Good beginnings

There are numerous excellent reasons to breastfeed a baby. Aside from the physical closeness and emotional security breastfeeding offers the nursing couple, human milk provides the baby with resistance to disease that cannot be duplicated.

Breastfeeding offers outstanding health benefits such as the prevention of gastrointestinal and respiratory illness, infections, and immunologic disorders. Studies have also shown that breastfeeding reduces the incidence of allergies, and may reduce the frequency of such adult diseases as breast cancer, osteoporosis, diabetes, ulcerative colitis, and Crohn’s Disease.

Colostrum, the first milk produced postpartum, contains concentrated nutritional ingredients vital to a newborn’s needs—immunoglobulins, leukocytes, and anti-inflammatory factors. The abundance of secretory immunoglobulin A (IgA) has been shown to significantly reduce the risk of acute gastrointestinal illness in breastfed babies. According to a study in The American Journal of Public Health (Koopmen 1985), “The risk of acute gastrointestinal illness in infants receiving formula was six times greater than in infants receiving breastmilk.”

Even more amazing is the fact that the presence of IgA in human milk has been found to stimulate an infant’s own immunologic development (Cruz 1989), offering protection to the baby two ways—with the IgA found in his mother’s milk and by stimulating the production of immunoglobulins in his own intestinal tract.

Another important finding is that breastfed babies showed a better response to vaccines with significantly higher antibody levels than formula-fed babies.

Even a few weeks of breastfeeding offers protection no formula can duplicate. A mother not only provides her baby with the gift of her presence, but also with the lifelong gifts of good health and a vigorous immune system.