Breast milk is the ideal food for newborns and infants up to six months of life, and continues to be so afterwards, accompanied by the complementary feeding recommended according to the baby’s age.
Numerous studies have proven that in addition to being the right food for the baby, breast milk offers a long list of benefits both in the short and long term.
The most recent study, for example, has found that breastfeeding benefits cognitive development up to adolescence , and that the longer the duration of breastfeeding, the more noticeable its benefits.
The study
Published in the journal Plos One, this new research once again reaffirms what previous studies have found about the impact of breastfeeding on infant intelligence. On this occasion, and unlike previous studies, the babies were followed from birth to 14 years of age.
Throughout all that time, the 7,855 babies born between 2000 and 2002 took various tests at five, seven, eleven and fourteen years of age , which measured their verbal and spatial cognitive abilities.
In addition to this, a record was made on the duration of breastfeeding and the socioeconomic level of each family, as well as a test that measured the cognitive abilities of the mothers.
At the conclusion of the study, it was found that those children who had been breastfed showed better cognitive abilities when they reached adolescence , compared to children who had not received breast milk.
But in addition to this, it was also found that the duration of breastfeeding had an impact on this, since the longer the duration of breastfeeding, the higher the children’s scores on cognitive tests . On average, they were 0.08 to 0.26 points different from children who had not been breastfed.
” If we talk in terms of the usual IQ scale, which has an average of 100, the differences between children who were breastfed for several months and those who were never breastfed would be between 1.5 and 4.0 points “, explains the doctor Reneé Pereyra-Elías, main author of the study.
Therefore, the researchers note that although the increase in cognitive outcomes may seem small and not be clinically significant at the individual level, it has the potential to influence the population level, and they conclude that it is recommended to continue to encourage breastfeeding for this reason . and all the benefits it provides.
