Toxic or not

Breast milk is better than formula food, even with toxins

SEVEN and a half months old Aashirya is healthy. She is less likely to fall sick or put on excessive weight as she grows up. This is because her parents are staunch believers of breastfeeding. Vineet Tyagi, her paediatrician father, and her mother, who is a dentist, decided to keep Aashirya on breast milk exclusively for the first six months. This, despite there being various studies on the presence of toxins in breast milk.

"The benefits of breast milk are more than the harmful effects of the toxins present in it. Neither are the studies conclusive," he said. However, for parents who are not doctors, the decision to breastfeed is not so simple. A booming infant food industry suggests that a huge number of people use formula food instead of breast milk.

The breastfed versus formula-fed debate is not new. Many studies have fed it.The first report of a toxin in breast milk, namely ddt, came in the 1950s and since than many other pesticides, heavy metals and persistent organic pollutants have been implicated. Nestle, the Swiss infant food major, reports that the infant formula section of the firm had seen sales rise from US $2.1 billion in 2000 to US $2.9 billion in 2007. Judy S LaKind, president of the US based LaKind Associates, a limited liability company, and other researchers from various institutes, recently authored a paper on impact of environmental toxins on the infant's health. "Physicians and lactation consultants are frequently asked whether breastfeeding is still the best way to nourish infants given that the news is often filled with stories on toxins in breast milk", LaKind said.

For the paper, the researchers analyzed three studies--two Dutch and one German--on the intake of dioxins through breast milk and their outcome on health. The studies indicated that babies exposed to dioxins had slightly higher levels of thyroid hormones and lower blood platelet counts but that did not adversely affect the child's health. The studies revealed that breastfed babies had higher mental development.

The paper, published in December in the journal Breastfeeding Medicine, concluded that the studies found beneficial effects associated with breastfeeding, including times when levels of environmental chemicals were higher.

M Nathaniel Mead, a nutrition consultant based in Oregon, US, recently analyzed certain studies on contaminants in breast milk. He tried to find out if benefits of breast milk can override the harmful effects of toxins. He concluded that breast milk is the best food for infants. The study was published in the October issue of the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.

Arun Gupta, national coordinator of the Breastfeeding Promotion Network of India, pointed out that most biomonitoring studies for the presence of toxins in the environment are carried out on breast milk and blood. This results in breast milk getting a lot of bad press and parents worry about the effect of the inherent toxins on the child.

This does not mean that infant milk substitutes might not be equally contaminated. A pathogenic bacterium, Enterobacter sakazakii which causes meningitis, has often been found in infant formula. It can enter food either through the raw materials required for production of the formula or while the formula-milk is being reconstituted, prior to feeding.

Globules of health
There is still a lot left to be known about how exactly breast milk is good for the infant, despite several studies. A study in the November issue of The Journal of Immunology showed that mothers' milk has antibodies protecting the newborn from infection. The August issue of Obesity showed children in Denmark who were breastfed for more than four months had 33 per cent lower risk of being overweight by the age of eight.

Researchers from the University of California in Davis and Nestle Research Centre in Switzerland tried to figure out the quality of milk that ensures that infants accumulate healthy subcutaneous fat instead of visceral fat around internal organs. These results, published in August in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, suggest that it is the way fat is packaged in breast milk.

Fat in breast milk is present as globules of varying sizes. The larger globules contain more triglycerides--cellular membrane components--than the smaller ones. The body of a breastfeeding infant needs the triglycerides to make new cells. However, milk that is processed for packaging as infant food is homogenized wherein the larger fat globules are broken down. This explains why children drinking breast milk would derive additional benefits.

Another study published in the same journal said certain sugars in the milk indicate mothers to have evolved to produce breast milk with the correct components that promote the growth of specific gut-dwelling bacteria good for the infant's health.

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