Oh yeah. Breastfeeding – it turns out – is good for the mothers who do it. This isn’t one of those studies where you sigh and say ‘but didn’t they do this study already, like about sixteen times?’ No, this is a new and interesting study. This study, started in 1985, strongly suggests that women who breastfeed are themselves protected against heart disease decades later.
“Breast-feeding, even for just a couple of months, can significantly lower a woman’s risk of metabolic syndrome — a dangerous cluster of heart disease risk factors — years later, reports a new study appearing online Dec. 3 in the journal Diabetes.
In women who didn’t have pregnancy-related (gestational) diabetes, breast-feeding between one and five months lowered a woman’s risk of developing metabolic syndrome by 39 percent, while breast-feeding for the same duration lowered the risk of the syndrome by 44 percent in women with gestational diabetes.”
They think that the important factor is glucose management, but they didn’t anticipate this when they started the study, so they didn’t measure insulin production.  Pity. But there you go. We live and learn – even scientists.
Fascinating, huh?
Photo by Morguefile.
