What Does Bottle-Feeding Have to Do With Autism Risk?

TIME:

As if there weren’t already enough tension between bottle-feeding and breast-feeding moms, now a researcher at the State University of New York at Albany is courting controversy by suggesting that bottle-feeding is associated with an increased risk of autism.

In actuality, it’s not bottle-feeding per se that may be linked to autism, but the absence of breast-feeding, contends evolutionary psychologist Gordon Gallup in an article published in June in the journal Medical Hypotheses.

Gallup didn’t do his own research but based his theory on data from a January study in the journal Pediatrics. That study analyzed more than 650,000 families to show that second-born children conceived within a year or less of the first child were three times more likely to have autism than second-borns conceived several years later. Gallup believes bottle-feeding may have been to blame.