5 ms·
While the article does acknowledge that the study only shows correlation and not causation, it doesn't suggest what seems to me the most intuitively obvious alt
by sjwright 12y ago
While the article does acknowledge that the study only shows correlation and not causation, it doesn't suggest what seems to me the most intuitively obvious alternative hypothesis.
We know that increased rates of mental stimuli and social interaction are beneficial to a growing brain. Perhaps breastfeeding correlates with parents that have more free time to interact with their child.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- learc83 12y agoResearchers have considered your hypothesis. There have been many attempts to eliminate confounding variables in these studies (this doesn't mean that they were necessarily successful in doing so, but they did think about it). Often they attempt to control for differences in parenting styles, which should cover how much time they spend interacting with their child. Also until 6-10 months, babies can't hold their own bottles, so someone is probably still interacting with them (unless you prop up the bottle and leave the baby alone, which is possible but not recommended).
- sjwright 12y agoBottles can be held by disinterested third parties. Boobs rarely can.
- vitobcn 12y agoThe actual paper contains much more information than this BBC article. I'm not sure why they didn't link to it, but here is the original paper at the Lancet [1] as well as the full-text pdf file [2]. [1]: http://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X%2815%2970002-1/abstract http://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-10... [2]: http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/langlo/PIIS2214-109X(15)70002-1.pdf http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/langlo/PIIS2214-109X(...