Brain Food

I went back to "school" this week! I was so lucky to attend a week long conference to become a Certified Lactation Consultant. This is something I have always wanted to do, especially after my own personal positive experience. I wanted to be able to help other women with their breastfeeding experience. I attended five 8 hour days and learned everything there is to know about my "girls" ;) The first thing the instructors told us was that we would learn so much but that we also needed to unlearn things too. They were right, some of my set in stone ideas (that are in every breastfeeding book out there) about BF needed some tweeking based on new research that was presented.
So here are the highlights of what I learned. Breast fed babies have significantly lower incidences of ear infections, respiratory disease, food and environmental allergies, and hospital visits. They are also at a lower risk for juvenile diabetes, lymphoma, breast cancer and obesity. Some studies show that speech and language skills develop quicker. One huge study (10.8 million 0-5 month olds) showed that infants who are not breastfed have 7x risk of death from diarrhea and 5x risk of death from pneumonia compared to infants who are exclusively breastfed. These are children world wide not just underdeveloped countries. Moms benefit from earlier return to pre pregnancy weight, delayed resumption of ovulation (who wouldn't want that!), improved bone formation, decreased risk of breast and ovarian cancer and hip fractures, not to mention how convenient (no bottle washing/formula mixing) and inexpensive it is! There are also social benefits such as reduced health car costs from less in- and out-patient visits with sick kids, reduced employee absenteeism, and reduced environmental waste from formula and bottle production. WHEW! I also learned the physiological process of how breast milk is made which is just so amazing, women are just hard wired to feed our babies. I also learned what my role is as a lactation counselor which is really a hands off approach. My job is to make sure mom has all the information she needs to make her feeding choice but keeping in mind if she chooses to breastfeed her goals are my goals. My thoughts and ideas of what a successful breastfeeding mom is takes a backburner to what mom's goals are. I really appreciated the counseling aspect of this course. So I know that I am just rattling off statistics but the bottom line is a child that is breastfed, whether for one day or 1 year, benefits greatly! For me, all I needed to know was that I was providing my girls with the most perfect form of nutrition and that I would thoroughly enjoy the bonding experience! I still have my issues about extremes of breastfeeding but what I have to remember is that women have been doing this for centuries and so it might not be the easiest thing to do but it is the most natural thing to do!