BMJ  2003;327:904-905 (18 October), doi:10.1136/bmj.327.7420.904

Paper

Breast feeding and obesity in childhood: cross sectional study

¹ Centre for Paediatric Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Institute of Child Health, London WC1N 1EH

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Introduction

The evidence that breast feeding protects against obesity is inconclusive: some studies show a protective effect¹ and others find no effect.^{2 3} Confounding factors may account for these inconsistencies. We used data from the offspring of the 1958 British birth cohort to assess whether breast feeding influences body mass index and obesity in childhood.

Methods and results

We used data from a randomly selected sample (n = 2584) of the members of the 1958 British birth cohort who had children by 1991.⁴ Information was collected on their offspring. Of 3077 children aged 4-18 years, we included 2631 children (1293 girls and 1338 boys from 1768 families; average age 8 years) for whom data on duration of breast feeding, body mass index, and confounding factors were available.

Body mass index (weight (kg)/(height (m)²)) was standardised relative to the 1990 British growth reference,⁵ and obesity was defined as a standard deviation score > 1.64 (95th . . . [Full text of this article]

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