Anne, I have had similar questions -- in particular from my local
pediatrician (sigh).
My response has been to photocopy and have, ready for immediate handing over
on the spot, Jack Newman's very extensive bibliography on the risk of
artificial feeding. It just goes on and on for pages, the doubting thomases
are usually pretty taken aback by it.
When I have more time to marshall my resources I also often photocopy a
couple of particularly impressive individual abstracts -- studies with big
samples, dramatic results, fancy peer-review publications, etc. There's a
tremendous amount to choose from. For example, this one:
Association between breast feeding and asthma in 6 year old children:
findings of a prospective birth cohort study. Oddy WH, Holt PG, Sly PD, Read
AW, Landau LI, Stanley FJ, Kendall GE, Burton PR. TVW Telethon Institute for
Child Health Research, West Perth, Western Australia, Australia 6872. BMJ
1999 Sep 25;319(7213):815-9
involved over 2000 kids, in Perth -- a nice sample and a first-world
environment by anybody's standards, I'd think, and a real respectable, e.g.,
medical, journal.
This one's good, too, for impressing pediatricians:
Breast-feeding and risk of childhood acute leukemia. Shu XO, Linet MS,
Steinbuch M, Wen WQ, Buckley JD, Neglia JP, Potter JD, Reaman GH, Robison LL.
Division of Pediatric Epidemiology and Clinical Research, University of
Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA. J Natl Cancer Inst 1999 Oct 20;91(20):1765-72
Included upwards of 4000 kids, roughly half with various kinds of leukemia
and half healthy controls without, and found the sick kids much more likely
to have been never-breastfed. And it comes out of the cancer research
community, it's not, as these folks like to scoff, an anecdote from LLL.
[don't flame me folks, that's in the scoffer's voice, not mine.]
I find words like "leukemia," are much more impressive when uttered with
really big sample-size studies held in the hand of the person saying the word.
I found these and lots more by just searching pubmed on "bf and cancer," "bf
and asthma," "bf and diabetes," etc etc, and reading what came up, it itself
an education which I highly recommend to anyone who had not yet experienced
it.
Warmly, Elisheva
Elisheva Urbas, bf chatterbox in NYC
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