Breastfeeding is well known to boost an infant鈥檚 health, and now it seems it may be good for the mother as well.
In a study of 96,648 nurses who gave birth between 1986 and 2002, those who had spend at least two years of their lives breastfeeding were 19 per cent less likely to suffer a heart attack than those who hadn鈥檛 breastfed at all. The difference was independent of any of the usual risk factors for heart disease, such as family history, diet or exercise levels.
One possible explanation, says study leader Alison Steube of Harvard Medical School, is that nursing a newborn may help a mother鈥檚 metabolism switch from pregnancy mode back to normal. 鈥淧regnancy is associated with a number of things that you normally wouldn鈥檛 want to happen to your body,鈥� Steube says, including storing more fat and having higher than normal levels of fatty acids circulating in the blood. By breastfeeding, mothers can convert those energy reserves into nutrition for their infants.
Advertisement
鈥淏reastfeeding isn鈥檛 just good for babies, it鈥檚 good for mothers, too,鈥� says Steube, who presented her findings at a meeting of the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine in San Francisco last week. She recommends that mothers breastfeed for three months to a year after giving birth.
