Editorial: Sustaining breastfeeding

WITH MORE FEELINGS. Families and communities must practice and promote breastfeeding, specially with few Filipino children receiving the Minimum Acceptable Diet and increasingly vulnerable to illnesses. (File Foto)
WITH MORE FEELINGS. Families and communities must practice and promote breastfeeding, specially with few Filipino children receiving the Minimum Acceptable Diet and increasingly vulnerable to illnesses. (File Foto)

THE complex balancing act Filipino parents carry out to bring family and career in equilibrium may put to test the practice of sustaining exclusive breastfeeding (EBF) throughout the first six months of an infant’s life.

To optimize the health of mother and child, the World Health Organization (WHO) advocates that an infant receives only breast milk during the first six months of life. According to its official website who.int, the WHO recommends that a mother nurses “up to two years and beyond” and supplements breastmilk with “nutritionally adequate and safe complementary foods” to meet the demands of her growing child.

In 2018, there was a timely initiation of breastfeeding in the Philippines, with 69.2 percent of the infants aged 0 to 23 months being breastfed within an hour of their birth.

However, as the babies grew older, there was a decline in the percentage of those still being exclusively breastfed, with EBF benefiting 65 percent of the infants aged 0 months; 57 percent of those aged one month; 68.6 percent of those aged two months; 57.2 percent of those aged three months; 51.3 percent of those aged four months; and only 29 percent of those at five months.

These are the major messages culled from the 2018 Expanded National Nutrition Survey (ENNS) presented during the 2019 National Nutrition Summit last June 25. The NNS, the most recent conducted in 2013, is the basis for the Food and Nutrition Research Institute (FNRI) of the Department of Science and Technology (DoST) to assess the country’s state of nutrition.

Mothers breastfeed fewer babies as they grow older. According to the ENNS, 50.6 percent of babies aged one year were breastfeed in 2018. In the same period, only 33.1 percent of two-year-old babies were nursed by their mothers.

The decreasing dependence on breastmilk for their growing children should impel Filipino parents, families, health professionals and women and child advocates to reexamine the current campaign for infant and young child feeding because the 2018 ENNS shows that only 13.4 percent of Filipino children aged 6-23 months meet the Minimum Acceptable Diet.

According to the FNRI-DoST, the Minimum Acceptable Diet is the “proportion of children 6-23 months meeting both the minimum dietary diversity and the minimum meal frequency to ensure both dietary and nutrient adequacy.”

Only four percent of children aged 6-11 months receive the Minimum Acceptable Diet compared to the 21.7 percent of those aged 18-23 months who do so. In terms of economic standing, 18.9 percent of the children born to the richest families receive the Minimum Acceptable Diet, in contrast with 11.7 percent of the children of the poorest families.

What are the implications of these findings? “Complementary feeding is suboptimal,” points out the FNRI-DoST. As a consequence, stunting is high among young children, doubling when the child turns one-year-old and shifts to complementary feeding.

Anemia is also high among infants aged 6-11 months, according to the 2018 ENNS.

Given the importance of the nutritional and health status of the early years to a child’s growth and development, parents, grandparents and other family members must support and sustain the practice of breastfeeding, particularly the EBF for the first six months of an infant’s life.

According to the WHO, breast milk is complete, cheap and safe, nourishing the infant with all the nutrients needed for the first six months and providing protection from diarrhea, pneumonia and later-stage obesity; helping the parents cope with the additional expenses entailed by a new member of the family; and benefiting society through the initiation of good health and productivity with long-term consequences and economic impact.

While knowledge about the benefits of breastfeeding is high, sustaining breastfeeding remains to challenge the family and the community that must act for the optimization of a resource that is free, accessible, and sustainable.

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