The impacts of early weaning child health

Abstract

Breast milk is the main source of nutrition, composed of elements essential to the body, such as proteins, lipids, vitamins and immunological factors. When considering this important function, it is considered that breastfeeding is an essential practice for the health of the child, in order to be naturally sufficient to meet the nutritional needs of newborns. Contradictory to the assertion, early weaning is still an act present in the social context of several families, however, this act can cause negative effects on the growth and development of children, as the interruption of breastfeeding can compromise the acquisition of such benefits and favor the occurrence of diseases. This study, therefore, is constituted as a bibliographic review of literature. It aims to analyze the effects of early weaning on children's health and the perception of the causes for the interruption of breastfeeding. For this, the searches were carried out using the following database: Virtual Health Library (VHL), CAPES Portal, on own website and redirect to cafe access ScienceDirect, Scopus e Web of Science, Scientific Eletronic Library On Line (SCIELO) and direct searches on various Internet sites. In order to include fifteen works for the foundation of this article. It was possible to verify, from the study of the selected works, the conjuncture of pre-existing reasons that led to early weaning, and its impacts on children's health, a circumstance that allowed to highlight the importance of breast milk for newborns.