Breastfeeding Benefits Mothers Health

Most people are aware of the benefits of breastfeeding for babies, but the many benefits to the mother are often overlooked or even unknown. From helping mothers lose weight, to long term health advantages such as optimal metabolic profiles and reduced risk of various cancers, to the warm emotional gains, breastfeeding gives a mother many reasons to be pleased with her choice. One of the best-kept secrets about breastfeeding is that it's as healthy for mothers as for babies. Let's look at all the benefits breastfeeding provides mothers .

Physiologic Effects of Breastfeeding

Immediately after birth, the repeated suckling of the baby releases oxytocin from the mother's pituitary gland. This hormone not only signals the breasts to release milk to the baby (this is known as the milk ejection reflex, or "let-down"), but simultaneously produces contractions in the uterus. The resulting contractions prevent postpartum hemorrhage and promote uterine involution (the return to a nonpregnant state).

Breastfeeding and Pregnancy

As for fertility, the lactational amenorrhea method (LAM) is a well-documented contraceptive method, with 98 to 99 percent prevention of pregnancy in the first six months. The natural child-spacing achieved through LAM ensures the optimal survival of each child, and the physical recovery of the mother between pregnancies. In contrast, the bottle-feeding mother needs to start contraception within six weeks of the birth.

Long-Term Breastfeeding Health Benefits

It is now becoming clear that breastfeeding provides mothers with more than just short-term benefits in the early period after birth. A number of studies have shown other potential health advantages that mothers can enjoy through breastfeeding. These include:

• Optimal metabolic profiles and weight loss: Production of milk is an active metabolic process, requiring the use of 200 to 500 calories per day, on average. To use up this many calories, a bottlefeeding mother would have to swim at least 30 laps in a pool or bicycle uphill for an hour daily. Clearly, breastfeeding mothers have an edge on losing weight gained during pregnancy. Studies have also confirmed that nonbreastfeeding mothers lose less weight and don't keep it off as well as breastfeeding.
• Breastfeeding and diabetes: The above weight loss finding is particularly important for mothers who have had diabetes during their pregnancies, as mothers with a history of gestational diabetes who breastfeed have lower blood sugars than nonbreastfeeding mothers and for these women who are already at increased risk of developing diabetes the optimal weight loss from breastfeeding may translate into a decreased risk of diabetes in later life.
• Reduced risk of various cancers: Non-breastfeeding mothers have been shown in numerous studies to have a higher risk of reproductive cancers. Ovarian and uterine cancers have been found to be more common in women who did not breastfeed. This may be due to the repeated ovulatory cycles and exposure to higher levels of estrogen from not breastfeeding. Although numerous studies have looked at the relationship between breastfeeding and breast cancer, the results have been conflictingl largely due to flaws in study design and lack of uniform definition of breastfeeding, resulting in difficulty comparing the data. Despite this, it is now estimated that breastfeeding from six to 24 months throughout a mother's reproductive lifetime may reduce the risk of breast cancer by 11 to 25 percent (Lyde 1989; Newcomb 1994).
• Psychological benefits of breastfeedung: How do you measure the peace of mind of having a healthy baby who is developing optimally? Where do you factor in the financial burden of formula prices and increased medical costs? There is much more to breastfeeding than the provision of optimal nutrition and protection from disease through mother's milk. Breastfeeding provides a unique interaction between mother and child, an automatic, skin-to-skin closeness and nurturing that bottle-feeding mothers have to work to replicate. This calming effect is hard to measure in a society largely unsupportive of breastfeeding such as the United States, where breastfeeding beyond the early weeks is not the norm.