One of the reasons that makes breastfeeding a baby the most logical and advisable is that the mother's breast, after giving the woman birth, continues to do the work that the uterus and the placenta cannot finish in the nine insufficient months of gestation .
At the brain level it has the function of helping the brain to grow and develop by creating white matter and gray matter and a recent study has shown the same, because it has been seen that Children who drink artificial milk have a worse brain development than those who drink breast milk.
Does the mother's breast follow the work of the placenta?
So is. Babies are born very immature, ahead of time. So early that, as they say, you leave a baby on the floor and your chances of survival are nil. In other animal species the young are born being able to walk and follow the mother, for example, because they are born much more developed.
This means that evolution has predicted that babies follow the development of the uterus that has not been completed during pregnancy. The placenta begins to transfer immune cells to the baby in the last weeks of gestation, so that it is born with a minimum of protection. That minimum should be strengthened after birth and we know that your immune system does not mature until an age between two and six.
The way to strengthen the immune system is by breastfeeding. That is, what the placenta has not been able to finish, the work that it leaves halfway, must be continued by the mother's chest, by her mammary glands. There is a transfer of powers, since the moment the placenta comes out the chest begins to produce milk, taking the witness.
That way breast milk provides the baby with immune cells and of hundreds of substances that continue to do what could not be finished in utero (As you can see in this image above, where you can see the differences between artificial milk, on the left, and breast milk, on the right, image that we discuss here), as for example, which is the topic we are dealing with today , continue with brain development. A baby is born with a brain size of 25% of what will be his brain in adulthood, so breast milk, which is the baby's food, has the mission of promoting its growth and development.
The problem comes when a baby does not drink breast milk
Because artificial milk does not know at what point the baby has stayed, it does not know what are the weeks in which it was born, what the conditions, what the level of development and why does not contain the same substances that breast milk contains, obviously.
Children who drink artificial milk tend to have a worse IQ and a worse response in cognitive functioning in childhood and adolescence.
This has been verified in this study carried out at Brown University, performed by means of magnetic resonances and observing the brain development of children under 4 years. In this investigation they saw that at two years, children who had been exclusively breastfed for at least three months they had better development in key areas of the brain compared to children who did mixed breastfeeding (maternal and artificial) and those who took formula exclusively.
Apparently, children who were not breastfed had worse development, lower brain growth, in the areas related to language, emotional function and cognitive skills. In the next image you can see the areas of the brain in which changes are seen among children fed in one way or another:
Sean Deoni, assistant professor of engineering at Brown University and lead author of the study, aware that previous studies showed differences in the cognitive development of both children, explained that they wanted to know what the moment was when everything happened:
We wanted to see when these changes in brain development occur ... We have shown that they are almost there at first.
How did they do the study
To do the study, as we have commented, they used silent MRI machines with which they could test the children while they slept. The intention was to assess the amount of white matter in the brain, which is the one that contains the long nerve fibers and that is responsible for transmitting impulses between different parts of the brain. A better development, better communication.
The researchers studied 133 children aged between ten months and four years. All were born at term and came from families with similar socioeconomic status. The children were divided into three groups: those who were exclusively breastfed for at least three months, those who drank breast milk and formula milk and those who were fed only with formula milk.
Better development according to feeding and better development with prolonged breastfeeding
In addition to looking for the time when some children differed from others, they also wanted to know how much was the difference between the growth of white matter of the three groups of children. Again citing Deoni:
We are finding that the difference in white matter growth is of the order of 20 to 30 percent, when the comparison is between breastfed children with non-breastfed children.
Finally, they wanted to see what were the effects of prolonged breastfeeding in the brain and compared breastfed babies over a year with those who were breastfed less than a year. They saw that brain growth was significantly higher in babies who were breastfed longer, especially in the brain areas responsible for motor functions.
The following image shows the areas in which the brain benefits from prolonged breastfeeding:
How does this affect everyday life?
Once the data were obtained, the researchers did cognitive tests on the older children, to see the differences between them. They found that Children who drank artificial milk had worse performance in language proficiency, visual reception and psychomotor development than children fed breast milk.
If we wonder how it affects everyday life, it is very difficult to say, precisely because we are comparing some children with others. The great, the ideal to know the real scope of the differences, would be that we could have two equal children (impossible, of course), being fed differently. In other words, to know how I, who was basically fed with artificial milk, would have been fed with breast milk for a long time, I would need to have another Armando by my side, the one who was fed with the chest, and from there start comparing us. Personally I do not think that this other me was very different from me, maybe I would get some more point in a test of measurement of the intellectual quotient, but in the you to you the differences would be imperceptible (that my opinion is not seen given the comparative graphics study).
The importance of continuing to advocate for breastfeeding and for professionals to be continuously trained and recycled
In any case, it is confirmed that from the health services breastfeeding should continue to be promoted and giving information for mothers to make an informed decision and to confirm something that seems even more important to me, that professionals must continue to form and recycle continuously to be able to help those mothers who want to breastfeed but that they encounter problems that nobody knows how to solve them. We know that 93% of women who stop breastfeeding would prefer not to have left it, and this is a clear sign that they have not found trained personnel capable of solving their difficulties.
We all know that breast milk is the best, but it is no use that doctors, nurses and midwives explain to mothers that the ideal is to breastfeed, if then when they come to us because they have problems we are not able to give solutions and they end up giving formula milk because it ends up being the only way to enjoy feeding their children.
