January 22, 2024 — Breastfeeding is such a good idea. But unfortunately, it doesn’t do much to prevent obesity. No matter. On the subject of breastfeeding and preventing obesity in children, we have policy-based evidence – the answer is preset. A new paper in Pediatrics lines up with this. Based on yet another finding of an association between breastfeeding […]
July 10, 2022 — “You oughta wanna do better.” That sums up the feelings evoked by a disturbing number of guidelines for health and wellness. This feeling comes when the guidelines conflict jarringly with the lived reality of many or most people. When guidelines become a prompt for finger wagging, they won’t move the needle on population health in […]
June 12, 2020 — The distinction between correlation and causality is basic to any serious scientist. But in PLOS Genetics yesterday, scientists toss it out the window. Yanyan Wu et al found an association between breastfeeding and obesity. Then they lept to claim cause and effect. Right up front in their title, they make the bold claim. “Exclusive breastfeeding […]
May 1, 2019 — The World Health Organization is doing some great work on obesity in the European Region. For instance, they just published an outstanding new report at ECO2019 on the prevalence of severe childhood obesity in 21 countries. Unfortunately, though, they buried it in a press release that falsely promotes breastfeeding as a proven effective strategy to […]
July 10, 2018 — This should not surprise us. Political squabblers have seized upon breastfeeding as a partisan issue. Over the weekend, the New York Times reported: A resolution to encourage breast-feeding was expected to be approved quickly and easily by the hundreds of government delegates who gathered this spring in Geneva for the United Nations-affiliated World Health Assembly. […]
March 4, 2018 — Will the perfect approach to feeding infants cut their risk of obesity? Perhaps. But if someone tells you they know that perfect approach, be careful. Evidence for such suppositions doesn’t yet exist. Infant-Led Weaning? One supposition has long been that Baby-Led Introduction to Solids (BLISS) would lead to a longer duration of breastfeeding and a […]
August 10, 2015 — Middle ground on nutrition is hard to find. Disciples of various nutritional dogmas make it scarce. There’s no scarcity of nutrition causes for people to argue and two of them are in the news this week: breastfeeding and the Paleo Diet®. National Breastfeeding Week is just behind us and hopefully the phenomenon of shaming mothers who are unsuccessful will […]
June 13, 2015 — A certain amount of half-baked advice for mothers is being offered in the name of preventing childhood obesity. Two recent publications bring two examples into sharp focus: breastfeeding and Caesarean births. In JAMA Pediatrics this week, Lisa Smithers and colleagues reviewed evidence for an effect of breastfeeding on obesity and intelligence. She notes claims for […]
May 30, 2015 — The passions of the breastfeeding war continue to spill into scientific publications. Another in a long line of publications documenting an association between breastfeeding and lower adiposity appeared this week in the Journal of Nutrition. The authors concluded: These data confirm the importance of exclusive BF and prolonged BF for later cardiometabolic health. But in fact, that’s […]
April 13, 2015 — A review of breastfeeding’s effect on childhood obesity rates caused a bit of a stir this week because its authors uttered a heresy: The concept of promotion of breastfeeding as a front-line strategy for the primordial prevention of obesity is not supported by the literature. This conclusion is not news to anyone who has been carefully following […]
