There’s lots of pressure on mothers to breastfeed, and lots of conflicting advice. Here’s a breakdown of the evidence.
There's not much good evidence that breastfeeding makes your child smarter.
There was a widely reported study recently that suggested that breastfed babies are more intelligent, and the longer they're breastfed, the more intelligent they tend to be.
But Dr Stuart Ritchie of the Centre for Cognitive Ageing at the University of Edinburgh points out that parents who are more intelligent tend to breastfeed, and parents who are more intelligent also tend to have more intelligent children. When studies control for parental intelligence, he says, "the biggest and best studies find no relationship". He points to a major review of the literature, published in the BMJ in 2013, which looked at 80 studies and found that "the initial positive effect of breastfeeding on IQ disappeared or diminished" in studies that looked at parental IQ.
Still, the breastfeeding-intelligence link gets brought up fairly often, says Ritchie. "It's a weird amnesia in the media – there's loads of research and every time people forget."
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Linda Geddes, the author of the science-of-parenthood book Bumpology , told BuzzFeed: "There have been lots of studies on breastfeeding, and they show real short-term benefits. They give babies antibodies which protect against diarrhoea and chest infections and things like that. All that's pretty well-established."
This is especially important in the developing world, where infections are a real killer. It may be less vital in the developed West, but it's still positive.
In Bumpology, Geddes points out that there is good evidence that breastfeeding protects against sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS, which used to be known as cot death. But, she says, the protective effect is small: "5,500 children would have to be breastfed to prevent one death".
Breastfeeding probably does make your child slightly less likely to be obese.
There is conflicting evidence here, and it's very complicated teasing out cause and effect. But, in 2013, a major meta-analysis by the World Health Organisation examined 71 studies into whether breastfeeding protects children against obesity in later life. After controlling for other factors, they found a "relatively modest" protective effect: "a small reduction, of about 10%, in the prevalence of overweight or obesity in children exposed to longer durations of breastfeeding".
It may also have a small protective effect against blood pressure and blood cholesterol, according to another WHO analysis.
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"Where it gets more complicated is whether it protects against allergies, diabetes, and things like that," says Geddes. "Some studies say it does, some say it probably doesn't, and the biggest and best studies tend to find no protection."
You'll find people saying that breastfed children are less likely to suffer from diabetes. It's true, but as with the intelligence thing, it's hard to determine whether breastfeeding causes this. Two meta-analyses, one in 2007 and one in 2014, found that there's not enough evidence to draw firm conclusions: "The role of body weight as a mediator or confounder remains uncertain," one says, and "At this stage, it is not possible to draw firm conclusions… Further studies are badly needed on this topic" says the other.
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