I had talked about the idea of extending the time range for breastfeeding for optimal child nutrition in the post “What If Breastfeeding Human Milk Is Extended Or Synthesized To Increase Height?“. I had theorized back then that it might be smarter for babies to end up bigger to increase the time for breastfeeding We already know that for the young baby with mostly multipotent stem cells the best type of nutrition is from the mother’s milk. However there seems to be people who are disagreeing over the natural breastfeeding vs. synthetic formula. This post will extend the idea of breastfeeding vs. formula to show that there are possible even more benefits.
Breastfeeding as been shown to be superior towards babies getting taller, but not fatter, and that means that the breastfeed child will probably have less change of development health problems later in life due to being overweight.
I think this study has shown with convincing evidence that there may not be any ethnicity or even groups of people who have any type of genetic propensity towards high stature.
Sure there will always be small pockets of people or certain families which have genes which make them taller than the rest of a ethnic group or “tribe” but this study suggest that through at least the act of the normal breastfeeding instead of giving our babies formula, we can standardized the growth progression (height increase) charts for all of the countries in the world.
From the website KellyMom.com, the article states…
“The problem is that many doctors are not familiar with the normal weight gain patterns of breastfed babies, and rely too much upon older growth charts that are based upon the growth of artificially fed babies. In 2006, the World Health Organization released revised growth charts that are representative of healthy breastfed babies throughout the world. Until doctors are familiar with them,…”
This shows that the data from the old medical & health organizations were using information from synthetically fed babies. The charts are off because babies fed with formula grow in weight much faster.
The writer makes an excellent point with….
“Healthy breastfed infants tend to grow more rapidly than their formula-fed peers in the first 2-3 months of life and less rapidly from 3 to 12 months. All growth charts available before 2006 (which are still used by many health care providers in the US) included data from infants who were not exclusively breastfed for the first 6 months (includes formula-fed infants and those starting solids before the recommended 6 months). Because many doctors are not aware of this difference in growth, they see the baby dropping in percentiles on the growth chart and often come to the faulty conclusion that the baby is not growing adequately. At this point they often recommend that the mother (unnecessarily) supplement with formula or solids, and sometimes recommend that they stop breastfeeding altogether.”
Later in the article the writers notes that the old charts that are used was from studies done from 1929-1975 of babies from ages 0-2 whose mother started feeding them solid foods by age 4 months or earlier and the data was for mothers who fed their babies milk and formula as a combination. The revised growth charts was for mothers who fed their babies solid food after 6 months as now recommended and predominantly feeds the baby breast milk.
From the website BabyCenter.com…
Some first asks the question “Is it true that breastfed babies grow more slowly than formula-fed babies?”
Babies who are breastfed for the first year of life seem to grow more rapidly in the first three or four months and then more slowly for the rest of the year. At age 1, breastfed babies weigh less, on average, than formula-fed babies.
Experts aren’t sure why this is so, but they do know that it’s absolutely normal and nothing to be concerned about. In fact, some research suggests that babies who grow too quickly may have higher cholesterol levels, higher blood pressure, and increased risk of obesity and diabetes later in life.
In 2006, the World Health Organization (WHO) published a brand-new set of growth charts based on 8,500 babies who were breastfed. The mothers participating in the study planned to breastfeed exclusively or predominately for the first four to six months and to continue breastfeeding for at least 12 months.
Before 2006, the growth charts that tracked babies’ length and weight gain – created by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 1977 and updated in 2000 – were based on babies who were fed formula or a combination of formula and breast milk.
Implications For Height Increase
The growth of a human individual is the most critical in their earliest years. I had shown from other posts that during the first year of life, a child can grow as much as 12 inches longer. After that, around the age 2-4 they average around 4-5 inches a year. Since the goal of our website is to try to optimize the growth pattern to reach the highest final height possible, it is important to consider whether it might be smarter to go with breastfeeding the baby exclusively for upwards of even 1 year so that the baby can keep their metabolism lower to not overstimulate the growth system. The studies do show that the breastfed baby in comparing length/height with the baby fed with formula was about the same. The formula fed baby was bigger only in terms of weight.
What we know from our research is that growth is overstimulated too early in life, that causes earlier puberty resulting in earlier growth plate closure and decreased final height. Since the benefits of breast feed babies are that they weigh less while still keeping the same rate of height growth, I strongly suggest that the baby should move towards breastmilk diet much longer than most physicians would recommend. 4 years of medical school learning with a couple of years of residency at pediatric hospital clinics is not enough to overide the natural tendencies of the billions of years of evolution which is dictated by Mother Nature’s wisdom.
[New growth references of the World Health Organization based on breast fed infants].
- An Pediatr (Barc). 2007 Feb;66(2):177-83.
- Lozano de la Torre MJ.
- PMID:17306105 [PubMed – indexed for MEDLINE]
Coordinadora del Comité de Lactancia Materna de la Asociación Española de Pediatría, Departamento de Ciencias Médicas y Quirúrgicas (Area de Pediatría), Universidad de Cantabria, Santander, España. lozanomj@unican.es
Abstract
The World Health Organization Multicenter Growth Reference Study is a multinational project to develop new growth references for infants and young children. The design combines a longitudinal study from birth to 24 months with a cross-sectional study of children aged 18 to 71 months. The pooled sample from the six participating countries (Brazil, Ghana, India, Norway, Oman, and the United States) consists of 8440 children. The new WHO Child Growth Standards confirm that all children worldwide, given an optimum start in life, have the same potential for growth and prove that differences in children’s growth to the age of 5 years are more influenced by nutrition, feeding practices, environment, and healthcare than by genetics or ethnicity. The new standards are based on the breast fed child as the norm for growth and development. For the first time, this ensures coherence among the tools used to assess growth and national and international infant feeding guidelines, which recommend breast feeding as the optimal source of nutrition during infancy.
Analysis & Interpretation
The statement we should be taking away from this abstract is ” The new WHO Child Growth Standards confirm that all children worldwide, given an optimum start in life, have the same potential for growth and prove that differences in children’s growth to the age of 5 years are more influenced by nutrition, feeding practices, environment, and healthcare than by genetics or ethnicity.”
The growth patterns and charts are from tabulated data of babies who are fed breastmilk. If the potential for growth is the same, we could ask why is it that some ethnicities seem to end up smaller and shorter than others. Why is it that Vietnamese females are so much shorter than Dutch females, often by upwards of 12 inches or more?
The chart shows that their growth patterns ar the same, so that in terms of the changes in growth rates over each year, the same shape of the growth curve line is the same. What is most likely the case is that the mother of the babies were smaller/shorter and their uterus/wombs were smaller so a smaller baby with less overall cell numbers could be inside the womb prenatally. The postnatal patterns are the same. It is just that the baby at birth is just smaller than the baby born in other nations due to the limitations of the body size of the mother. If a baby is born from an ethnicity which is supposed to be idiopathically small but comes out healthy with the same length and weight from a mother with a large womb and tall height, and they are fed breast-milk for an extended time, the growth pattern shows that they are likely to end up the same final height as their supposed counterparts in other nations. What I would argue then is that the real limiting factor is the size theperson comes out when they are first born.
However, the side note to always realize is that the growth patterns are an average of thousands of babies growth progression. Each individual with their immediate families genetics will deviate from the average which is of an entire nation or group of people.