About 80% of women breastfeed their newborns for a short amount of time, but that number decreases as milk production falls off. Derby Informer reports that researchers are investigating why this usually happens in women suffering from obesity as they focus on chronic inflammation as the main culprit.
The US Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2020-2025 [PDF-30.6MB] recommend that newborns up to six months should be exclusively breastfed with continued breastfeeding until complementary foods are introduced for 1 year or longer. Meanwhile, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the World Health Organization also recommend the same with continued breastfeeding up to 2 years of age or older.
How Obesity Affects Milk Production
Previous studies have shown that chronic inflammation begins in the fat and spreads to organs and systems throughout the body when a person is obese. Unfortunately, that inflammation disrupts the absorption of fatty acids into body tissues. Fatty acids are the building blocks of fats needed for a growing infant.
Study lead author Rachel Walker, a postdoctoral fellow in nutritional sciences at Penn State University, said that there is a strong connection between fatty acids in foods a person eats and in their blood. For instance, someone who eats salmon will have omega-3 in their blood and someone who eats hamburgers will have saturated fats in their blood.
The study, titled "Fatty Acid Transfer from Blood to Milk Is Disrupted in Mothers with Low Milk Production, Obesity, and Inflammation" published in The Journal of Nutrition, is one of the first research to examine whether fatty acids in the blood can also be found in breast milk.
In the study, researchers analyzed the blood and milk of 23 mothers at Cincinnati Children's Hospital and the University of Cincinnati who had very little milk despite frequent breast emptying. Mothers with very little milk have obesity and biological markers of systemic inflammation compared to other mothers.
Fatty Acids in Blood and Breast Milk
Mothers who are exclusively breastfeeding their children have a very high correlation between fatty acids in their blood and the breast milk they produce, Med India reported.
But when they are experiencing chronic inflammation due to obesity, they struggle to produce enough milk and the link was gone. This is strong evidence that fatty acids are unable to enter the mammary gland in women with chronic inflammation.
For many years, studies have shown that obese mothers are at an increased risk of shortened breastfeeding duration. The new study provides more clues about the mechanisms that may lead to this result. The findings could lead to better strategies or treatments that allow mothers to breastfeed their children more.
Breastfeeding has health benefits for both mothers and children as it can protect them from certain illnesses. According to the CDC, the five great benefits of breastfeeding include giving babies the best source of nutrition, protecting mothers and infants from infections, sharing antibodies with the baby, allowing mothers to feed their babies anytime, and reducing a mother's risk of chronic diseases.
RELATED ARTICLE: Babies with Longer Breastfeeding Duration Found to Have Better Cognitive Skills, New Study Suggests
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