Determinants of Exclusive Breastfeeding and Patterns of Complementary Feeding Practices in Mecca City, Saudi Arabia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends optimal feeding practices during infancy and early childhood for better health and growth of children. Objective: To determine the factors affecting exclusive breastfeeding (EBF) duration and the time of introducing complementary feeding (CF) in Mecca City, Saudi Arabia. Methods: This cross-sectional study recruited 814 Saudi mothers. All mothers filled out a closed questionnaire on family sociodemographics, health status of mothers and infants, and postpartum breastfeeding habits and patterns. The patterns of CF and bottle-feeding were examined, and binary logistic regression was performed. Results: The mean ± standard deviation EBF duration was 4.6 ± 2.5 months. The EBF rate showed a sharp decrease from 50.6% at birth to 14.4% at 6 months among children. Employment of mothers, weight at childbirth <2.5 kg, weight of 2.6–3 kg at child birth, postnatal disease in infants, and pacifier use for infants were associated with a low EBF rate. Intermediate education of the mother was found to increase EBF duration as compared to mothers with higher levels of education. Most mothers introduced plant-based CFs to infants at 4 months of age (median), but animal-based CFs were introduced only after 8 months (median). The median age of starting milk formula was 3 months. Conclusion and Recommendation: The reported rate of EBF is far below the current international recommendations. The patterns of CF practices and bottle-feeding differ widely from the WHO recommendations in Mecca City. National campaigns should be implemented to promote EBF in Saudi Arabia.
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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 | 0.000 | 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".