Breast feeding won't halt obesity, report says

ATLANTA -- While breast-feeding has many benefits, it won't prevent a child from becoming fat as an adult, says a new report that challenges dogma from U.S. health officials.

The research is the largest study to date on breast-feeding and its effect on adult obesity.

"I'm the first to say breast-feeding is good. But I don't think it's the solution to reducing childhood or adult obesity," said the study's lead author, Karin Michels of Harvard Medical School.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention promotes breast-feeding as a way to reduce children's excess weight, and the guidelines for federal chronic-disease prevention grants to states call for breast-feeding promotion.

A CDC official said he couldn't comment on the new research because he hadn't fully reviewed it. But many previous studies have linked breast-feeding and lower rates of childhood obesity, he noted.

The Harvard study, published online this week in the International Journal of Obesity, involved nearly 14,500 women who were breast-fed as infants and more than 21,000 who were not.

In 1989, the women were asked their height and weight and what those measurements were when they were children and at age 18. Then every two years, through 2001, they were asked to update their weight information.

The surveyed women were all between 25 and 42 at the time of the 1989 questionnaires, Michels said.

Women who were breast-fed had a risk of being overweight or obese that was nearly identical to that of women who were bottle-fed, the study found.

The duration of breast-feeding didn't seem to make a difference.