Carlos, I know the study you mean.  I can't remember if it was the Lancet or the
BMJ.  This is part of on-going research looking at diet and health, which has
shown some interesting effects eg it's important that babies are well nourished
in utero, both for themselves and for their babies.  They are (I believe ) now
finding in Holland that the babies of mothers born during the 1944/45 period
when Holland's people were desparately short of food are having problems,
whereas the babies born to the mothers who were starving are OK - is this right?


The research Carlos mentions came up again recently because of the
pacifier/intelligence/breastfeeding paper in the Lancet.  The cohort are
English, in their 60's and 70's, and they use the individuals they can trace in
conjunction with their Health Visitor records of them as babies which are
unusual in that they exist at all!  I agree whole heartedly with Carlos general
comments about retrospective research of this kind.  Specifically, I recall that
the main conclusion was that poor weight gain in the first year of life was a
marker for ischaemic heart disease in later life.  It happened that a fair
number of babies who were breastfed at 1 year came into that category.  Does
that mean that the breastfeeding is to blame?  Or are there other factors - for
example could it be that a proportion of the breastfed babies were being given
inadequate solids due to poverty?  Who knows?  Anyway the research caused a
scare in the UK at the time.

Mary Broadfoot, Scotland