BERKELEY, Calif. -- Got breast milk? Mothers in Berkeley, the famously liberal university town near San Francisco, plan to have plenty of it on Saturday when hundreds of them gather at a local theater in an attempt to break a world record for breast-feeding.

So far the event, aimed at promoting the health benefits of nursing, has attracted some 800 women, enough to mount a challenge to the 767 mothers in Australia who reportedly set a new breast-feeding record on Thursday, said Kelly Moore, the co-chairwoman of the event. "We thought Berkeley was a great place to have the event because of the culture in Berkeley," Reuters quoted Moore as saying on Friday. "We know we are going to break the record."

Organizers hope to attract as many as 1,000 mothers to the mass nurse-in where the women will go for a new Guinness Record in the "most women breast-feeding simultaneously" category. The city of Berkeley is sponsoring the event as part of the town's Women, Infants and Children Nutrition program.

Volunteers from the Bay Area Lactation Association will help tally the number of nursing mothers and two independent observers will be on hand to verify whether the women break the record, Moore said.

While the attempt to win the nursing crown has grabbed headlines, she added the event will more importantly promote the health benefits of breast-feeding, which research has shown reduces a woman's risk of breast cancer.

A recent study in the British medical publication **** Lancet****, for example, calculated that for every year a woman breast-feeds, it cuts her risk of breast cancer by 4.3 percent.

Women in developed countries feed their children naturally for about two or three months while 50 percent of mothers in the United States, about 25 percent in Europe and about 10 percent in Scandinavia choose not to breast-feed, the study said.