This week has been deemed World Breastfeeding Week, providing an opportunity to highlight the benefits of breastfeeding and to encourage everyone to support mothers who want to breastfeed. One of the most highly effective preventive measures a mother can take to protect the health of her infant and herself is to breastfeed. It protects babies from many infections and illnesses, such as diarrhea and pneumonia. Children who have been breastfed have lower rates of childhood obesity. Mothers who breastfeed have a decreased risk of breast and ovarian cancers.
The Affordable Care Act has made significant progress to support breastfeeding, which include historic new insurance guidelines that will ensure millions of women receive preventive health services without a co-pay or deductible. These new guidelines, developed by the independent Institute of Medicine, require insurance companies to cover certain women’s preventive services, including breastfeeding support, supplies, and counselling.
World Breastfeeding Week is celebrated every year from 1 to 7 August in more than 120 countries to encourage breastfeeding and improve the health of babies around the world. It commemorates the Innocenti Declaration made by WHO and UNICEF policy-makers in August 1990 to protect, promote and support breastfeeding.
The World Health Organization recommends exclusive breastfeeding until a baby is six months old and continued breastfeeding with the addition of nutritious complementary foods for up to two years or beyond.
Breast milk remains the one and only natural, complete and complex nutrition for human infants. It is nature’s formula for ensuring the health and quality of life for infants, as well as on through childhood to adult life. Just as importantly, breastfeeding promotes a very special bond between mother and child that only a mother can provide.
Some Americans have the mistaken idea that today’s infant formulas are nearly identical to human milk and that they are “almost as good as breast milk”, that is not true at all. Formula-fed babies are sicker, sick more often, and are more likely to die in infancy or childhood. Compared to exclusive and extended breastfed babies, formula-fed babies have a doubled overall infant death risk, and 4-fold risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS).
Peter Kinderman, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Liverpool, who was not involved in the study, said it was a good piece of research with important findings:
“Positive bonding between parent and child is known to be fantastically helpful for development. This is more evidence of the importance of breastfeeding and mother-baby attachment, not just for physical health but also for the psychological development of the child.”
Maria Quigley of the national prenatal epidemiology unit at Oxford University adds:
“Mothers who want to breastfeed should be given all the support they need. Many women struggle to breastfeed for as long as they might otherwise like, and many don’t receive the support that might make a difference.”
Promoting sound feeding practices is one of the main program areas that the Department of Nutrition for Health and Development focuses on. Activities include the production of sound, evidence-based technical information, development of guidelines and counseling courses, promotion and support of infant and young child feeding at policy, health service and community levels.
Written by Sy Kraft