| In most cases, I wasn't able to tell which study you were referring to. I was able to correlate study 4 tho: > The fourth linked study on IQ concludes: "These results, based on the largest randomized trial ever conducted in the area of human lactation, provide strong evidence that prolonged and exclusive breastfeeding improves children's cognitive development." https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18458209/ The study was cited with criticisms of its method and strong reason to believe the study result is implausible. The effect size is far too large: there is no way that EBF causes a 24 point jump in IQ, when observed correlated effects are so much smaller. That effect is so large that it would be immediately and apparently obvious who was breast fed. In fact, you could guess someone's EBF status simply by knowing how smart they are. Intelligence would be multimodal around who was breastfed and not. I'm not sure exactly what they screwed up when running the study. Possibly an overreliance on the power of random cluster trials? After all, if you run 31 clusters in total, then it wouldn't be too surprising that you find weird statistics, since N=31, not the number of human participants. But whatever the case, the whole thing is completely compromised because the result is so implausible. Anyway that's the best and only random study of EBF and intelligence if 538 is to be believed. Which means we essentially have no randomly controlled evidence at all that EBF improves intelligence. |