Cultural Determinants of Optimal Breastfeeding Practices among Indigenous <i>Mam</i> -Mayan Women in the Western Highlands of Guatemala
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Among indigenous Mam-Mayan women, breastfeeding practices may be intertwined with cultural influences during the early postpartum period. OBJECTIVES: Our study explored whether beliefs regarding transmission of emotions through breast milk, the feeding of agüitas or temascal (traditional sauna) use were associated with achievement of the World Health Organization infant feeding recommendations and if these cultural practices served as moderators of the relationship between optimal breastfeeding practices and infant anthropometry. METHODS: We recruited 190 mother-infant dyads at infant age < 46 days. Data on breastfeeding and cultural practices were collected via questionnaire. Infant length, weight, and head circumference were measured and z scores were calculated. Multiple linear and logistic regression analyses were used to examine determinants of initiation of breastfeeding within 1 hour, breastfeeding frequency, breastfeeding exclusivity, and infant weight-for-age z score (WAZ). RESULTS: Mothers who delivered at the traditional midwife's house (odds ratio [OR] = 2.5) and those who did not believe in the transmission of susto (fright) through breast milk (OR = 2.4) were more likely to initiate breastfeeding within 1 hour postpartum. Higher breastfeeding frequency was observed among mothers who spent more time in the temascal. Initiating early breastfeeding within 1 hour postpartum was the sole infant feeding practice positively associated with exclusive breastfeeding and WAZ. CONCLUSIONS: Our investigation in the Western Highlands of Guatemala has highlighted the link between cultural practices and beliefs during lactation, breastfeeding practices and infant growth. Public health practitioners need to understand how local cultural practices influence early initiation of breastfeeding to promote adequate infant weight.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".