Dr Stuart Ritchie
speaker
14 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2015
last heard Mar 2015
Dr Stuart Ritchie’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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I think there's a major problem with any study of breastfeeding and intelligence that doesn't measure the intelligence of the parents of the child.
The reason for that is that it's a major confounding factor.
It's a bit like saying parents who have more books in their house tend to have more intelligent children and it's the books that cause that.
Well, it might just be that more intelligent parents tend to have more books in their house and they pass on their genes, which give them higher intelligence, to their children.
So it's actually not that the books, or in this case, the breastfeeding is causing higher intelligence.
It's just correlated with it.
So they've tried to control for maternal intelligence by just looking at how many years they stayed in school.
But that's not the same thing as actually giving the parents an intelligence test.
A review study that came out a couple of years ago that systematically reviewed all the studies right across the world that have ever been done on breastfeeding and intelligence concluded that the relationship is probably due to confounding by either social class or the cognitive abilities of the parents.
Breastfeeding doesn't relate to intelligence.
I should say that this doesn't mean that you shouldn't breastfeed or that we should stop recommending mothers to breastfeed their kids.
Breastfeeding has lots of other clearer benefits for child development and
the immune system and so on.
These are areas that I'm not expert in, but if you're just breastfeeding to give your child a higher intelligence test score, then you might want to rethink that.
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