She’s planning to breastfeed them all.

Health: Breastfed babies more receptive to tastes, say food research scientists

· Change in flavours helps children enjoy varied diet
· Different formulas may benefit bottle-fed infants

• Ian Sample, science correspondent
• The Guardian, Thursday 24 July 2008
• Article history

Scientists have discovered another reason why breast is best. Already associated with increased intelligence, greater social mobility and protection against ill health, breastfeeding may also help babies develop a more sophisticated palate.

Researchers at the University of Copenhagen conducted tests on breast milk to see how the flavour changed with the mother’s diet. They found that different foods caused subtle shifts in the flavour of breast milk, which appear to prime babies for the wide range of foods they are likely to encounter once they are weaned.

Helene Hausner, at the Centre for Advanced Food Studies at the University of Copenhagen, decided to investigate the influence of diet on breast milk after reading a study that showed how babies enjoyed a meal of carrot-flavoured cereal more if their mothers drank carrot juice while breastfeeding.

Hausner recruited 18 breastfeeding women and gave each of them edible capsules containing distinctive flavours, including banana, liquorice, caraway seed and menthol. To see if the flavours came through in the mothers’ breast milk, she tested samples provided by the women before and up to eight hours after taking the capsules.

Her tests showed only around 1% of the flavour compounds were detectable in the breast milk, although some persisted for longer than others. Banana flavour peaked within the first hour, while menthol persisted for eight hours.

In a second series of experiments, Hausner checked whether breastfed babies were more likely to eat certain meals than babies fed on formula from a bottle. She found breastfed babies were happier eating meals laced with caraway flavouring than babies fed on formula.

“Diet does change the flavouring of the milk, but it’s not like if the mother eats apple pie, the infant thinks, ‘Mmm, apple pie’, and gets to like it,” Hausner said. “It seems that breastfed infants get used to small flavour changes and so they become more accepting of a variety of flavours compared to formula-fed infants.”

“It seems that breastfeeding itself does prime the infants to be more accepting of new flavours when they start to eat solid food,” she added.

Hausner, whose research is reported in New Scientist, also examined the flavours of different formula milks and found that they varied between manufacturers.

“If women are feeding their babies formula, it might be best for them to vary the type of formula to get their babies used to changes in flavours,” she said.

Gill Rapley, a nurse with more than 20 years’ experience of postnatal care, said the research could help new mothers who find their infants are sometimes reluctant to eat. “Mothers often talk about whether something in their milk may have upset their baby, but within eight hours, most flavours will be gone,” she told the magazine.

Last year, researchers at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess medical centre in the US reported that people who were breastfed as babies went on to have a lower risk of heart disease, while a team at King’s College London found that breastfeeding raised the IQ of children by an average of seven points, if they had a particular version of a gene.

The studies followed other research which found breastfed babies had a better chance of climbing the social ladder than those raised on formula.

I shall write more here on that after I’ve had a chance to digest fully all the different issues with it (more than you’d think – cultural significance of “fussing” and the way we deal with it, etc – fascinating stuff!), but in the meantime, to whet your appetite(!), here’s a link to some newborn baby feeding pattern charts on the Breastfeeding Network.  Interesting, hey?

And Happy New Year to everyone who reads, comments and thinks about stuff they’ve seen on here.  I’ve had tens of thousands of visitors here in this past year and I hope that what I write is useful to some of you.  Here’s to a happy and healthy 2009!

Temple researchers look for behavioral link between breastfeeding and lower risk of obesity

Breastfeeding has a number of positive health benefits for baby: it can prevent ear infections and allergies, and lowers the risk of developing respiratory problems. It can also help prevent against obesity later in life, but the reason for this still isn’t known.

In an effort to find this link, Katherine F. Isselmann, M.P.H., a doctoral candidate in Temple’s department of public health, has been comparing the feeding habits of mothers who breastfed their babies and mothers who bottle fed their babies, and has also examined the eating habits of their pre-school aged children.

In preliminary research presented at this year’s American Public Health Association annual meeting on Oct. 28, Isselmann and faculty members in the department of public health at the College of Health Professions surveyed more than 120 mothers on whether they had breastfed or bottle-fed their babies, using either pumped breast milk or formula.

They found breastfed children could more easily determine when they were full. Children who were bottle-fed with pumped breast milk were less likely to respond to the feeling of being full by the time they were preschool-aged. Also, children who had a lower response to fullness had a higher body mass index (BMI).

According to Isselmann, these results suggest a behavioral link between breastfeeding and obesity prevention, in that children who are breastfed grow to have more positive eating behaviors, which could help prevent obesity later in life.

“Mothers who bottle feed often focus on a set amount of ounces per day or time schedule for feeding,” said Isselmann. “This could lead mothers to rely more on the bottle for feedback than on the infant’s cues of fullness and hunger.”

