I was just updating my lectures on diabetes and obesity when I came across some interesting studies on why it is so important that infants with a family history of diabetes and obesity be breastfed exclusively as long as possible. Infants born with certain alleles are influenced by certain environmental experiences including breastfeeding (or lack thereof). In the study below, breastfeeding appeared to counter the deleterious effect of the PPARG2 Pro12Ala polymorphism on anthropometric parameters in adolescents. That is, adolescents who were carriers of an allele that put them at high risk for overweight and obesity and were not breastfed were significantly heavier than those children who had been breastfed.



Verier C, et al.Breast-feeding modulates the influence of the peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor-gamma (PPARG2) Pro12Ala polymorphism on adiposity in adolescents: The Healthy Lifestyle in Europe by Nutrition in Adolescence (HELENA) cross-sectional study. Diabetes Care. 2010 Jan;33(1):190-6. 

One of the publications from the TRIGR study (funded by Mead Johnson) showed that an enhanced humoral immune response to various CM proteins in infancy is seen in a subgroup of those children who later progress to T1D. Accordingly, a dysregulated immune response to oral antigens is an early event in the pathogenesis of T1D. The infants were at increased risk for diabetes, had been breastfed and then weaned onto cow's milk based formula or a hydolyzed formula.

Luopajärvi K, et al. Enhanced levels of cow's milk antibodies in infancy in children who develop type 1 diabetes later in childhood. Pediatr Diabetes. 2008 Oct;9(5):434-41.

Some of the concerning things about so many of the studies on breastfeeding, formula feeding, diabetes, and obesity is how breastfeeding is so differently defined in each study and how some don't use the exclusively breastfed infant as the control group.

Marsha Walker, RN, IBCLC
Weston, MA
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