Tuesday

breastfeeding has significant impact on your risk for diabetes

Breastfeed for at least a year and reduce your OWN future risk for this nasty disease by up to 15%, say researchers.

Read all about it right here

Of course, it can also be said (but rarely is) that NOT breastfeeding RAISES the risk for diseases such as diabetes. If breastfeeding is the norm, then that's actually the appropriate way to frame the issue.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

And what about women who don't have children? Where do they fit into the equation are the more or less likely to get diabetes than those who do or don't breastfeed? And the problem with this type of research is also that these groups are not randomly selected, so it may be that people who are at risk for diabetes are more likely to choose not to breastfeed.

It's curious that this type of correlational research works in medicine, but when done in education is not "scientifically based."

Anonymous said...

yup. exactly. it was stuff like this that scared the piss out of me when I screwed up breastfeeding. in large measure why I screwed up is becuase the breastfeeding "activists" are so petrified that if they tell the truth that no one will breastfeed that they didnt prepare me for the possibility of anything going wrong. there was just massive denial on thier end. of course when you reach for the formula (or put a kid in a crib for that matter) then they are ready to roast you. then they say "if you feel guilty you are guilty" nah. its like the jewish mother who makes her kids feel like shit if they arent married to a doctor by a certain age. its totally false guilt but still makes you feel like garbage.
there was a comment in the article (i read the same article in my local paper and just knew Miss Kate would be on it like a fly to shit) from a woman who tracks health studies in general. she said, and I think this is probably true of a lot of the studies iwth breastfeeding. that women who choose to breastfeed in general are probably more health conscious and its probably hard to sift out which came first the chicken or the egg. one may point to the positive psychological benefits and this may be true in a culture where one gets the message "to care is to breastfeed' but years ago when there was no options you had the incredible caring mothers breastfeeding right along with the child beaters. the magic titty didnt prevent my grandmother from beating the snot out of her kids and emotionally fucking with thier minds at every opportunity. so much for the positive effects of oxytocin.

Anonymous said...

Jay, that is very interesting about the people at risk for diabetes being more likely not to breastfeed. it is entirely possible that people who are on a lot of medication (as are diabetics) and who have to watch every morsel that goes in thier mouths( as do diabetics) might be prone to bottle feed and not have to factor in messing with adjusting thier insulin along with a feeding baby and adjusting thier diet along with it. whether or not it would actually be easier is beside the point. if they percieve it to be easier to just go with the formula that would most definately skew the data. humans are NOT rats and one thing they say about ALL these health studies, not just breastfeeding, is that they can never be completely exacting because you are dealing with humans and the ethical issues that accompany setting up a control group, etc etc. instead of a "real" scientific experiment as would be done with rats...you look at groups of people and run the stuff you want to correlate through a computer. these programs are, I have heard, very sophisticated but there can still be some hidden factor that someone missed that would throw the data off. they can only approximate a real experiement as you would do with rats. I believe the article itself, at lesat the version in my paper,said the numbers were very very small and that there were far greater risk factors to worry about than breastfeeding.
there is nothign wrong with breastfeeding. I just object to making people feel like shit with stuff that if it makes any difference at all is probably a minute difference. like I said, I think that among "lactivists" there is a weird denial of anything that they percieve might make people less likely to breastfeed (like coming clean about how easy it is for your baby to starve in the first couple of weeks if you dont stay totally on top of the situation) that actually makes it easier for people to not deal with a problem in a sane manner instead of panicking because no one told them that it would be anything but "something anyone can do that comes naturally". and a certain number of these situations WONT work out and these lactivists will not be honest and say that in past years these babies would have died and now, thank God, they have formula. some babies do NOT get the hang of nursing no matter how much professional help is applied to the situation. instead of being honest about this, "lactivists" just blame the "male medical establishment" and the mother, depending on how she responds, is either blamed herself or felt sorry for as a victim of said medical establishment.

Anonymous said...

you know what, I just read on epinions a woman who had breastfed whose son died of leukemia. which is of course one of the biggies that is claimed to be "prevented" by breastfeeding. can you imagine if she had bottlefed and had you jerks making her feel she killed her son?

Anonymous said...

First, even if we view breastfeeding as the biological norm for those who bear children, that doesn't make childbearing the biological norm, and it's deeply sexist to assume that it is. Some women choose not to bear children; other women can't. They are not some weird, unnatural aberration from the biological norm.

Second, according to kellymom.com, PCOS can cause major difficulties breastfeeding. PCOS is also a huge diabetes risk factor. So I absolutely agree with the person who suggested that the correlation and causation here could be backwards.

Anonymous said...

thank you. I did not know about the PCOS connection even though I have known a couple of women who have PCOS. there was also, on epinions..a woman who was a certified nutty crunch breastfeeder BUT she was ALSO a number cruncher for government studies. she said even though she loves breastfeeding and could never advise anyone against it, that knowing what she knows that raw data is given to people with an order to manipulate it to get the desired result.that she could not buy most of the health claims that are made..well you can see that if some lactinazi wants to "prove" that breastfeeding prevents stuff..then guess what...the numbers will be tweaked to reflect that...a feat especially easy if you are not looking at huge differences anyway. I would imagine it would be harder to skew data on say, smoking. but then thats so obvious we dont need to drain away a bunch of tax dollars to study it from every angle (although of course of government does just that). she further added, and I did not know this, that on surveys that people fill out incompletely, guess what...the researchers "guess" as to what the rest of their answers would be. imagine that. so "lactivists" get just what they need to reach their "conclusions".
when you get reality contradicting what these "studies" are saying it is cause for wonder. frankly Katie is the only person I have ever seen who has claimed her bottlefed kid was less healthy than the breastfed ones. usually its the other way around..people (including me) who say wait a minute, I KNOW you are saying this but at my house its the other way around. as far as Henrys allergies and headaches go, both of those can have a major psychological component and if I had a mother hovering around saying to everyone in earshot that I was "less than" my nursed siblings I would probably develop some psychosomatic symptoms too. lets remember Katie also goes for the "bonding" business too so if her child (and her) believe he is less well bonded than the other two I can only imagine the psychological distress that would cause.

Anonymous said...

I can see though with the IQ issues, as there IS a major hereditary factor in IQ...I can see why a lot of "lactivists" would really want to stack the odds in their kids favors any way they possibly can.

Anonymous said...

I would amend this comment two above to state that the one woman I know with PCOS who had a child could only lactate out of one breast. obviously she did not produce enough milk for more than a few months. although she did persevere with partial nursing through gall bladder surgery. nonetheless she had the local chapter of Le Leche idiots breathing down her neck about how she could just "try a little harder". Bah.