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OBJECTIVE. Nutrition in the first weeks of life may program disease risk in adulthood. We examined the influence of initial infant feeding on cardiorespiratory risk factors in adulthood. PATIENTS AND METHODS. A total of 9377 persons born during 1 week in 1958 in England, Scotland, and Wales were followed-up periodically from birth into adulthood. Infant feeding was recorded from a parental questionnaire at 7 years old as never breastfed, breastfed partially or wholly for 1 month. Height; waist circumference; hip circumference; waist/hip ratio; body mass index; blood pressure; forced expiratory volume; total, high-density, and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol; triglycerides; hemoglobin A1c; fibrinogen; fibrin D-dimer; C-reactive protein; von Willebrand factor; and tissue plasminogen activator antigen were measured at 44 to 45 years of age. RESULTS. Breastfeeding for >1 month was associated with reduced waist circumference, waist/hip ratio, von Willebrand factor, and lower odds of obesity compared with formula feeding after adjustment for birth weight, prepregnancy maternal weight, maternal smoking during pregnancy, socioeconomic position in childhood and adulthood, region of birth, gender, and current smoking status. Infant feeding status was not associated with other cardiorespiratory risk factors after adjustment, except for lower fibrinogen and C-reactive protein levels in women. CONCLUSIONS. The inverse associations of breastfeeding for >1 month with measures of central obesity and inflammatory markers in the current study are small and of little public health importance. Although there was no substantial long-term protective effect of breastfeeding for >1 month on other cardiorespiratory risk factors in adult life, further studies with contemporaneous data on exclusive breastfeeding are needed to confirm these findings.

Objective. To examine the influence of initial infant feeding on obesity in later life.Methods. A systematic review of published studies investigating the association between infant feeding and a measure of obesity was performed with Medline (1966 onward) and Embase (1980 onward) databases, supplemented with manual searches. Data extraction was conducted by 2 authors. Analyses were based on odds ratios of obesity among initially breastfed subjects, compared with formula-fed subjects, pooled with fixed-effects models.Results. Sixty-one studies reported on the relationship of infant feeding to a measure of obesity in later life; of these, 28 (298900 subjects) provided odds ratio estimates. In these studies, breastfeeding was associated with a reduced risk of obesity, compared with formula feeding (odds ratio: 0.87; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.85–0.89). The inverse association between breastfeeding and obesity was particularly strong in 11 small studies of Conclusions. Initial breastfeeding protects against obesity in later life. However, a further review including large unpublished studies exploring the effect of confounding factors in more detail is needed.

Objective. To examine the relationship between birth weight and blood total cholesterol (TC) and to compare its strength with that of the relationship between current body mass index and TC.Methods. 1) Cross-sectional study of adolescents, with retrospective ascertainment of birth weight from birth records or parental recall; 2) systematic review of studies examining the relations between birth weight and cholesterol at all ages.Participants. 1) 1532 individuals (92% white, 55% male) in 10 British towns; 2) 28 studies with 32 observations showing the change in TC per 1 kg increase in birth weight—6 in infancy, 14 in adolescents, 12 in adults.Results. In the cross-sectional study, there was a weak inverse relation between birth weight and TC level (−.061 mmol/L fall in TC per kg increase in birth weight, 95% confidence interval −.131 to .008 mmol/L per kg) which was little affected by adjustment for current body size. The difference in TC corresponding to an interquartile range increase in birth weight (−.03 mmol/L) was approximately a quarter of that for an equivalent increase in body mass index (.11 mmol/L). In the systematic review, an inverse association between birth weight and TC of a similar size to that in the cross-sectional study was observed (−.048 mmol/L per kg, 95% confidence interval −.078 to −.018 mmol/L per kg) similar in strength at all ages.Conclusion. The relation of fetal nutrition to TC appears to be weak and is probably of limited public health importance when compared with the effects of childhood obesity.