You know I find this thread a bit depressing - given that these responses are mostly from women who are graduates.
It really drives home for me the true degree of misunderstanding about research into breastfeeding.
The comments about being intelligent, despite not being breastfed as a baby (oh the irony!) If anyone here had actually read the research and not just relied on reports of it that they'd stumbled across in their copy of the Daily Mail they'd know that it seems to show that for the majority of the population (because not everyone is genetically 'programmed' to benefit from the IQ boosting powers of breastmilk) being breastfed gives approximately 6 additional IQ points. That means it gives you a slight extra 'edge' in IQ terms over what you would have had, had you not been breastfed. In other words - it won't make someone who's intrinsically thick, bright.
Can we be logical about this for a minute? Is the IQ boost that comes with breastfeeding something you as an individual could perceive? Of course not - unless you could live your entire life again in exactly the same way, with the single difference of how you were fed as an infant. And probably not then either - unless you had your IQ formally tested and could compare test results.
As for all the other things...... The vast majority of adults in their 30's and 40's in this country describe their health as 'good' despite the fact that many actually have very unhealthy lifestyles, and despite the fact that approximately a fifth were exposed to cigarette smoking in the womb. Does this mean that prenatal smoking, poor diets and lack of exercise don't have a signficant impact on health?
And would six months of exclusive breastfeeding have given you better health in childhood and adulthood? Yes. You would have a different distribution of body fat. Your IQ would be slightly higher, your blood pressure slightly lower, your arteries slightly less stiff. As a child you would have been likely to have had fewer trivial infections and doctors appoinments (although the likelyhood is you still would have had some). Would you be able to perceive this benefit as an individual? No - no more than you'd be able to see or feel the benefits of having an optimal diet in childhood (which many of us have not had).
We all know that a large minority of children in this country are being raised on diets high in saturated fat and refined carbohydrates and low in fresh fruit and vegetables. I challenge ANYONE to identify which children have these diets based on an examination of their individual health records. Does that mean that these children wouldn't benefit from a balanced diet? Of course it doesn't? That's the whole point of doing research using large samples and strict controls. Without this research we wouldn't have known that smoking in pregnancy is bad - doctors used to even recommend it to women because the health affects on babies weren't noticable to the individual. Yes some babies of smokers were born with low birthweights, but there can be so many reasons for this - not just smoking. The majority of babies born to smokers are seem perfectly healthy, although research tells us that smoking, particularly in early pregnancy DOES damage fetuses.
Diseases such as coeliac, crohns and diabetes, which have been linked to a lack of breastfeeding are actually not very common and in any case, once again there's no simple cause and affect mechanism at play that would make it possible for us as individuals to identify the role of infant feeding in the development of these illnesses - hence the need for large scale research with proper controls.
I also think that someone needs to point out that when you look at the research that shows significant differences between the health of populations of ff and bf the really striking differences, particularly when it comes to things like gastric illness and respitory infections, are between EXCLUSIVELY breastfed babies and formula fed babies. Now only a tiny minority of bf babies in the UK today are TRULY exclusively breastfed - ie, no formula at all, from birth. And if that's true of babies today it must have been an even smaller minority of babies who were exclusively breastfed in the 1960's, 70's and 80's. Those of us born in those decades were also much more likely to have been weaned onto solids before 12 weeks as well - something that's also implicated in the development of diabetes, coeliac and crohns disease, as well as respitory illness, diarrheoa and obesity.
So basically, in a very long winded way the point I'm trying to make is that threads like this are COMPLETELY pointless and tell us NOTHING. In fact - they tell us less than nothing because they distort our understanding of the true complexity of the relationship between infant nutrition and child and adult health.