Hat-tip to Savage Minds Around the Web

On a complementary note, especially for breast feeding at night, see our popular post: Cosleeping and Biological Imperatives: Why Human Babies Do Not and Should Not Sleep Alone

The Bump: The Inside Scoop of Pregnancy organization created the video. You can find out more about breastfeeding, including “10 Reasons Why Breastfeeding Doesn’t Suck,” over at TheBump’s breastfeeding page, which also has the clip. And they even have BumpTV.

Breastfeeding really does promote brain development and smarter babies! Here’s a very recent article by Elizabeth Isaacs et al. (2010): Impact of Breast Milk on Intelligence Quotient, Brain Size, and White Matter Development. You can get the pdf here; the abstract is below.

Although observational findings linking breast milk to higher scores on cognitive tests may be confounded by factors associated with mothers’ choice to breastfeed, it has been suggested that one or more constituents of breast milk facilitate cognitive development, particularly in preterms. Because cognitive scores are related to head size, we hypothesized that breast milk mediates cognitive effects by affecting brain growth. We used detailed data from a randomized feeding trial to calculate percentage of expressed maternal breast milk (%EBM) in the infant diet of 50 adolescents. MRI scans were obtained (mean age = 15 y 9 mo), allowing volumes of total brain (TBV) and white and gray matter (WMV, GMV) to be calculated.

In the total group, %EBM [amount of breast milk in infant’s diet] correlated significantly with verbal intelligence quotient (VIQ); in boys, with all IQ scores, TBV and WMV. VIQ was, in turn, correlated with WMV and, in boys only, additionally with TBV. No significant relationships were seen in girls or with gray matter. These data support the hypothesis that breast milk promotes brain development, particularly white matter growth. The selective effect in males accords with animal and human evidence regarding gender effects of early diet. Our data have important neurobiological and public health implications and identify areas for future mechanistic study.