Healing Our World: Weekly Comment

By Jackie Alan Giuliano, Ph.D.

Finally – Proof That Disconnection Harms

"If a child is to keep his inborn sense of wonder,
he needs the companionship of at least one adult
who can share it, rediscovering with him
the joy, excitement, and mystery
of the world we live in."
-- Rachel Carson

"I looked on child rearing not only as a work of love and duty but as a profession that was fully as interesting and challenging as any honorable profession in the world and one that demanded the best that I could bring to it." -- Rose Kennedy

Since the start of the Industrial Revolution a few hundred years ago, humans have become more and more separated from the natural world. While a clear connection has been shown between a diet based on processed food, loaded with pesticide residues and artificial chemicals, and life threatening diseases, it has been harder to prove that distancing ourselves from the cycles of life and the rhythms of nature also erodes our health. Finally, a study has been released that proves quite conclusively that ignoring the web of life and natural human development can kill.

For thousands of years on Earth, the size of the population was kept down by a combination of high infant mortality and spacing of births caused by the natural suppression of ovulation during the three to four years a woman would breastfeed her children. Lengthy breastfeeding was a very natural process and viewed as an important factor in the development, growth, and health of the child that would affect him or her for their entire life.

But over the last 100 years, breastfeeding for less than six months, if at all, has become a common phenomena in the developed world. In fact, women who gave birth in the 1950s were often advised that breast milk was not the best food for their babies and they were given injections to dry up their milk. The infant formula companies thrived during that era and became the multi-billion dollar industries that they are today.

The July 20, 2002 issue of “The Lancet” medical journal includes a report by a group of authors known as the Collaborative Group on Hormonal Factors in Breast Cancer at Oxford University in England. Their study has a remarkable conclusion - the more a woman breastfeeds her child, the more she is protected against breast cancer, even if her family is considered high risk genetically.

Breastfeeding mother (Photo courtesy Mommy-place.com)

If wildly publicized, this report could end the debate on the value of lengthy breastfeeding.

This landmark study was a collaborative re-analysis by 200 researchers from around the world of individual data from 47 epidemiological studies in 30 countries, including 50,302 women with breast cancer and 96,973 women without the disease. Experts have already said that these findings could explain the mysterious rise in breast cancer over the last 100 years. Environmental pollution is considered a factor as well by many other researchers.

One of the study’s findings was that for every year the women breastfed their babies, their risk of breast cancer decreased 4.3 percent. In the developed world, women breastfeed their children for an average of two or three months, if at all. Today, women in the developed world have a 6.3 percent chance of getting breast cancer by age 70 while women in lesser developed countries have a 2.7 percent risk.

The mechanization of the childbirth experience and the distancing of parents from childrearing, while prevalent in today’s developed world, started a long time ago when humans began settling down into cities and parents focused more and more on producing food and working.

Bottle feeding with the help of a baby bottle holder (Photo credit unknown)

Infant formula companies contribute to the reduction in breastfeeding around the world. Free formula samples are given out to women in the hospital, particularly in poorer countries. The convenience of infant formula is heavily promoted and children are often hooked on it before they leave the hospital. Once the free supplies run out, the woman’s milk is often dried up from lack of use and to get more formula, she must pay.

Polluted water supplies around the world contribute to the death of many formula fed babies.

While in the hospital for the birth of my son last year, we were given free formula samples, even though we made it clear that we wanted a natural childbirth. In the months that followed, we were deluged by mailings from the infant formula companies, encouraging us to use their products. We received at least 10 pounds of free formula in those mailings.

The power of infant formula companies cannot be underestimated. In 1995, Gerber Baby Foods Corporation used the World Trade Organization to suppress a Guatemalan law that encouraged mothers to breastfeed their children. Heavy marketing by the formula industry has contributed to a drop in breastfeeding rates in both the United States and lesser developed nations. Advertisers work hard to convince women that breastfeeding their baby isn’t modern and that bottle feeding is healthier, even though these assertions are unsupported medically.

Infant daycare, Huntington, Indiana (Photo courtesy Pathfinder Services)

I think we are going to be seeing more and more studies like the breastfeeding study in the coming years. We have polluted the Earth, extracted huge amounts of resources, and separated ourselves from its natural rhythms for hundreds of years and the impacts of those actions are now catching up with us.

Soon it may be undeniable, even by modern scientific standards, that disconnection harms not only the planet, but our lives and our souls.

RESOURCES 1. See the full article from “The Lancet” at: http://www.thelancet.com/home You will need to register to use the site, but access if free.

2. See a collection of articles about breastfeeding at: http://www.breastfeeding.org/bfarticles.html

3. Attachment Parenting International’s website has much information about the importance of lengthy breastfeeding at: http://www.attachmentparenting.org/

4. Keep track of legislation relating to breastfeeding at: http://www.supportbreastfeeding.com/

5. See the story about the suppression of breastfeeding encouragement in Guatemala at: http://www.projectcensored.org/stories/2001/15.html

6. Find out who your Congressional representatives are and e-mail them. Demand that they create sweeping federal legislation outlawing discrimination against lengthy breastfeeding and breastfeeding in public. If you know your Zip code, you can find them at: http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/ziptoit.html

{Jackie Alan Giuliano, Ph.D. is a writer and teacher in Seattle and the author of ""Healing Our World", A Journey from the Darkness Into the Light," available at: http://www.xlibris.com/HealingOurWorld.html or your local bookstore. Please send your thoughts, comments, and visions to him at: jackie@healingourworld.com and visit his web site at: http://www.healingourworld.com}