What Are The Benefits Of Breastfeeding

Breastfeeding is a method of feeding a baby with milk directly from the mother’s breast. Breastfeeding is a great way to start a child’s life. Breastfeeding has many benefits for mother, such as child spacing, postpartum weight loss, and reduction of ovarian and uterine cancer, and the emotional effects. Lactation is a natural process that begins with conception; it provides many short and long term benefits for the mother. After birth, the suckling that a baby does releases oxytocin from mother’s pituitary gland. Oxytocin signals the breast to release milk to the baby, which is known as milk ejection reflex, but at the same time produces contractions in the uterus. The ending contractions prevents postpartum hemorrhage and promote the return …show more content…
Breastfeeding mothers have an edge when it comes to losing weight that was gained during pregnancies. Production of milk is an active metabolic process, requiring the use of two hundred to five hundred calories a day. Women who have a history of gestational diabetes who also breastfeed will have lower blood sugar levels than mothers who do not breastfeed. Some women that have a higher chance of developing diabetes will lower due to the loss of weight from breastfeeding. Women who have type one diabetes before their pregnancy will need less insulin while they breastfeed because of their reduced sugar levels. The greatest weight loss, improved blood sugar control, and good cholesterol, due to the fact that women have high HDL cholesterol. All of these factors may have the effect of lower risks of heart problem, since women have a greater chance of heart problems than men. Ovarian and uterine caners are more common in women who do not breastfeed. This would be caused by the repeated ovulatory cycles and exposure to higher levels of estrogen from not breastfeeding. It is estimated that breastfeeding from six to twenty-four months throughout a mothers reproductive lifetime may reduce the risk of breast cancer by eleven to twenty-five percent. There are many physical effects, but there are also many emotional effects. Breastfeeding offers an interaction between a mother and child, the skin to skin closeness that bottle feeding mothers will have to try very hard to replicate. The baby’s suckling the breast produces a special hormone called prolactin. Prolactin is a milk making hormone but it creates a kind of calmness in women that