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Breastfeeding can help social mobility in adulthood

Those who were breastfed as children are more likely to move up the social ladder than those bottle-fed as children, new research claims.

A study undertaken by researchers at Bristol University found that being breastfed as an infant made you 41 per cent more likely to be socially mobile.

Research was conducted using data from 1,414 people in their 60s and 70s as part of the Boyd Orr Study of Diet and Health in Pre-War Britain.

The study also found a direct correlation between how long a child was breastfed for and how easy they found it to progress on the social ladder.

"We found that ever having been breastfed was positively associated with increased odds of upward social mobility in this cohort born in the 1920s and 1930s when there was little social patterning in infancy of breastfeeding," the researchers wrote in the British Medical Journal.

"One of the most consistent findings in the published literature on the long-term impact of infant-feeding is that breastfeeding is associated with improved neuro-cognitive development, which could influence future educational and occupational success and hence social mobility."