Breastfeeding beyond nine months increases risk of allergies

Everyone has learnt by now that breast-feeding gives babies the best start in life but new researches show that breastfeeding over nine months is not as beneficial.

While breast feeding for up to six months protects babies from allergies like eczema and asthma, breastfeeding over nine months put babies at risk of developing allergies.

The research started twenty years ago when Finish scientists asked 200 mothers to breast-feed their newborn children for as long as possible. The children were then assessed after five, eleven and twenty years. Children who were breastfed for more than nine months were found to be more prone to allergic conditions like eczema and food hypersensitivity.

Children who developed allergies after prolonged breastfeeding did so during the first years of life. More than fifty percent of the children who had family history of allergies and were breastfed longer than 9 months developed allergies until they were five while only one-fifth of those who had been breastfed for two to six months suffered from the same.

I think that study is bunk. Unless you can back that up with more information I would go with the extensive studies done in the US and Europe that say that breastfeeding continues to be good for the baby (and allergies etc.) well past the 9 month mark.

I am also highly skeptical about this. I am vegan and am raising my daughter that way. I believe wholeheartedly in letting nature take its course, and Billie was fully breastfed up until nearly eleven months of age purely by her own choice. I offered food from six months but she was never interested, until one day she was! She is in the 99th percentile for weight (not that I particularly care!) and is thriving for all to see. What a ridiculous notion that breastmilk could be detrimental to our childrens' health. Why on earth do we produce it? I would be curious to hear if the children in this study who were weaned at 2 - 6 months were given formula or cows' milk instead. Could anyone really logically believe that could be better than mother's milk? Cow's milk is for calves, who have four stomachs to digest it, and weigh an awful lot more than our precious little ones...thank goodness!

Unless I'm looking at the wrong study, this was based on infants who were fed EXCLUSIVELY on breast milk up to nine months. Most babies are interested in at least some solid food by then.