Breastfeeding good for mother and child

Breast milk is best for every newborn, there is no doubt about that. Breastfeeding also has benefits for the mother herself. Those who breastfeed lose excess weight faster. In the months your baby is exclusively breastfed, you yourself burn nearly 600 extra calories a day. Thanks to breastfeeding, you also run a lower risk of breast cancer. The protective effect is modest: your risk decreases by 4% if you breastfeed for one year. If you breastfeed for 2 years, your risk decreases by 8%. In Flanders, only 36.1% of children are still breastfed at 6 months. Even in Brussels and Wallonia, the number of newborns breastfed within 6 months drops below half. Breastfeeding is promoted throughout the country and thanks to these efforts, most newborns started on breast milk.

In developing countries, women have more children and babies are breastfed longer, on average 2 years per child. They also have a much lower age at which women have their first child than we do. The number of children, age of your first child, choosing to breastfeed and duration of breastfeeding reduce the risk of breast cancer. It is the combination of these four factors that explains why breast cancer is so much less common in developing countries.

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