Scaling up breastfeeding to reduce global chronic disease burden

What is it about?

This study examines what could happen if more mothers around the world exclusively breastfed their babies for the first six months of life. While breastfeeding is already known to improve child survival and early development, we asked a broader question: can it also reduce long-term diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, and cancer in both mothers and their children? To explore this, we used data from 132 low- and middle-income countries and developed a simulation model that combined global breastfeeding rates, information on major diseases and risk factors, and evidence from many previous studies on the health effects of breastfeeding. Our findings show that increasing exclusive breastfeeding to 90% coverage could have substantial long-term benefits. It could prevent or delay about 72,300 deaths each year from chronic diseases, add around one million years of life across populations, avert approximately 10 million cases of diabetes, and prevent about 3.8 million cases of high blood pressure. Together, these results highlight how breastfeeding is not only essential for early life, but also a powerful, low-cost strategy for improving health across the entire life course.

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Photo by Helena Lopes on Unsplash

Photo by Helena Lopes on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This study is the first to quantify how scaling up breastfeeding could reduce the long-term burden of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) across both mothers and their children at a global scale. While breastfeeding is widely recognized for its immediate benefits in reducing child mortality and improving early development, its potential to prevent chronic diseases later in life has remained underexplored at the population level. Our work is timely because low- and middle-income countries are facing a rapid rise in NCDs such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer, alongside persistently suboptimal breastfeeding rates. By integrating evidence from multiple high-quality meta-analyses with global data across 132 countries, we provide the first comprehensive estimates of how a simple, cost-effective early-life intervention could generate substantial, long-term health gains across generations. These findings expand the value of breastfeeding beyond child survival to include chronic disease prevention, offering a compelling case for integrating breastfeeding promotion into national and global NCD prevention strategies. Our results also help identify regions and populations where investments in breastfeeding support could yield the greatest health impact, informing more strategic and equitable policy decisions.

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