She says with breast-feeding, the ability to measure in ounces how much a baby has eaten isn’t there, so mothers can become more in tune with when their babies are done eating and babies are able to develop their own internal cues to signal when they feel full.

While some women may choose not to breastfeed, Isselmann says it’s important to encourage mothers who bottle-feed to adopt more infant-focused feeding habits exhibited by mothers who breastfeed.

“The theory of ‘x ounces per day’ isn’t set in stone for growing babies. Some days they may need more food, other days they may need less,” said Isselmann.

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Other authors on this study are Bradley Collins, Ph.D., Deborah Nelson, Ph.D, and Brian Daly, Ph.D., of the department of public health at Temple University.

First of all, I strongly believe that, all other things being equal, it’s best for babies and for their mothers to have and give breastmilk.

But I also strongly believe that there’s not enough information out there for women to make an informed choice without doing their own research. Healthcare professionals are busy, often have limited knowledge themselves and without knowing where to look, or what to expect, it’s hard to know what you should be researching.

I believe that the UK society isn’t geared up for breastfeeding, certainly not past the first few weeks, and I think that it’s criminal that 90% of women who stop breastfeeding in the first six weeks of their baby’s life do so against their wishes. The fact that only 1 in 4 babies is having any breastmilk at all at six months and more than 90% of babies have formula at one stage or another also demonstrates how ingrained giving formula is.

Formula manufacturers spend almost £20 per newborn baby marketing their product. The Government spends about 80p per baby marketing breastfeeding. So I’m not sure that anyone can complain that breastfeeding is “pushed” on them. And this brings me to what often irritates me about this whole debate – yes, I breastfeed, yes, I support other women to breastfeed where I can, but I don’t do it for any reason other than that I feel that women often get a raw deal with breastfeeding support in this country and if I can help stop that, in some small way, then I will feel quite happy about that, because breastfeeding, when it’s going well, is a really nice thing to do.

But the implication is so often that for some reason I and other supporters of breastfeeding are trying to make women who feed formula feel bad, or wrong in some way.

I have nothing against formula or women who feed their babies with formula. I do wish that the breastfeeding campaign had the spending power of the formula companies, definitely.

I object to formula being advertised for many reasons, not least because the adverts don’t actually tell you anything useful and I don’t think that’s helpful to a woman trying to choose the best nutrition for her baby.

What I would like to see is a total ban on formula advertising (including in professional journals – in fact, especially in professional journals), follow-on and growing up milk banned (they are unnecessary products) and, in my ideal world, all midwives, health visitors, paediatricians, GPs and any other healthcare professional who has contact with babies to have full training on all things breastfeeding.

I would also like to see more information for mothers about the normal course of breastfeeding and give them the confidence to diagnose their own breastfeeding “hiccups” without telling them they ought to top up with formula at the slightest sign of a dodgy weigh-in one week, or stop breastfeeding if they need to take antibiotics of antidepressants, as well as the knowledge of when a problem needs extra help from a professional (such as with a severe case of mastitis or thrush).

Also, if workplaces provided better facilities for women to express and store their expressed milk and there was more information about how to manage working and breastfeeding, more women would have the confidence to start breastfeeding – so often I hear women say there’s not much point doing it, since they’ll have to give formula when they go back to work – I do realise it’s not always possible to keep breastfeeding once you return to work, given the nature of some employment, but more women than currently do would be capable of it, given the right support and knowledge.

What I really object to is this spurious argument that somehow by allowing formula advertising to continue, you’re helping women have a choice, when, in fact, all you’re doing is making very sure the formula manufacturers can use their rather large budget and their very sneaky tactics to undermine women at their most vulnerable time.

But mostly, what I really want, is for women to be able to make decisions they’re comfortable with, based on up-to-date information. I do get very sad reading wistful “I wish I’d known then what I know now” accounts. I don’t want women to regret anything about the early days with their babies – and that 90% figure bothers me greatly, because that’s a lot of regret.

And some extra searching has brought me to the history of the feeding bottle.

And a link from Wikipedia about the history of breastfeeding.

Childrens Centre Resource Pack

“Will the age for weaning be changing from six months soon?”

Please can you post the reply here, giving as much detail as you can (or email me at info@howbreastfeedingworks.com)?  I know some of you have already been told that this is going to happen (some citing reasons of allergy) and I would be very grateful if you could post your experience here too.

If you happen to know that they advise weaning before six months anyway, also post!

Why?  The Department of Health has confirmed to me that they are not planning on changing the weaning age – see this email I received today:

“Thank you for your further email to the Department of Health about weaning.

I have been advised by nutrition policy officials that the Department is not looking at changing the current guidance on weaning and has no intention of doing so.

Policy officials are interested to know where this conflicting information is issuing from.  If you could provide more specific information on the sources it would be appreciated.”

Thank you very much indeed.