If you’re concerned about family wellness, one of the many concerns you might have is how are you going to get your children to eat their 5-a-day? According to research, breastfeeding for as long as possible might be the answer for the wellbeing of your child, as it doubles the likelihood that she children will end up eating twice as many vegetables when she grows older. How does that work?
According to Dr Michael Greger, research suggests that ‘breastfed babies, whose mothers regularly eat a variety of foods, are exposed to a diversity of flavours that are absent from formula milk and this early exposure augments the acceptance of various flavours.’ In other words, your baby subconsciously remembers the taste of broccoli after he’s been breastfed, and so he’s less inclined to spit it out. This potentially explains why the length of time a baby is breastfed correlates with lower wellness risks of inflammatory diseases such as asthma, cancer, and diabetes, and Greger recommends breastfeeding for a full 6 months.
However, as you carry contamination from industrial pollutants in your breast tissue, should you be worried that you’re passing those toxins onto your baby? According to Greger, ‘the level of industrial pollutants mothers have in their fat tissue doesn’t necessarily reflect what they’re passing on to their child’, yet last year a study was conducted in which researchers measured pesticide levels in the umbilical cord blood, taking samples before the cord was tied off after delivery.
The results were that of ‘almost all umbilical cord blood samples, 95% showed detectable DDT residues’ the levels of which were most closely associated with the mother’s consumption of fish, meat, and dairy products. Yet Greger still urges that breast is best, and cites studies that show that even if you give your child toxins during breastfeeding, by the time he reaches maturity he will have got rid of 95% of these as long as he maintains a healthy lifestyle and doesn’t live in a sewer! It’s never too late to improve your family’s diet and get rid of unwanted toxins, but you can still give them the best possible start and inclination towards healthy foods by breastfeeding.
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