Breastfeeding 101: What Every Black Woman Needs to Know

Summary

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The risk of SIDS is reduced by 50 percent if you breastfeed your baby. Part of the reason may be that breastfed babies tend to spend more time sleeping with their mothers. This allows for the mother's breathing and waking patterns to affect her baby's, helping to prevent any breathing difficulties that could lead to SIDS. Additionally, breastfeeding further decreases the risk of SIDS because breastfed babies tend to nurse often and sleep lightly, allowing them to wake up more easily if they begin to have breathing difficulties.

While it's a fact that more white women have breast cancer, African-American women are twice as likely to die before the age of 40 from breast cancer. For each year that you breastfeed your baby, you reduce your chance of breast cancer by 4 percent. So, the longer you breastfeed and the more babies you birth, the more protection you have from breast cancer.

[...] when babies under four months are given infant formula - which is made from cow's milk - they have a greater risk of suffering from asthma and related complications.

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Extract

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Breastfeeding 101: What Every Black Woman Needs to Know

Deciding whether or not to breastfeed or formula-feed your baby is a matter of choice. Ideally, you base your decision on many factors: the best nour- ishment, the ...

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