Breast-feeding may help mothers reduce the risk of obesity later in
life, according to a study of 740,000 post-menopausal women in the U.K.
For every six months women
breast-fed, their body mass index was 0.22, or 1 percent, lower, even decades
after giving birth, according to the research, which was published today in the
International
Journal of Obesity. The observation was made across socioeconomic groups
and regardless of the number of children the women had.
While the body-fat measure, known
as BMI, was higher in women who gave birth to more children, it was lower in mothers
who breast-fed than in those who hadn’t. Breast-feeding has also been found to
reduce the risk of childhood
obesity. More than 1.4 billion adults globally are overweight and at least
500 million of them are obese, with a BMI of 30 or more, according to the World Health Organization.
“A 1 percent reduction in BMI may
seem small, but spread across the population of the U.K., that could mean about
10,000 fewer premature deaths per decade from obesity-related conditions, such
as diabetes, heart
disease and some cancers,” Valerie Beral, co-author of the study and
director of the Cancer Epidemiology Unit at the University of Oxford, said in a
statement.
The study, funded by Cancer
Research UK and the Medical
Research Council, used data from the Million Women
Study, which investigates how reproductive and lifestyle choices affect
women’s health. Of the 740,000 participants in today’s study, 88 percent had
had at least one child and 70 percent of those women had breast-fed for an
average of 7.7 months.
The average age of the women in
the study was 57.5 and the mean BMI was 26.2. BMI is a
measure of body fat calculated using a person’s height and weight. A person
whose BMI is between 25 and 30 is considered overweight, while one whose BMI is
30 or greater is obese.
While the exact reason for the
lower BMI years after giving birth wasn’t studied, breast-feeding may set
mothers on a healthier trajectory that is long-lasting, Beral said. It seems to
be “a very simple way of having a persistent slight reduction,” she said.
Makiko Kitamura
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