Breastfeeding is the best feeding you can offer your newborn. Breast milk is a perfect and complete food that is utterly suitable to nourish babies and protect them from diseases. By breastfeeding your baby, you are giving her at least 100 ingredients that are absent in the formula!

Breastfeeding perks up the overall health of your baby. Here is how:

• Breast milk contains all the essential nutrients and in just right amounts that your newborn's undeveloped digestive system can digest easily.
• Breastfeeding confers your baby an ability to fight infections. Breast milk contains the antibodies that can destroy disease-causing organisms and protect your baby from infections. Furthermore, breastfeeding also cuts back the use of bottles, nipples and water for formula preparation and hence infections due to them.
• The digestive tract of breastfed baby is much superior to formula fed baby and has large amounts of Lactobacillus bifidus, a friendly bacteria, which prevents the growth of harmful organisms.
• The growth and development of breastfed babies is ideal; they generally remain leaner but are strong, and their brain development is much better to babies fed on formula.

Due to numerous benefits of breastfeeding, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommends feeding the babies solely on breast milk during the first 4-6 months. Subsequently, introducing solid foods while continuing to breastfeed until the baby is 2, or for as long as convenient.

Breastfeeding is not just beneficial to babies, but to moms as well. By feeding your baby on breast milk, you will burn extra calories and get back to shape faster. Breastfeeding will also help you reduce the uterus to its original size. It also cuts back the risk of ovarian and breast cancers.

As such, there is no reason to not to breastfeed your baby. However, in certain conditions breastfeeding may not be safe. If you are HIV positive or are on chemotherapy, taking medicines like ergotamine, cyclosporine, cyclophosphamide, methotrexate, bromocriptine, doxorubicin etc., you should avoid nursing your baby.