From naturalsociety.com
Many women want to breastfeed their babies, but few know just how much it can benefit their child’s health. In addition to halving obesity risk and saving your child’s life from numerous other issues, breastfeeding has been shown to dramatically improve a child’s brain power, especially when done for multiple months.
Many mothers already know that breastfeeding is a wonderful bonding experience that helps to create the ‘cuddle’ hormone, oxytocin, between themselves and their babies. This fact alone would seem to be enough reason to breast feed if at all possible, but it turns out that breast feeding also reduces the incident of infant disease by boosting their immune systems – and helps their minds develop more fully. What’s more, the fat helps to support eye development and nervous system development as well.
A study carried out by researchers from Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health in the US found that healthy fats in mother’s breast milk, primarily docosahexaenoic fatty acid (DHA), is what helped infant’s brains to develop more fully. This polyunsaturated fat is highly concentrated in the neuronal membranes in the brain, especially when babies are just coming into the world.
A babies brain grows most between the ages of 1 and 3, so giving the neurons this important nutrient from the start sets up a good foundation for future growth and development. The human body has some ability to synthesize this important fatty acid on its own, but infants require it in larger amounts in order to boost brain capacity.
Another related study found that for each month a woman reports breastfeeding, her child does better on tests of language and intelligence. Overall, breastfeeding was tied to an improvement of 0.21 point on language tests after mother’s intelligence and other factors like family income were taken into account.
Follow us: @naturalsociety on Twitter | NaturalSociety on Facebook
0 comments:
Post a Comment