Better Living Through Psychology

Dr. Jonathan Gitlin, Roberson professor of pediatrics and genetics at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, says parents should turn their focus away from cultivating particular characteristics in their children.
“I advocate breastfeeding because it’s wonderful and a great bonding situation for a mother and her child, but there is no scientific data that claims a baby will be smarter if he is breastfed,” he says.

Well Dr Gitlin how about the study by Melanie Smith and colleagues that found a 10.7 point advantage in overall intellectual function and a 10-14 point advantage in verbal ability for children “directly breastfed” (as opposed to fed expressed breastmilk) over children who never received breast milk? Even after adjusting for social advantage, maternal education and household income, the breastfed children retained a 5.5 IQ point advantage.

Or what about Anderson, Johnstone and Remley’s 1999 meta-analysis? They concluded that without adjusting for covariant factors like household income, mother’s education and so on, there was a 5.3 IQ point advantage and in studies where five or more of these factors were taken into account (11 studies - that’s not “no scientific data”!), the adjusted results still produced a 3.2 IQ point difference in favour of breastfeeding. And they found that low birth weight children derived an even greater advantage: 5.2 points.

Of course, there is a recent BMJ article, which, by controlling for mother’s IQ and the home environment claims to have reduced a 4 IQ point advantage to 0.5 points. However there were some serious methodological flaws in the study. For starters, they define a breastfed child as one who was ever breastfed. That’s not what breasfeeding advocates advocate. If we were talking about a new intelligence-boosting wonder drug you’d expect to have dosages and frequencies controlled in a prospective study, or at least correlated with dependent variable (IQ) in a retrospective study. More importantly, there’s a fairly commonsense resolution to the failure to find a difference between ‘breastfed’ and non-breastfed children in this study. It’s based on evolution and I’ll quote its succinct explanation by one of the respondents to the article, Dr Alison Barrett:

Rather than using statistics to explain away the significance of an observed effect, we need, first, to consider the probability that the effect is real. Is it biologically plausible that babies who are fed with human milk achieve optimal neurological development?

Consider the World Health Organization’s recently released Multicentre Growth Reference Study. This study, based on breastfeeding as the biological norm, showed that babies who are breastfed exclusively for around 6 months and continue to be breastfed for up to 2 years and beyond while complementary foods are added, have marked, measurable and statistically significant differences in anthropomorphic growth compared to artificially fed babies (1). If their bodies grow differently, why shouldn’t their brains develop differently as well?

That’s right folks, Nature intended babies to be breastfed. A substitute doesn’t make you a bad parent - parents are often in the situation of choosing between the lesser of two evils - but let’s not alleviate people’s guilt by pretending that breastfeeding is not best.