Getting your player ready...
Most doctors agree that breastfeeding is best for babies’ health. Now a large study suggests the practice benefits mothers as well: Women who have breast-fed, it says, are at lower risk than mothers who have not for developing high blood pressure, diabetes and cardiovascular disease decades later, when they are in menopause.
The benefits increase with duration of past breastfeeding, the study found. Even those postmenopausal women who had breast-fed for just one month in their lives had lower rates of diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol. The research, to be published in the May issue of the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology, analyzed data on some 139,681 women.
