I LOOK AT THE PHOTOS of candidate Barack Obama and his family in People magazine, watch the interview with the children on television and all I can think of is “Did Michelle breastfeed those children?” I know that seems strange, but breastfeeding advocacy is part of my job, and the thought may not be as irrelevant as it seems at first glance. Here is a vibrant young American family right smack in the public eye and breastfeeding is a public-health issue.

Public health, along with a myriad of other hot political topics, fits right into a discussion of “were the children breastfed.” For instance, preventing short- and long-term health problems on a population-wide scale conserves health-care dollars and promotes a healthy future for kids, a fine political message.

Over the past year, there have been many health-related articles in this newspaper on conditions such as Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes, childhood obesity and breast cancer, but with scant information that breastfeeding infants decreases the risk for these ailments. To present this knowledge in a more updated version, feeding formula to babies increases the risk of the health problems. Neither version has made that great an impact. Despite overall increases in breastfeeding initiation and duration rates in the 1990s, still fewer than half of all infants are now being exclusively breastfed for up to four months. (The Office of the U.S. Surgeon General and the American Academy of Pediatricians recommend six months’ exclusive breastfeeding and continuing with the addition of complementary feedings.) Exclusive is the operative word here because research studies point to a dose-dependent relationship between breastfeeding and disease prevention, the more the better. Mixed feeding does not produce the same positive outcomes.

So in my political fantasy, the candidate’s wife comes out on the campaign trail, when talking about health care, and makes a series of forceful and convincing speeches about the long-term ramifications of feeding breastmilk to infants. This just might have some impact on rates. Don’t tell me that she has no time for such activities as a working woman. Plenty of women are making breastfeeding work by direct feeding at home and pumping at their places of business.

Women do need plenty of support, though, to establish and maintain breastfeeding. Here in Rhode Island, there are two laws on the books concerning this matter. The first states that breastfeeding is not to be considered disorderly conduct. The second suggests that employers make every effort to accommodate their breastfeeding employees. And a new law, to go into effect in March 2009, guarantees a woman’s right to feed her baby in public. There are also legions of hospital staff, lactation consultants, counselors, peer counselors, nutritionists, La Leche League leaders, hospital telephone help lines and community support groups, to name a few, ready to help the new mom.

Of course fuel prices, conservation, the higher cost of living, being more thrifty, protecting the environment and eating locally are all current political issues as well and fit neatly into reasons to breastfeed in this political year and beyond. One needn’t use gasoline to go out to buy more formula or add more packaging to the landfill or spend much needed income unnecessarily if the baby is being breastfed, not to mention the argument that eating locally is more environmentally sound. We would all be hard pressed to come up with a place more local than the mother baby dyad.

Speaking of local, it is important to note that there is a milk bank that has opened in the Boston area called the Mother’s Milk Bank of New England. Its purpose is to provide screened, pasturized human milk to sick and or premature babies whose mothers are unable to provide it.

Were the Obama children breastfed? I hope so for the healthy future this good role model could provide for American parents and their offspring. And, from Isaiah: “A little one shall become a thousand and a small one a strong nation.”

Michael Fink is pre-natal-education coordinator at Memorial Hospital of Rhode Island, a lactation consultant with the state Women, Infants and Children program and a longtime member of the Rhode Island Breastfeeding Coalition.