ATLANTA -- Although breast-feeding has many benefits, it won't prevent a
child from becoming fat as an adult, says a new study that challenges dogma from
U.S. health officials.
The research is the largest study to date on breast-feeding and its effect on
adult obesity.
"I'm the first to say breast-feeding is good. But I don't think it's the
solution to reducing childhood or adult obesity," said the study's lead author,
Karin Michels of Harvard Medical School.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention promotes breast-feeding as a
way to reduce children's excess weight, and the guidelines for federal
chronic-disease prevention grants to states call for breast-feeding promotion.
Some health officials say that 15 percent to 20 percent of obesity could be
prevented through breast-feeding.
Larry Grummer-Strawn, chief of the CDC's maternal- and child-nutrition branch,
said he couldn't comment on the new research because he hadn't fully reviewed
it. But many previous studies have linked breast-feeding and lower rates of
childhood obesity, he noted.
Perhaps the obesity-preventing benefits of breast-feeding wane by adulthood,
Grummer-Strawn said.
Good or bad eating and exercise habits, developed later in life, might sustain
or erase initial weight-related benefits from breast-feeding, he and other
experts said. But that doesn't take away the other benefits of breast-feeding,
such as building a child's immunity to disease.
The Harvard study, published online this week in the International Journal of
Obesity, involved nearly 14,500 women who were breast-fed as infants and more
than 21,000 who were not.
Source : The Associated Press
