[Advantages of breast feeding (author's transl)]

Abstract

The advantages of breast feeding are due to numerous factors i.e. the favourable composition of basic nutritives, the content of nucleotides, polyamines, rare fatty acids and rare oligo- and polysaccharides in human milk, its high content of immunologically active substances like immunoglobulins, fats, glycoproteins, lysozyme and lactoferrin, and the psychologically important opportunity for close sensual contact between mother and infant. Involution of the uterus is greatly accelerated by breast feeding. In case the mother has to take certain drugs her breast feeding can be disadvantageous for the infant. At present, we do not see any reason to recommend discontinuation of breast feeding because of the relatively high DDT content found in human milk, since the concentration observed has shown no toxic effects. Furthermore a decrease of DDT concentration in human milk has been observed recently.