Mayim Bialik has defended her right to breastfeed all over the place including a New York City subway. She has been a staunch advocate of attachment parenting and nursing until children are ready to be done, even if that means the “baby” is 2 or 3.

She recently defended said subway incident, according to The Huffington Post. She said of the ensuing firestorm,

“What I like to point out is that was the best way for that subway ride to be pleasant for everyone,” she said, adding later: “I don’t believe you need to cover up a baby eating anymore than you need to cover a baby drinking a bottle.”

She went on to blame the controversy over breastfeeding on our society’s “very, very bizarre relationship with breasts.”

Ok, so we may have a weird relationship with breasts. Consider the never-ending and always heated (for some reason) discussion on breastfeeding amongst new mothers and the mom-shaming that goes on for choosing not to, or not being able to, breastfeed.

Is it really that big of a deal? A new study says it may not be.

“I do think a lot of the effects of breastfeeding have been overstated,” lead researcher Cynthia Colen, assistant professor of sociology, tells Yahoo Shine.

She added, “African-American women breastfeed children much less than white women do, for example, and I thought, this has to be affecting the findings,” she explains. “But I didn’t expect the research to be this striking.”

1,773 sibling pairs were followed between 1986 and 2010 to make up the study. The result was that siblings raised in the same family but fed differently as infants had virtually no differences in outcomes including BMI, obesity, hyperactivity, parental attachment, and test scores predicting academic achievement in vocabulary, reading, math, and general intelligence in the ages between 4 and fourteen.

Interesting. Perhaps this research will prompt a cease-fire in the endless debate between breast and bottle? One can hope.

Image via Wikimedia Commons