The long-term health benefits of being breastfed – lower cholesterol, lower risk of blood pressure and lower risk of obesity – are well known. The positive effects of breastfeeding on a child’s brain development are also well established but controversial because it can be hard to determine whether the intellectual benefits are from the breastfeeding itself or due to other social or genetic factors that the mother and child share.
What is less well-known are the economic benefits to the individual and to society.
Therefore, researchers looked at the impact of breastfeeding in 14,500 participants in Children of the 90s, a long-term health research project that has been charting the lives of those involved since the early 1990s.
They looked at participants who had achieved five GCSEs at grade C or above and divided the participants into three categories. Those who had never been breastfed, those who had been breastfed for up to six months and those who had been breastfed for more than six months.
They found that the children who had been breastfed for longer were more likely to achieve five good GCSEs. This remained the case even after a comprehensive range of factors were taken into account. These included the mother’s age and education, whether the mother had ever smoked and how many other children she had, as well as the baby’s weight at birth and the length of the pregnancy.
Among those who had achieved five good GCSEs, the researchers used current UK income statistics to calculate that the lifetime gross income for people who were breastfed as babies for six months or more was almost £8,800 higher than those who were never breastfed.
While this may seem a modest amount for an individual over an entire lifetime, the benefit to the 800,000 new babies born every year of a one per cent increase in breastfeeding rates, would be an estimated £33.6 million over their working lives.
Speaking about the findings, Dr Pauline Emmett, one of the report’s authors said:
On the basis of our findings, any publicly financed programmes to encourage breastfeeding that achieve an increase in breastfeeding rates would be highly cost-effective and should be supported. Our research has shown that in addition to the known health benefits of breastfeeding, it can also bring additional economic benefits to the individual and to society.