Breast-Feeding Tied to Reduced Child Obesity

Posted by Neill Abayon

Breast-feeding may reduce children's risk of being overweight or obese, a large new study from Japan found.

Researchers looked at more than 43,000 children, aged 7 and 8, with records of how they were fed during infancy.

The study was published online Aug. 12 in the journal JAMA Pediatrics.

The investigators first took into account other factors that could influence the children's weight, such as gender and the amount of time they spent in front of the television or computer, as well as their mothers' education levels, smoking and employment status, according to a journal news release.

Children who were breast-fed at 6 months to 7 months of age were less likely to be overweight than those who were formula-fed, the researchers concluded.

"After adjusting for potential confounders, we demonstrated that breast-feeding is associated with decreased risk of overweight and obesity among school children in Japan, and the protective association is stronger for obesity than overweight," wrote Michiyo Yamakawa, of the Okayama University Graduate School of Medicine, Dentistry, and Pharmaceutical Sciences, and colleagues.

Although the study found an association between being exclusively breast-fed in infancy and a lower risk of obesity or overweight in young children, it did not prove a cause-and-effect relationship

Source: Healthfinder

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Dioxins in food chain linked to breastfeeding ills

Posted by Neill Abayon

Exposure to dioxins during pregnancy harms the cells in rapidly-changing breast tissue, which may explain why some women have trouble breastfeeding or don't produce enough milk, according to a University of Rochester Medical Center study.

Researchers believe their findings, although only demonstrated in mice at this point, begin to address an area of health that impacts millions of women but has received little attention in the laboratory, said corresponding author B. Paige Lawrence, Ph.D., associate professor of Environment Medicine and of Microbiology and Immunology at URMC.

"Estimates are that three to six million mothers worldwide are either unable to initiate breastfeeding or are unable to produce enough milk to nourish their infants," Lawrence said. "But the cause of this problem is unclear, though it has been suggested that environmental contaminants might play a role. We showed definitively that a known and abundant pollutant has an adverse effect on the way mammary glands develop during pregnancy."

Dioxins are generated mostly by the incineration of municipal and medical waste, especially certain plastics. Most people are exposed through diet. Dioxins gets into the food supply when air emissions settle on farm fields and where livestock graze. Fish also ingest dioxins and related pollutants from contaminated waters. When humans take in dioxin – most often through meat, dairy products, fish and shellfish – the toxin settles in fatty tissues; natural elimination takes place very slowly. The typical human exposure is a daily low dose, which has been linked to possible impairment of the immune system and developing organs.

Read the full article here.

Breastfeeding may boost post-baby weight loss

Posted by Neill Abayon

By Joene Hendry

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - New moms may be better able to return to their pre-pregnancy weight by exclusively breastfeeding their infants, according to new research.

"The practice of exclusive breastfeeding helps mothers lose the weight accumulated during pregnancy and do that faster compared to those who don't practice exclusive breastfeeding," Dr. Alex Kojo Anderson, of the University of Georgia in Athens, told Reuters Health.

Anderson and colleagues compared pre-pregnancy and at-delivery weight, with weight at 12 weeks after delivery, among 24 mothers, aged 19 to 42 years. Seventeen of these new moms exclusively breastfed their infants, while 9 mothers mixed-fed their infants using formula or a combination of formula and breastmilk.

According to the findings, published online in the International Breastfeeding Journal, during the first 4 weeks after delivery, mothers in the mixed feeding group lost more of their at-delivery weight than did mothers who exclusively breastfed. However, from 8 to 12 weeks this trend reversed.

When Anderson's team compared the women's post-pregnancy weight loss according to their pre-pregnancy weight, mothers who exclusively breastfed lost more weight at 2-, 4-, 8-, and 12-weeks after delivery than did mothers in the mixed feeding group.

This weight loss trend was evident in spite of the greater caloric intake and lower activity level among breastfeeding mothers, compared with mixed feeding mothers, the investigators found.

Read the full article here.