Breastfeeding in Brazil: major progress, but still a long way to go

The innovative and well-designed retrospective study by Oliveira et al. featured in this issue documents encouraging secular trends in breastfeeding duration in Rio de Janeiro during the 1960---2009 period.Study participants were staff from a university in the city of Rio de Janeiro interviewed between 1999 and 2012 who were asked to recall the breastfeeding duration of their first-born child. 1 Median breastfeeding duration among women giving birth in the 2000---2009 period was 12 months, compared with six months among children born between 1960 and 1969, five months among those born between 1970---1979, six months among those born between 1980---1989 and eight months among those born between 1990 and 1999.Given how strikingly similar these findings are to secular breastfeeding trends previously reported for Brazil as a whole using repeated cross-sectional survey data, 2,3 this commentary extrapolates implications from Oliveira's et al. study to the whole country.3 Data from national surveys and Oliveira et al. 1 on one hand point to the major progress in breastfeeding outcomes in Brazil over the past four decades, as illustrated by dramatic national improvements, including an increase ଝ Please cite this article as: Pérez-Escamilla R. Breastfeeding in Brazil: major progress, but still a long way to go.