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Comment by sjwright | Hacker News Reader

While the article does acknowledge that the study only shows correlation and not causation, it doesn't suggest what seems to me the most intuitively obvious alternative hypothesis.

We know that increased rates of mental stimuli and social interaction are beneficial to a growing brain. Perhaps breastfeeding correlates with parents that have more free time to interact with their child.

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The actual paper contains much more information than this BBC article. I'm not sure why they didn't link to it, but here is the original paper at the Lancet [1] as well as the full-text pdf file [2].

[1]: http://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-10...

[2]: http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/langlo/PIIS2214-109X(...

Researchers have considered your hypothesis. There have been many attempts to eliminate confounding variables in these studies (this doesn't mean that they were necessarily successful in doing so, but they did think about it). Often they attempt to control for differences in parenting styles, which should cover how much time they spend interacting with their child.

Also until 6-10 months, babies can't hold their own bottles, so someone is probably still interacting with them (unless you prop up the bottle and leave the baby alone, which is possible but not recommended).

Bottles can be held by disinterested third parties.

Boobs rarely can.

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