In gov­ern­men­tal and pop­u­lar lit­er­a­ture breast­feed­ing is praised as being the opti­mum solu­tion to infant feed­ing. The Wikipedia arti­cle, for instance, is exten­sive and well-cited sug­gest­ing the fol­low­ing ben­e­fits to infants: supe­rior nutri­tion, greater immune health, higher intelligence… the list goes on. For the mother, many long– and short-term health ben­e­fits are also cited.

In what has become quite a con­tentious arti­cle, Hanna Rosin for The Atlantic dis­cusses what she calls “the ulti­mate badge of respon­si­ble par­ent­ing”, and sug­gests that “the actual health ben­e­fits of breast­feed­ing are sur­pris­ingly thin”.

The best com­men­tary on the arti­cle I’ve seen comes from Alex Tabar­rok at Mar­ginal Rev­o­lu­tion who dis­cusses the econo­met­rics of breastfeeding—although the com­ments are equally as enlight­en­ing, cov­er­ing the prob­lems with run­ning sci­en­tific tri­als on breast­feed­ing (i.e. eth­i­cal issues with decree­ing how a mother should feed her child) and more besides.

For now it appears that the jury is still out, edg­ing towards breast­feed­ing due to small but sig­nif­i­cant benefits.

Given the mas­sive, lucra­tive mar­ket avail­able I fully expect that by the time I’m a par­ent the dif­fer­ence between for­mula and breast milk will be neg­li­gi­ble, if not edg­ing in favour of for­mula thanks to nutri­tional and sci­en­tific advances. Of course the psy­cho­log­i­cal ben­e­fits of breast­feed­ing (if only to the par­ents?) may never be able to be duplicated.

via Over­com­ing Bias

Update: The BBC reports that Nutri­cia (own­ers of the Cow & Gate and Milupa brands) has been told to cease air­ing mis­lead­ing adverts claim­ing that their follow-on milk could “sup­port the immune sys­tem”:

Com­pa­nies are not allowed to adver­tise for­mula milk for babies under six months old.

But some pro-breast feed­ing groups believe there should be a total ban on this kind of advertising.

The World Health Orga­ni­za­tion rec­om­mends that babies are given breast milk exclu­sively for the first six months and after that it should con­tinue along­side food until the age of two.

In fact, accord­ing to the WHO:

Breast­feed­ing is an unequalled way of pro­vid­ing ideal food for the healthy growth and devel­op­ment of infants; it is also an inte­gral part of the repro­duc­tive process with impor­tant impli­ca­tions for the health of mothers.