Breastfeeding: Understanding How It Helps Your Baby’s Brain Development
Proper nutrition is crucial for your baby’s optimal brain development and growth. The best source of it is breast milk, the milk that is naturally produced by a mother. Before an infant can swallow and digest solid foods, it serves as the primary supply of nutrition that is fed to the growing child.
Breastfeeding is so important to a child’s health that it is recommended by health institutions, including the World Health Organization (WHO), to nursing mothers for the nourishment of their newborn babies.
Omega-3 Fats in Breast Milk Can Make Your Child Smarter
Omega-3 fats are natural components of breast milk. They are essential nutrients, which ensure the baby’s maximum brain development and reduce the risk of autism, ADHD and other conditions in your child.
Recently, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has confirmed that the Omega-3 fat supply in breast milk does have beneficial effects for the brain and eyes of babies.
Docosahexaeneoic acid (DHA), a type of long-chain omega-3 fatty acid, especially promotes your baby’s intelligence. It consists most of the brain: 15 to 20 percent of the cerebral cortex and 30 to 60 percent of the retina, which explains why it is so vital to a child’s normal development.
In particular, DHA helps improve your baby’s health in terms of:
- • Ability to concentrate and focus
- • Cognitive function
- • Muscle control and coordination
- • Good mental health
- • Normal social development
- • Appropriate behavior
- • Visual acuity
Based on several studies, DHA has been shown to make breast-fed infants more intelligent than those fed with formulas that lack this fat.
Why Omega-3 Supplementation Is Important
When breastfeeding, the health of the baby, as you would expect, depends much on his or her mother’s health. That’s why in order to provide adequate levels of Omega-3 fats to the baby, of course the mother should also be properly nourished. One thing she can do is to keep a diet that has these essential fats, which are derived from fish and other seafood.
“Unfortunately, the vast majority of our fish supply is now so heavily contaminated with industrial pollutants and toxins like mercury, PCBs, heavy metals and radioactive poisons that I just can’t recommend it any longer,” says Dr. Joseph Mercola, a natural health expert.
Even with such a fish-based diet, he goes on to say that most people, including pregnant women, are still deficient in safe, “high-quality, animal-based” omega-3 fat supplement.
As a solution, Dr. Mercola recommends that mothers turn to omega-3 supplementation to help them obtain healthy levels of this fat. A superior supplement like Krill oil, which is rich in omega-3 fats like DHA and Eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), will provide the necessary high levels of nutrients that mothers need for producing healthy breast milk for their babies.
To learn more on how to boost your child’s intelligence, browse through this site to read more articles.














[...] Start early by breastfeeding your child. “Breast-fed kids have huge lifetime health advantages over formula-fed babies. You will never again have the [...]