“Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.”
That’s a rather more concise way of expressing “Chesterton’s Fence”: a principle that urges us to exercise caution before we sweep away institutions, practices, buildings, and structures without fully understanding why they came to exist in the first place.
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The fence is a homely example, befitting the great fat man himself, but real-world instances have been devastating and tragic and anything but quaint.
Take China’s “Four Pests” campaign, begun under Chairman Mao in the late 1950s. In the name of maximizing agricultural output, farmers were encouraged to massacre sparrows wherever they were found, since they eat grain. Less grain, lower yields—no Great Leap Forward. But when the sparrow population collapsed as intended, insects like locusts ravaged the crops. Famine ensued. Millions died.
The humble sparrow, it turned out, played an important role in keeping insects and other pests in check, a role that more than balanced the annoyance of a bit of lost grain.
These days, if I reach for an example to illustrate Chesterton’s fence, I might reach not for Chairman Mao and his little birds but for breastfeeding. Breast milk is the natural food for babies and infants, a food perfectly suited to a young child’s nutritional needs, and what’s more, it’s free. Mothers produce as much as is needed, for as long as needed. Yes, a very small minority of women have trouble producing breast milk, and some children, including the author, have trouble latching on for one reason or another, but these are problems that can easily be remedied with breast-milk exchanges and bottle feeding. In short, there’s no good reason why every child shouldn’t be fed breast milk.
That didn’t stop corporate food makers from selling mothers a product—baby formula—that they didn’t and don’t need. For decades, formula has been sold as a safe, healthy alternative to breast milk right from the get-go, as soon as the baby is born. In fact, it’s often been marketed as a superior choice to breastfeeding, not just for the baby’s health, but also for Mom too—especially if she’s a busy professional who’s short on patience and time.
Today, about 15 percent of American babies are never breastfed, and the majority—around 70 percent—have their feedings supplemented with formula during the first six months. Generally, rates of formula use are highest in the developed world, but the developing world is catching up fast. Global formula sales have more than doubled since the year 2000.
Over the same period, more and more research has revealed exactly what formula-fed children miss out on. We know that breastfed children tend to have higher IQ scores and significantly lower incidence of allergic conditions than children who go without. Breast milk supplies nutritional compounds, including vital immune factors and sugars that encourage the growth of healthy bacterial strains in the gut that no shop-bought formula can replicate, although smart alecks are now trying to create “lab-grown breast milk” in bioreactors, an endeavor that will also fail.
In truth, though, there are still plenty of things we don’t understand—or are only beginning to understand—about breastfeeding and its importance to children’s development.
A new study shows that breastfeeding may help infants develop self-control by giving them regular training in recognizing when they’re full. This training translates to other impulses and behavior—to what researchers call “executive function”—and may have long-term ramifications, including reduced likelihood of overeating and obesity.
Researchers have known for some time that early childhood is a key period in habit formation and the development of self-regulation. Until now, the role of breastfeeding in those processes had been unclear.
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It was hypothesized that breastfeeding might play a role in the emergence of self-control because babies take the lead. When bottle feeding, mothers have a visual guide to how much has been consumed—the amount of liquid in the bottle—and may encourage their babies to finish the contents even when they’re full. Bottle-fed babies may consistently be trained to overeat. By contrast, when mothers breastfeed, there is no visual guide. They must wait until their babies choose to stop.
The researchers behind the new study looked at data for nearly 600 infants from the Quebec Longitudinal Study of Child Development. The children in the study were born before breast pumps were widely used, so the researchers could be certain the data would provide a strong comparison between breastfeeding and bottle feeding with formula.
Mothers reported at regular intervals about their babies’ diets, and the children were subject to a variety of cognitive tests at three-and-a-half years of age. The tests included several direct measures of executive function, including tests of inhibitory control. Mothers also answered questions about their children’s daily behavior and signs of inattention and hyperactivity.
The researchers found that breastfeeding predicted better inhibitory control at three-and-a-half years of age. The longer the child was breastfed, the better the score. Breastfed children also showed fewer signs of hyperactivity and inattention. Their mothers were less likely to report fidgeting, impulsiveness, and poor concentration.
Importantly, there was no evidence of a link between breastfeeding and other forms of executive control, like working memory (holding information in your mind as you work through a problem) and cognitive flexibility (being able to change your thinking as a situation changes). This supports the hypothesis that breastfeeding primarily trains self-control.
It’s also likely the benefits observed are a result of the superior nutritional content of breast milk, which supports brain development, but this may be less of a factor in this case than the process of repeatedly learning when to stop eating.
The study has a number of lessons to teach us. The first, as I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, is the Chestertonian one: fools rush in where angels dare to tread, etc. By substituting formula for breast milk, corporate food makers interfered with early childhood development in ways that harmed children but may ultimately have benefited their own interests. The entire premise of ultra-processed food is that it should be “hyperpalatable,” food scientist speak for “impossible to stop eating.” In a very real sense, formula is preparation for a lifetime of eating foods that have been specifically designed to bypass the body’s mechanisms of appetite and satiety. The latest generation of ultra-processed foods was born in the 1980s, when tobacco companies began branching out into food and used all the tricks of product development and marketing they’d learned with cigarettes to create an entirely new market of captive eaters.
And research bears this out: formula-fed children are more likely to end up overweight or obese and addicted to ultra-processed foods.
The second is a broader lesson for anybody who wishes to improve the health of Americans today. America’s chronic disease nightmare is the result of enormous changes to not only what Americans eat, but also how Americans eat. These changes have been thrust upon Americans from birth, and their effects ramify across an individual’s lifetime by means of habits and preferences that escape conscious control, making them harder to arrest and reverse. If Secretary Kennedy really does want to Make America Healthy Again, he’s going to have to catch consumers as young as the corporate food makers catch them and then set them on a different path, the one Mother Nature intended for them.