A few hours ago we read an article in a newspaper that has attracted a lot of attention by the headline: "A study from the University of Granada shows that breast milk of obese women is worse than artificial milk."
This headline summarizes an effect that breast milk has on both obese women and women with normal weight: Babies of obese mothers take less weight than those who drink artificial milk. The difference is that this is not bad, but quite the opposite: it is totally positive.
A coordinated international study in Granada
As we read in Europa Press, this study has been coordinated by the teacher Cristina Campoy, from the Department of Pediatrics of the University of Granada. To carry it out, the growth of a sample of babies of 175 women, both obese and normal weight, was analyzed during the first two years of life, separated according to the food they received.
Data were collected at 3, 6, 12, 18 and 24 months, and with them they saw that Babies born to obese mothers have a significantly greater weight at birth than mothers with normal weight.
With breast milk, babies gain less weight
This situation of excessive weight gain during pregnancy, which increases the risk of obesity of babies, seems to be reversed when babies drink breast milk.
The researchers saw that babies of obese mothers fed exclusively breastfeeding had, at six months, a lower weight than those who drank artificial milk.
In addition, they saw that these babies, at six months, even had a weight for height and a Body Mass Index (BMI) for their younger age than exclusively breastfed babies of mothers with normal weight.
Breast milk as protection?
The results suggest that breast milk has, then, a protective effect for those babies born with excess weight because of the obesity of their mothers.
Thus, until six months, these babies are descending in their weight gain curve until they reach a point a little below (in relative terms with respect to height) of breastfed mothers of normal weight mothers, and from there They move forward from a more logical position and with a lower risk of future obesity.
For this, of course, Pediatricians and nurses need to know that this phenomenon caused by breastfeeding can happen since, if they do not know, they will intervene in many cases before the baby reaches that point, supplementing breastfeeding with artificial milk, advancing cereal porridge or even replacing breastfeeding with formula.
At 24 months there were no differences
Once these babies began the complementary feeding the weight was increasing gradually until reaching a point, at 24 months old, in which they had the same weight, on average, as babies of mothers of normal weight who had been breastfed. This confirmed that thanks to breast milk, babies did not have, despite being born with more weight, a problem of obesity at two years.
And artificial milk, where is it?
The artificial milk looks like the best substitute for breast milk for when you can't or don't want to. Being a standard food for all babies, you cannot make any modulatory response that modifies its nutritional and caloric characteristics depending on the weight of the baby being born, so it tends to gain more weight than breast milk and cause more risk of future obesity .
It does it because it is richer in proteins (and it should be, because it has to compensate for the worse biological quality of its proteins with a somewhat higher concentration) and it does because it is given in a bottle.
The first factor cannot be modified beyond offering babies artificial milk with less protein. The second should be controlled as we said a few days ago when we explain that the bigger the bottle is prepared, the greater the risk of obesity: give the bottle on demand and never force babies to continue eating, whatever the amount they have eaten.
In other words, if we prepare 90 but it has taken 40 ml and does not want more, do not think about having to finish the bottle, but throw the milk and wait until you are hungry again, in the same way that it is done with breast milk, when a mother does not count what a baby eats by counting the minutes it is to the tit.
Photos | iStock
In Babies and more | A study reveals why babies fed with adapted formulas gain more weight, Women with obesity or overweight breastfeed less time, When the baby who drinks breast milk gets too fat (and they even tell you to switch to artificial milk)
