Longevity in Stories
Dr. Sataporn Wangthitikul, MD — Longevity & Aesthetic Medicine Physician, Layan Life Longevity Retreat
Longevity doesn’t begin at forty
Most people who sit down with me are somewhere in their forties or fifties. They arrive with a wearable full of data and a fair question: what can I still change? There’s usually a great deal. But I’ve come to think we start this conversation two or three decades too late.
The first 1,000 days — conception to a child’s second birthday — are one of the few stretches of life when human biology is still genuinely malleable. WHO and UNICEF recommend beginning breastfeeding within an hour of birth, breast milk only for the first six months, then continuing to two years or beyond alongside solid food (World Health Organization, 2025a). Most of the world doesn’t manage it. Just under half of infants under six months were exclusively breastfed in 2024, which is why the World Health Assembly raised the global target to 60% by 2030 (World Health Organization, 2025b).
Milk is doing more than feeding
Here is the part I still find remarkable. A large share of what’s in breast milk isn’t food at all. Human milk oligosaccharides are among its most abundant components, and the infant cannot break them down for energy. They are there to feed bacteria — to steer the gut towards Bifidobacterium and away from less helpful residents (Thomson et al., 2018). Others bind viruses and bacteria directly, help the intestinal lining mature, and school the immune system while they’re at it (Donovan, 2026).
The effects surface much later. Breastfeeding lowers rates of childhood infection, mortality, malnutrition and later obesity (Victora et al., 2016). A 2025 analysis of more than 360,000 adults in the UK Biobank found a small but real reduction in adult type 2 diabetes among those who had been breastfed as infants, and the protection counted for most in the people carrying the highest genetic risk (Hu et al., 2025).
The half we usually skip
We discuss all of this as something done for the baby. It is also something happening to the mother. Lactation is a metabolic and hormonal event in its own right. Pooled data from eight prospective studies covering nearly 1.2 million women found that those who had breastfed at any point had lower rates of cardiovascular disease, coronary heart disease, stroke and cardiac death, with benefit accruing up to roughly twelve months of breastfeeding across a lifetime (Tschiderer et al., 2022). Add the long-established reductions in breast cancer, ovarian cancer and type 2 diabetes (Victora et al., 2016). I can’t think of many interventions where two patients benefit from the same act.
What I actually say in clinic
All of this is observational data, and I would rather say so than pretend otherwise; nobody is going to randomise infants to formula. And plenty of women can’t breastfeed, or can’t for long — supply problems, medication, illness, a difficult caesarean, a job that won’t wait. The 2023 Lancet series was blunt about where the failure sits: in policy, workplaces and formula marketing far more than in mothers (Pérez-Escamilla et al., 2023).
So what I tell people is fairly simple. Some breastfeeding beats none. Duration matters more than perfection. And advice without support isn’t really advice. At Layan Life we treat the first 1,000 days as the ground floor beneath everything that follows, which means paying as much attention to the mother as to the child — iron, thyroid, metabolic markers, sleep, recovery. In the postpartum year those aren’t afterthoughts. They are what makes the first step possible at all.
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