Health experts call for breastfeeding

Breastfeeding promotes healthy weight gain and helps prevent childhood obesity: Dr Azhar

ABBOTABAD:

Breast milk provides abundant and easily absorbed nutritional components, antioxidants, enzymes, immune properties and live anti-bodies from mother to child. A mother’s more mature immune system makes anti-bodies for the germs to which she and her baby have been exposed. These anti-bodies enter her milk to help protect her baby from illness.

This was the crux of the one-day seminar on Breast Cancer Awareness and Importance of Mother Feeding organised by a civil society organization, Stellar & Ray, at SOS village Dhodial.

Stellar & Ray CEO Dr Rabia Noor Azhar said breast milk provides ideal nutrition for babies as it contains everything a baby needs for the first six months of life, in all the right proportions. Its composition even changes according to the baby’s changing needs, especially during the first month of life.

She said it also reduces a baby’s risk for many illnesses and diseases including middle ear infections, throat, and sinus infections.

Dr Azhar said breastfeeding promotes healthy weight gain and helps prevent childhood obesity. Breastfeeding for longer than four months had a significant reduction in the chances of a baby becoming overweight and obesity, she concluded. Dr Azhar said in this disease cells in the breast grow out of control. Breast cancer can spread outside the breast area through blood vessels and lymph vessels. She advised women to undergo a test which is an X-ray picture of the breast and to consult a doctor if they have swelling in any part of the breast,

Published in The Express Tribune, July 27^th, 2021.