Family socioeconomic status acted as a buffer, protecting the breastfeeding chances of those with more resources, even in low quality environments.
The graph below illustrates this protective effect. The belarus rcs data relatively smaller gap between income lines on the right compared to the left shows that mothers from higher-income households had relatively high breastfeeding initiation rates regardless of objective environmental quality (i.e. the neighbourhood assessment score); while breastfeeding initiation was more strongly positively correlated to objective environmental quality in lower-income households.
With only weak evidence for a link between mothers’ perceptions of their local environments and breastfeeding outcomes, I decided to investigate whether more subtle physical aspects of the environment could impact breastfeeding chances using the Born in Bradford cohort study.
White British women and Pakistani-origin women showed some differences in the associations between environmental quality and breastfeeding, even though they lived in the same geographical area.
For example, water chemicals did not affect the breastfeeding chances of White British mothers, but Pakistani-origin mothers with the greatest water chlorination exposure were around 25% less likely to initiate breastfeeding and higher levels of uptake per day also increased their hazard of stopping breastfeeding by about 20%.