Body & beauty

Is breast best?

Our green guru Jo Wood explores this topical issue

Family tradition

When my daughter Leah was seven months pregnant with her second baby, she was in no doubt as to whether she’d be breastfeeding a second time around. We, as a family, are well aware of its benefits: I breastfed my three children, and quite apart from enjoying the nurturing bond I was able to form with them during this time, I felt reassured I was providing them with the healthiest, most natural, immunity-boosting nourishment possible. What worries me is that with all the negativity the media has thrusted upon the issue, many pregnant women have started to doubt whether breastfeeding the best option after all

A growing number of people are beginning to see breastfeeding as a sacrifice and an obligation, impacting negatively on women’s wellbeing, and by society at times as something to be tolerated (and certainly not in public, when a baby is no longer a newborn). Attitudes like this can prove detrimental to other efforts to promote breastfeeding. Anything which influences mothers to dispense with the process deprives infants of the many immunity supports contained in their natural, tailormade milk supply, full of essential longchain polyunsaturated fatty acids, growth factors and hormones, all of which are proven scientifically to help reduce incidences of infant respiratory and digestive infections, childhood obesity, and type 2 diabetes. According to Save the Children, if within the first hour of their life babies were breastfed, an estimated 830,000 deaths globally could be avoided.

Extensive research has proven that breastfeeding your baby will in fact have a positive influence on its health, intelligence and behaviour, regardless of external factors, such as social class, education, attitudes, home situation and parental IQ.

Ridiculous ideas

According to the laws of nature and human survival, women simply wouldn’t lactate if breastfeeding was not the healthiest form of nourishment for their offspring, so to suggest that artificially developed, cow’s milk formula is equal, or superior, is absolutely ridiculous! Artificially produced infant formula was only introduced at the end of the nineteenth-century as a means to feed motherless babies who would have otherwise died. And although manufacturers now supplement this replacement feed with certain vitamins and minerals in an attempt to replicate the nutritional content of breast milk, little is known as to whether their labours are effective.

In the past, research has indeed highlighted similarities of bovine and human colostrum, which could possibly have led to the misguided view that anything other than breastfeeding could be equally as beneficial to babies, but cow’s milk itself can be very difficult for humans to digest.This is why it amazes me that even after weaning and into adulthood, many of us drink it when there are so many other milks to enjoy, such as rice, almond, oat and goat’s, but that’s a subject for a whole other article

Where do you stand on the breastfeeding debate? Comment below with your views.

Article by

Jo Wood

Healthy and Organic Living Guru

is a healthy and organic living guru and creator of her own natural beauty range

Discover more

Article by

Jo Wood

Healthy and Organic Living Guru

is a healthy and organic living guru and creator of her own natural beauty range

Discover more