Infant Nutrition Advice Mitchell SD

Baby Fat in a Bottle

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Some babies aren’t born with baby fat—they get it from a bottle. Or so a growing number of studies suggest. Advocates of breastfeeding have long suspected that bottle-fed babies face a greater risk of obesity later in life than their breastfed nurserymates do. Now researchers seeking to understand the ever-expanding obesity epidemic have found evidence that they’re right. At a recent conference sponsored by both the University of California at Berkeley’s Center for Weight and Health and the California Department of Health Services, experts analyzed data from studies worldwide. The most compelling research came from Scottish scientists at the University of Glasgow and Glasgow Caledonian University. They studied 32,200 Scottish children and found that those who were breastfed during infancy were 30 percent less likely to become obese as children. How to account for the findings? One possibility is that breastfed babies are better “programmed” against overeating later in life, because parents who use bottles tend to overfeed. Babies fed on breast milk have also recently been shown to have lower levels of leptin, a protein associated with obesity, than formula-fed infants. And some suspect that because most infant formula is made with sucrose rather than lactose (the natural sugar in breast milk), bottle-fed babies may be more likely to develop a preference for processed sugar. To be sure, no one is suggesting that breastfeeding is a magic bullet against obesity: All sorts of environmental and genetic factors contribute to the tendency to put on pounds. But the mounting evidence of the effects of infant nutrition is hard to ignore.

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