Dear Friends: Today I gave a presentation to a group of endocrinology fellows about the connection between formula feeding, obesity/overweight and diabetes. They were an ideal audience, attentive, thoughtful and polite. (I am always a bit anxious about talking to an audience of physicians, but so far now, each time has been fabulous.) Several people wondered about a baby's ability to self-regulate intake if the baby is ingesting mother's milk in a bottle. There are studies (Fisher, J Am Diet Assoc. 2000 Jun;100(6):641-6 ¡Possible mechanisms include learned self-regulation of energy intake, metabolic programming in early life, and residual confounding by parental attributes. JHL 2003 19(1):9-18 and "Does maternal control during feeding moderate early infant weight gain?"PEDIATRICS Vol. 118 No. 2 August 2006, pp. e293-e298 (doi:10.1542/peds.2005-2919 .............to name but a few) that talk about this learned self-regulation as a protective factor against obesity/overweight. I don't know that anyone has looked at mother's milk in a bottle and infant self-regulation. I speculated that a mother returning to school or paid employment will breastfeed before she goes back, and will breastfeed at night and on weekends so that might mitigate the impact of using a bottle. But I do not know for certain about this. Does anyone? warmly, Nikki Lee RN, MS, Mother of 2, IBCLC, CIMI, CCE ________________________________________________________________________ AOL now offers free email to everyone. Find out more about what's free from AOL at AOL.com. *********************************************** Archives: http://community.lsoft.com/archives/LACTNET.html Mail all commands to [log in to unmask] To temporarily stop your subscription: set lactnet nomail To start it again: set lactnet mail (or [log in to unmask]) To unsubscribe: unsubscribe lactnet or ([log in to unmask]) To reach list owners: [log in to unmask]