What is best for the brain development of your baby, Breast-feed or Bottle-feed?
In the present era influence of breast milk over the formula-feeding for the growth and development of infants have been a debatable topic and an area of intense research. Studies have proven that other than formula, breast milk has shown high positive impacts towards childhood and adult-onset medical conditions. Not only breast milk has shown positive impacts towards physical development, studies have suggest that between breastfeeding mothers and infants have a stronger emotional bonding and high cognitive and motor development than between formula-feeding infants and their mothers. (Anatolitou, 2012).
Even after passing the infant stage, children who are breastfed for a longer time have shown less frequentility of seeking medical assistance compared to formula-fed children. Numerous organizations have recommended that breastfeeding of the child during first 6 months till two years will fulfill the child’s nutritional requirements and promote health and development due to presence of antibodies and immunoprotective substances. Breast milk has a unique composition that is solely made up for fulfilling the nutritional requirements of an infant. Nutrition requirements of First two years of the newborn considered as crucial for his entire life. Human milk contains 6.9% — 7.2% carbohydrate calculated as lactose, 3% — 5% fat, 0.8% — 0.9% protein, 0.2% mineral constituents and energy content of 60–75 kcal/100 ml (Keunen et al, 2015).
Infancy is a time where rapid brain growth and key developmental changes happen in the sensory, motor, visual, and voice processing regions of the brain. During the infant stage babies develop strong language skill, where they are capable of recognizing his native language over a foreign language. The human voice, visual acuity, and cognitive development are very important in firming the social connection of a newborn with the outside world. As an example, it has found that during 3–7 months infants will be developing their human voice sensitive areas established in the temporal lobe. Therefore providing an optimal nutrition level at this stage is important for the rest of the life of the infant. Choosing a proper source of nutrition at this stage of the child is considered essential. In this report it’s focused on the fact of how breast milk effect for the brain development of infants and contribution of formula for the brain development (Deoni et al, 2013).
Let’s take a look at brain development during infancy..
Humans belong to one of the limited species lives on earth born “incomplete.” At birth, human brains are nowhere near completely developed, it slowly develops over the time. New technology such as CAT (Computed Tomography) scans, MRIs (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) and PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scans indicate that our brain develops until adolescence. The human brain experiences fast growth during the first two years of life. The University of Washington has done a neuroscience research and it has shown that by the age of two, the brain is about 80% of the size of an adult’s brain. Children who don’t receive proper nutrients and nourishment during this crucial period can suffer cognitive problems. Although many factors contribute to brain development in 1 to 2year olds, nutrition is an important factor (Issacs et al, 2013).
The human brain is built up from nearly 100 billion neurons. Formation of myelin or myelination starts at birth and continues rapidly throughout the first two years of life. Between the period of birth and 8 months synapses produce rapidly. One neuron has the ability to make connection with 15,000 other neurons. During the first 3 months of life, the synapses multiply more than 20 times (Gale et al, 2003) at 3 months, the babies’ synaptic count pass over 1,000 trillion. Seven hundred synaptic connections are found to be made in every second in a baby’s brain during first 3 years of life. Proliferation and movement of glial precursors and differentiation of astrocytes and oligodendrocytes are largely belonged to postnatal processes, there is little belief that these processes play a critical role in the functional maturation of developing neural circuits of infants (Keunen et al, 2015).
Certain structural changes take place inside an infant’s brain that are very important when it comes to early childhood development. These changes include increment in whole brain volume takes place by increasing cortical gray matter volume, cortical white matter volume and cerebral white matter volume. There will be also increment in intacranium volume and during infancy, the cerebellum triples in size, significant growth in the hippocampus, growth in the limbic structure related to recognition memory and frontal and temporal lobes become consolidated (Keunen et al, 2015).
To sum up…
Breast milk can be considered as optimal source of nutrition for newborn babies from the origin of mankind. Many alternatives to replace breast milk have introduced during past century due to reasons like busy life style, medical conditions of mothers like HIV, cancer, personal preferences and lactation insufficiency. In spite of all these reasons breast milk have shown some significant contribution for the cognitive and neural development of infants. Breast milk consist of thousands of essential nutrients that are completely natural and not harmful for the infants while infants formula contains only a hand full of nutrients mostly synthetic and giving complications to infant’s health.
Essential fatty acids like docosahexanoic acid and arachedonic acids plays a key role in brain and neural development and these fatty acid content in breast milk found to be remarkably high in breast milk with respect to the infant formula. During 1–2 years of child’s’ life DHA accumulation in cerebral cortex and retina happens quickly leading to a rapid development of brain. Presence of high levels of healthy cholesterol in breast milk helps in neural development and thereby making strong connections between brain and organs of the body. Therefore authorities must start looking at ways to enlighten the public about the importance of breast milk as the optimal safe nutritional source for the infants. If not caregivers might mislead by the massive marketing campaigns run by manufacturers convincing that infant formula is even better than breast milk. Mothers with busy lifestyles could learn how to pump milk as an option without going for infant formula. Mothers suffering from lactation insufficiency can choose to breastfeed as much as she can and for lacking amount a high-quality infant formula having FDA approval. Mothers under chemotherapy for conditions like cancer can go for options like volunteer mother’s breast milk and high-quality infant formula. By giving proper education about breast milk and its benefits for the infants to the public right now would make healthy and smart children for the future.
