The funny thing about breastfeeding is that advice varies between countries, despite WHO advice. Which is very short on data, IMO. China, France say bottle up, UK has a strange and emotional culture around bonding with your baby, as if men and adopted parents are unable to do so without mammary glands.
I have very little time for the breastfeeding brigade, particularly those who think it induces some kind of superhuman immunity in their kids. It's plain wrong in my experience and only serves to perpetuate the exclusion of men and those who didn't give birth to their children.
I think the data's pretty unequivocal about it affecting the IQ of the baby.
This study's *1 got the result down to 7 points increase for 90% of babies when breastfed, whereas the figure I hear thrown around most often is 4 points. That's definitely not insignificant! I don't know about the strength of the data around immune systems.
If one study is enough to convince you, without being skeptical of its methods, fair enough, but consider this:
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a) despite controlling for socio-economic status, non-breastfeeding in the 1970s (when this study first got underway), in a period of much stricter gender-roles, could be indicative of mothers who were slightly less concerned with IQ scores than those who breastfed. Mothers' IQ does not control for general educational support and encouragement throughout life. Nor does the IQ measurement taken at 5 years old.
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b) the milk formula used for comparison with breastmilk was that of the early 1970s. The study does not mention if the formula has improved over the intervening ~40 years. One could reasonably hypothesize that it had. In fact, the study mentions:
> Infants not breastfed received formula feeding (before LC-PUFA supplementation became widely available in the U.K.)
Look it up. The ingredient that caused the effect mentioned is now included in all formula products.
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c) if you believe that children's IQ is set from the age of 5, when this study measured it, and cannot be increased through tuition or other external factors (lowered or raised), then this must all seem very unequivocal to you. May I remind you that many countries (Scandinavia, Germany) which tend to produce extremely well-educated adults don't even start school until 7+.
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The unquestioning approach of 'there's a study so it must be right'/'this confirms my bias so it must be right' strikes me as going against everything science stands for, and in an industry that so heavily relies on old wives-tales and 'common knowledge', there's every reason to perpetuate the status quo. It's not only intellectually dishonest, it's morally dishonest. All studies should be made to highlight their weaknesses on the front page, and not leave it up to well respected charities (UNICEF) to unthinkingly promote half-truths.
It's not even the strength of the data that bothers me. It's the fear-mongering (which is very real in the UK, worse in other places, I hear) and guilt laid on to mothers based on these spurious studies which none-to-few of the health advisors have ever read in detail. If all of the data was laid out honestly and people were not pressured into making a choice either way, I'd be fine with that. But the way that women (and men, but mostly women, still) are allowed to essentially bully other women, many of whom have very little choice in the matter, into an activity that often depresses and exhausts them for months on end, when a shared feed from a bottle would have no material effect on the outcomes at adulthood, that makes me frustrated. Don't get me started on when the NHS literature in the UK mentioned increased cancer-rates for non-breastfed children without citing the study, parameters, and knowing full-well that few people understand that correlation != causation should be a consideration in decision-making.
So, in full consideration of the study, if you could raise a nation's IQ by x points by feeding them breastmilk, why aren't governments a) funding studies into which active ingredient causes the effect, whether it be synthesized, how long the optimal exposure period is etc. and b) ensuring every child gets that headstart? Oh, they did. And it's already in formula. And you struggle to produce it naturally if your diet is bad. So you struggle to breastfeed. See how flawed the study and its interpretation can be?
One study isn't what convinces me, it's the existing body of evidence that does so. Organisations like WHO don't recommend a minimum of 6 months of exclusive breastfeeding because of a single study, and I don't claim to be able to interpret any of the studies better than them. Your complaints about the 'breastfeeding brigade' don't seem to square up with existing medical advice.
The NZ study is an interesting one because of its huge scope and the fact that NZ at the time (for some reason) didn't have a big link between socio-economic status and breastfeeding, like in Europe. So I do believe it was instrumental in changing medical advice around the world when it was published.
So you think it is plain stupid to pause your career so that you can breastfeed your kids? Obviously kids grow up without breastfeeding, although that alone doesn't tell us much - kids tend to grow up no matter what you do, and in some cases we probably simply don't know how to measure the impact of their experiences as toddlers.
Anyway - why can't the preference to breastfeed at least be accepted? Clearly some parents make that choice, and it shows in the numbers. As a result of a choice, not because of discrimination.
I have very little time for the breastfeeding brigade, particularly those who think it induces some kind of superhuman immunity in their kids. It's plain wrong in my experience and only serves to perpetuate the exclusion of men and those who didn't give birth to their children.