Mother’s milk a gift that keeps on giving

The University of Texas Medical Branch has released a research paper that, surprise, there really is a ton of benefits to breast feeding over formula feeding! I think the main idea is that people are still uneducated about what is best when having a baby. Many still believe that formula=breast. People do not realize that they have no control of what goes into formula, except for the purity of water they use. The paper is not freely available online, unfortunately, but the University of Texas Medical Branch has released a news article about it. Here is an excerpt:

"UTMB professor of pediatrics David K. Rassin, a co-author of the paper (with Baylor College of Medicine assistant professor of pediatrics Judy M. Hopkinson), said, “Although many of us assume that everyone knows breastfeeding is best for infants and the American Academy of Pediatrics has come out with really strong recommendations in favor of it, the prevalence of breastfeeding in the United States is only about 65 percent right now.” Rassin elaborated: “Historically, we had a rapid increase from about 25 percent in the Sixties up to the area of 60 percent in the late Eighties, and it’s only very gradually crept up since then.”

“Within the United States, where we’ve got clean water and don’t have a lot of the diseases associated with formula feeding in Third World countries, I think we still have this concept that there really isn’t any difference between breastfeeding and formula feeding,” Rassin said. “One of the points we tried to make in this article is that even in this country there are definitely some health risks associated with formula feeding - they just tend to involve diseases that take a long time to emerge but may reflect lack of breastfeeding.”