One of the advantages of a baby being breastfed, compared to one that is not, is that the risk of obesity in adulthood is less. Breastfed babies tend to gain a little less weight than those who drink artificial milk and you can not say that feed less, but quite the opposite: those who take a bottle they overweight because artificial milk contains more protein and has not yet managed to get babies to gain the same weight as with the natural diet of a lifetime.
However, it happens sometimes that some baby who drinks breast milk gets too fat, or more than what is expected by the type of food he receives, and then there are concerns: that if he is not getting too fat, that if it should be given less frequently or even that it could be good for him switch to artificial milk. Is that so? Is that what needs to be done? Does something happen if a baby gets too fat with breast milk?
Babies who gain a lot from breast milk
Surely you know some, or perhaps you are the mothers or fathers of one of them. They only take tit, on demand, as recommended, and they gain weight that they give fear. I have seen babies earn 500 grams every week, and see that they soon became like real bulls: big, chubby and full of folds.
A few weeks ago, in the magazine Journal of Human Lactation They talked about one of these babies, who gained a lot of weight up to 6 months, with exclusive breastfeeding, and who She continued breastfeeding and complementary feeding even though doctors recommended that she stop breastfeeding., because I got fat (then we go with this, which has crumb). For another eight months, the baby continued to increase at a similar rate, always being in percentiles above 97.
Above 97? But that's too much! You will think. And yes, it leaves the tables above, so you should also assess the height. Apparently, the baby was also very tall, and also left the tables in stature. The bottom line is that he was simply a big baby. Very tall and very heavy because it was large constitution. Do you mean that you will be a very large adult? Well it depends ... it is very possible, but it can also happen that then the growth slows down and gets closer to the average.
Babies who gain a lot of weight have a higher risk of obesity
So is. Babies who gain more weight than they should, like many who drink artificial milk, because of its high protein concentration, have a higher risk of obesity in adulthood. Apparently, the more an infant grows and fattens in childhood, more fat cells create (cells that accumulate fat). After childhood, the number of fat cells does not vary and then the differences in weight are produced by the fat accumulated in these cells. If you gain weight, they get bigger. If weight is lost, they decrease. From this it is extracted that the more cells are created during childhood, the more easily a person will have to gain weight in adulthood, as more fat cells will have.
But weight gain is multifactorial
Now, what a baby or another gains in weight cannot be determined solely and exclusively by the milk he drinks. It is better for a baby not to gain so much weight for so long, but if you do it with breast milk it is clear that you will also do it with artificial milk (Probably, for the amount of protein, you would earn a little more). Therefore, although this mother was recommended to leave the breast and go to the bottle, the result would have been the same with a great inconvenience: the baby would have stopped receiving the immune protection provided by breast milk.
Something similar we see when a baby does not gain the weight that the pediatrician considers he should gain and tells the mother to take the baby's breast to give him a bottle. If the baby is eating well, if you breastfeed what you need, the change does not bring any benefit because artificial milk has the same calories as breast milk. Bottle is given, breast milk is removed and it turns out that it does not gain more weight, but follows the same trend (perhaps something more for proteins, but far from the change expected by the pediatrician). Outcome? Than have breastfed without need.
What they should have done is assess if the baby was really eating less, because if he eats on demand, he is satiated and is not irritable by hunger, the change is absurd. And if so, if you are eating less than you need, then you have to look for the reason, because If you solve the reason you avoid the bottle. It can be a problem in the suction, a problem of the mother, that produces little milk due to some hormonal alteration or problem during childbirth, or it may be that the baby has a problem (such as a urine infection) that does not let him gain weight .
Babies who gain a lot up to 4-6 months and then slow down
But not everyone is like the baby we have commented. The usual thing, what usually happens with babies who gain a lot of breast milk and are planted with 4 months weighing more than 7 or 8 kilos is that then start braking. They stop gaining so much weight and little by little they are being reached by other children who did not come so big.
That's why you don't have to do anything before or after. Neither try to eat less, telling the mother something as absurd as "feed him on schedule," or say "bottle feed" (because if you look, it seems that the bottle is the solution to everything, whether you earn little as if he earns a lot). Must keep breastfeeding on demand and then, when you start eating the complementary food, continue feeding on demand (both the chest and the food).
I myself had a baby, the middle one, who despite being born prematurely began to gain weight in an exaggerated way. Every week it was 250 to 300 grams, without stopping, and there were mornings that when we saw him wake up we were scared because it seemed that he had given a wide stretch that night. At 4 months he weighed more than 7 kilos and they started telling us that he was eating too much. Well, after 6 months he stopped gaining so much weight and began to slow down and slow down, to a point where he did not reach 9 kilos a year of life: "Luckily, as a baby he took so much weight"The same pediatrician told us to suggest that he eat less.
So when a mom comes to the office worried because her baby is getting too fat, I say the same thing: "Calm down ... it is possible that she will stop getting fat so much and then we will say 'thankfully she took so much baby'".
What if I gained too much, but too much, always?
If the baby always fattened excessively, and grew a lot, in an exaggerated way, it would be necessary to find out where the problem is. Again, changing one milk for another would not make a difference, so you should look for the factor that made you get so fat (hormonal alteration probably).
So if your baby is one of those that makes a lot of baby fat and they recommend that you start feeding him early or change your milk, don't pay attention because it doesn't make sense.
