Breastfeeding Yes Or No

Breastfeeding - yes or no?

- If the mother's breast is the theater of war

Hardly a topic has so much explosive as the Breastfeeding Discus-sion: Breastfeeding - yes or no? How long? What position? Or maybe the vial? No matter how we twist and turn, it always comes down to one thing - and that is the diet of the babies. While some swear on breastfeeding, others prefer the vial.

Until the 19th century breastfeeding was for granted, either by the mother or by a fostress. With industrialization the bottled milk came and especially in the 1970s, breastfeeding was not contempo-rary.

Today, at least breastfed children are in the clear majority. Initially around 90 per cent of babies are breastfed in Germany, after two months, there are only 70

Some of the children were breastfed during the first three months, another got the bottle, and a third group was breastfed and received complementary foods at an early stage.

The result: The growth of the white brain substance is 20 to 30 per-cent bigger than in the non-breast-fed infants in the breast-fed in-fants. The group of mixed-fed children also performed better than the non-breastfed children, but was well behind the breast-fed in-fants.

However, it is denounced that most of these studies are not repre-sentative because the parent-child pairs, which differ in terms of breastfeeding behavior, are not comparable to other aspects. They led only because of the assortment of participants astray, criticized health researcher Cynthia Colen from Ohio State University in Co-lumbus. "They let factors such as race, age, family income and em-ployment of mother ignored - all things that we know that they influence the decision of breastfeeding and children's health.

And what about the health aspect of child and

The study is based on data from 28 studies and analyzes on health and economic consequences of breastfeeding. The majority of the studies has been specially created for the meta-analysis.

According to the meta-analysis the risk of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) could be improved by more than one-third decrease in rich countries by breastfeeding. That breastfeeding is a factor for the prevention of SIDS, it is known for some time. However, critics complain that it is difficult to calculate the impact of individual risk factors for sudden infant death syndrome.

In poorer countries, about half the diarrheal epidemics and a third of the respiratory diseases could be prevented by prolonged breastfeeding, says the "Lancet". There are also studies which suggested that breast milk decrease the risk of diabetes and obesity to the child. Mothers who have breastfed their babies would get even rarer breast and ovarian cancer. Breastfeeding relieves so far the health