I think the difficulty in much of the research on breastfeeding and diabetes
is that the numbers of babies who are exclusively breastfed is so small.
When I attended a meeting of the local diabetic association, parents were
being told that breastfeeding or bottlefeeding made no difference. This was
based on a North American retrospective study, where they looked at children
who developed diabetes and found that as many were breastfed as were
bottlefed. This annoyed me tremendously, because it was obvious to me that
this was bad research. Very, very few breastfed babies in North America do
not get formula or cow's milk at some point during their first year. So you
are really comparing babies who had some formula/cow's milk with babies who
had all formula/cow's milk, and it seems that even a small amount of foreign
milk may trigger the process that leads to diabetes. What we need is a study
that compares babies who had only breastmilk, no cow's milk or formula at
all, for at least twelve months (with perhaps some solids added in the
latter half of the first year), with other babies.

Teresa Pitman
Guelph, Ontario

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