Breastfeeding News, Research, and Controversy
Breastfeeding News, Research, and Controversy — by Catherine Morgan (cross-posted at BlogHer)
I came across an interesting article today, about a new study on breastfeeding, and how it relates to IQ. Even though I’ve been personally out of the breastfeeding business for some time (my son is 16 and my daughter is 13), this article still intrigued me, so I decided to use it as the topic of todays post. Surprisingly, this wasn’t the only study (or news) on breastfeeding that had been released recently.
So, instead of this post being only about how breastfeeding relates to IQ, it’s also going to be about how breastfeeding relates to heart disease in adults, how asthma may hinder the benefits of breastfeeding, and whether or not breastfeeding is the leading cause of sagging breasts in women. There has also been another controversy over a women’s right to breastfeed her child in public, so I’ll tell you more about that too.
Let’s start with the research that first caught my eye today…
In two studies of over 3,000 children in Britain and New Zealand; breast-fed infants were found to have a 7 point increase in their IQ, when the child also carried a particular version of the FADS2 gene.
“It is this genetic variant in FADS2, a gene involved in the control of fatty acid pathways, that may help the children make better use of the breast milk and promote the brain development that is associated with a higher IQ score,” said Julia Kim-Cohen, assistant professor of psychology at Yale and a member of the research team.
“Children who do not carry the ‘helpful’ genetic variant have normal average IQ scores,” Kim-Cohen said. “Being breastfed for them is not associated with an IQ advantage.” — read full article
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