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Breastfeeding 'linked to higher IQ'

bbc.com

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Re: Breastfeeding 'linked to higher IQ'

#41

Post by BenDaglish »

DanBC wrote: post #35
BenDaglish wrote: post #33

It interests me that the conclusion of these studies is almost always presented as breastfeeding increasing IQ (or conveying health benefits or whatever). Surely, breastfeeding is the norm , and this headline should be "Bottle feeding linked to lower IQ"?

Reframing it like that makes it seem like parents who formula-feed (because you can pump breast milk into a bottle) are harming their children. There's already enough pressure on women to breast feed and I'm not sure it's useful to put more on. It'd be better to make sure women can get rapid access to breast feeding consultants.

>makes it seem like parents who formula-feed are harming their children

Well, if the studies are to be believed, then that's exactly what is happening. I completely understand the "pressure on mothers" argument, but I'm not sure that really flies, especially given the (albeit more subtle these days due to legislation) opposite pressure put on mothers by Nestlé and the rest.

I also find the fact that initial breastfeeding rates vary so wildly by country (from 98% in Sweden though to 57% in the US) interesting, and again more likely to do with commercial and social pressures of the same kind than to do with physical differences between mothers worldwide. While-ever the argument is presented as "Breast is Best" rather than "Artificial is Worst", I suspect this will continue.

Re: Breastfeeding 'linked to higher IQ'

#42

Post by jtheory »

gadders wrote: post #28
jwdunne wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some cases, the pressure to breastfeed can do more harm than good. If the parent is feeling stressed, as it can be an extremely intense and also painful experience, the bonding process can suffer. More importantly, some mothers just cannot produce enough milk. The father of my adopted son forced my wife to breastfeed. Over a 3 month period, the poor boy lost a dangerous amount of weight and needed a stay in hospit…

>> In some cases, the pressure to breastfeed can do more harm than good. If the parent is feeling stressed, as it can be an extremely intense and also painful experience, the bonding process can suffer. More importantly, some mothers just cannot produce enough milk. This mirrors what happened to us in an NHS hospital in the UK. As a result, my daughter's blood sugar dropped dangerously low as we were encourage to per…

These issues are complicated to navigate for the midwives as well -- it's hard for them to know exactly who's hoping for more support, and who's really in need of an alternative option.

> More importantly, some mothers just cannot produce enough milk.

I'd guess this would be vanishingly rare, just due to evolutionary pressures over a long period of time, and there are other factors that just make nursing really difficult for many mothers. But I don't know for sure, and nowadays babies that would have simply died, or have killed the mother as well as died, can survive as a matter of course; so that changes the equation as well.

Breastfeeding (the first time around, especially) is quite a bit harder than most people realize -- it's partly a process of teaching the newborn what to do. They may be eager but default to a bad latch, they may be convinced their hand also needs to be in their mouth while they feed, or they may quickly pick up the habit of feeding for 20 seconds then taking a 2 minute nap, or they may decide they can only sleep while latched on. And those are just the problems we saw with our own two daughters!

But it is worth some serious effort (even if just for convenience, once it's working, among other benefits) -- it's just not worth destructive effort, and if it doesn't work out it's not worth remorse.

> She's also on the gifted and talented programme at her school now, so I don't think Formula did her any harm.

Right -- it's just so hard to predict. She might have been breastfed and yet be having difficulty in school as well; there are so very many factors involved, but many parents fix on a few (and torment themselves with guilt, or pride themselves on a choice well-made...).

But there are so many paths to a happy & healthy child who grows up to be a happy & healthy adult, and so many that go elsewhere, and many factors are totally out of our control.

Re: Breastfeeding 'linked to higher IQ'

#43

Post by paulfr »

johnloeber wrote: post #31
paulfr wrote: post #22

Just 2 weeks ago, I won a machine learning contest with a $20,000 prize pool where the goal was to predict the IQ of a child at age 7, based on various biological measurements and demographic indicators. The data includes whether a child was breastfed. After reading the article I did some very quick computations and my finding based on the model I developed is that children who were not breastfed have an IQ impairmen…

Wow, that's very interesting work. I'd love to see a write-up -- not just with respect to breastfeeding, but generally on your findings.

I found a big improvement to my model just after the contest was over, so I made a proposal to develop the improved model and do some more in-depth analysis. I'm currently waiting for their reply!

If they accept I'll have an opportunity to look deeper -- it's one thing to develop an efficient model, but fully exploiting it in order to gain a better understanding of the data takes some work. A limitation of these contests is that you're rewarded for producing a very efficient model, but there is very little emphasis on analysis of your model once you built it. I think it's a shame, because the person who built the model is often in the best position to have a good intuition of both the dataset and why the model had to be built that way.

I've been considering opening a blog, but I haven't found time to do so yet.

Briefly, the purpose of the contest wasn't to understand the effect of breastfeeding, but to understand how important normal child growth is to mental development. They included several scenarios: with all data available, with demographic data removed, and with demographic data and growth curves removed. Unfortunately, IQ is so overwhemingly affected by demographic that the scenarios without demographic data devolved into a game of extracting all the demographic data that was leaked by non-demographic variables. And when demographic data is available, more than 90% of the variance extracted by the model comes from demographic data rather than biological measurements!

It's really disheartening to think that depending on the social setting you come from, you start with an IQ of 85 or 115 -- at age 7...

Re: Breastfeeding 'linked to higher IQ'

#44

Post by DanBC »

BenDaglish wrote: post #41
DanBC wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reframing it like that makes it seem like parents who formula-feed (because you can pump breast milk into a bottle) are harming their children. There's already enough pressure on women to breast feed and I'm not sure it's useful to put more on. It'd be better to make sure women can get rapid access to breast feeding consultants.

>makes it seem like parents who formula-feed are harming their children Well, if the studies are to be believed, then that's exactly what is happening. I completely understand the "pressure on mothers" argument, but I'm not sure that really flies, especially given the (albeit more subtle these days due to legislation) opposite pressure put on mothers by Nestlé and the rest. I also find the fact that initial breastfee…

I suspect that socially progressive Sweden makes it easy to breastfeed while repressive US (Facebook bizarely banned photographs of breastfeeding mothers) doesn't.

Re: Breastfeeding 'linked to higher IQ'

#45

Post by aikah »

colordrops wrote: post #13
aikah wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I definitely take studies like this with a grain of salt as everybody should, the problem is the media publishing these stories know that the only thing people read are the headlines. > Experts say the results, while not conclusive ... The article says one thing and its opposite. The goal here isn't to inform but to distract. Absolutely no conclusion can be made out of reading this article.

What exactly is wrong with this study?

Because you read the study ? there isn't even a link to the study in the article. The article is garbage.

Re: Breastfeeding 'linked to higher IQ'

#46

Post by aikah »

paulfr wrote: post #22

Just 2 weeks ago, I won a machine learning contest with a $20,000 prize pool where the goal was to predict the IQ of a child at age 7, based on various biological measurements and demographic indicators. The data includes whether a child was breastfed. After reading the article I did some very quick computations and my finding based on the model I developed is that children who were not breastfed have an IQ impairmen…

> I won a machine learning contest with a $20,000 prize pool

Who organized that contest ?

Re: Breastfeeding 'linked to higher IQ'

#49

Post by DanBC »

robmcm wrote: post #48

How long before breast milk becomes so valuable women start selling it for huge profit? I'm going to set up Boober, an app for breast milk delivery and make millions!

Breast milk and colustrum is already sold, both in healthcare (eg premature babies) and leisure (a short lived experiment saw a London cafe selling breastmilk icecream).

http://www.wired.com/2011/05/ff_milk/

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