Gimme the real thing

Breast-fed babies have lower blood pressure later in life. Mother's love can't be bottled

By Marcello Palmieri

Tossing the baby bottle aside in favour of breast-feeding can help a newborn in even more ways than we thought. New research published in the March 16 issue of Circulation shows that breast-feeding seems to lower blood pressure in childhood. Breast milk was already known to decrease the risk of type I and II diabetes and obesity, and was also thought to decrease mortality from coronary heart disease, but it wasn't clear why. The researchers set out to investigate whether it was a blood pressure link.

They found that seven-year-old children who'd been breast-fed as babies had on average 1mm Hg lower blood pressure than other seven-year-olds who'd been bottle-fed as infants. Although it's a small reduction, it could have a big impact on heart disease mortality down the line.

"The wider promotion of breast-feeding is a potential component of the public health strategy to reduce population levels of blood pressure," writes lead researcher Dr Richard M Martin of the University of Bristol's Department of Social Medicine in the UK.

Dr Martin and colleagues started their research by revisiting the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, better known as the Children of the 90s Project. They sifted through the records to see which infants were fed on breast milk and which were given only milk formula. The researchers then measured the blood pressure of 4,763 of the now seven-years-olds. Whether the kids were breast-fed all or some of the time didn't seem to impact on the findings, but duration of breast-feeding plays a part � the researchers found that systolic pressure was reduced by 0.2mm Hg for every three months the child was breast-fed.

The results are hardly surprising for Dr Louis Beaumier, a neonatologist at the Montreal Children's Hospital. The study backs-up a practice he and other doctors have long believed is in the best interest of both mom and baby. "There's a great deal of evidence that shows breast-feeding leads to a better outcome in life," he says. "Breast milk has hormones and nutrients that no milk formulation has."

But with all the research done on breast-feeding, Dr Jack Newman, a Toronto-based pediatrician who founded the first hospital-based breast-feeding clinic in Canada in 1984, finds "it's something of a miracle that any woman in Canada manages to breast-feed successfully, so unsupportive and unknowledgeable are the people who are supposed to be helping her."

He says most physicians don't know anything about breast-feeding. When he was a med student, he received about an hour of training and adds that although today's physicians get a little more, it's still mostly theoretical, with no practical information on helping women if they should have problems with breast-feeding.

With this is mind, he published a help guide in 2000 for professionals and mothers called Dr Jack Newman's Guide to Breastfeeding that offers advice on all aspects of breast-feeding, from getting off to a good start to breast-feeding preemies.

To get a copy of Dr Newman's help guide, visit www.parentbooks.ca/breastfeeding.html.