Breast feeding initiation rate across Western countries: does religion matter? An ecological study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Breast feeding initiation rates remain below 80% in some Western countries. Many individual-level determinants are known; however, less is known regarding cultural and societal determinants, such as religion, that could explain population-level variations. We examined the correlations of the proportions of Catholics and Protestants with the breast feeding initiation rates across and within Western countries. METHODS: Using publicly available data, we carried out an ecological study comparing the proportions of Catholics and Protestants with the rates of breast feeding initiation. We correlated data at the country level, and additionally explored within-country data in five Western countries: France (Departments), Ireland (counties), the UK (countries), Canada (provinces) and the USA (states). Our analyses accounted for human development index, gross domestic product and population density. RESULTS: We observed a negative correlation (r=-0.30) between the proportion of Catholics and the rate of breast feeding initiation in Western countries. This correlation was consistent when using within-country data in France (r=-0.27), Ireland (r=-0.23), the UK (r=-0.79) and Canada (r=-0.62). In the USA, the positive correlation (r=0.26) between a state's proportion of Catholics and its breast feeding initiation rate was confounded by race, education and socioeconomic status (SES). After controlling for education and SES, the state proportion of non-Hispanic white Catholics was negatively correlated (r=-0.29) with the rate of breast feeding initiation. CONCLUSIONS: In this ecological study, we found consistent negative correlations between Catholicism and breast feeding initiation rates. Qualitative and quantitative studies at the individual level are needed to confirm and explain our findings. Our results suggest that women living in a country or region where Catholicism has historically dominated are less likely to initiate breast feeding, and that breast feeding promotion policies should be adapted to better fit populations' cultural and religious norms.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".