That breastfeeding has countless benefits for babies is something no one disputes. That one of those benefits is that babies who breastfeed suffer less respiratory infections is another reality that has been widely demonstrated to date. What is not usually said and is unknown is that breast milk does not protect boys as much as girls.
Fernando Polack, a pediatric doctor specializing in childhood respiratory diseases, who received in 2010 the award for best researcher of the year granted by the Pediatric Research Society of the United States, found along with his team of researchers that breastfeeding protects girls more than boys against possible respiratory infections.
It has always been thought that the benefit of breast milk for babies to respiratory infections is that the mother's antibodies reach the baby's body through the milk and work by defending the baby from viruses, something like “since you don't have enough defenses, you take mine. ”
The reality seems to be different, because if so it would protect children equally, so the Polack team has concluded that breast milk should act, not passively, as previously thought, but actively , activating some system of the girls that does have less respiratory infections than the boys.
In other words, breast milk seems to activate some existing defense system in girls' bodies that is not activated when it is a child who takes it (or not to the same extent).
Once this investigation has been discovered, Fernando Polack's team's research is, right now, aimed at knowing the system by which girls are much better protected than boys by simply drinking breast milk. Once they know what it is, they will try to activate it in boys so that they also benefit from this mechanism and are less likely to suffer from diseases.
