Doesn’t Chris Fearne have anything more important to do than boss ladies about breast-feeding?
My column in The Malta Independent yesterday – please read it via the link to the newspaper, below. Oh, and if you want living proof that babies raised on formula milk don’t turn out shorter than they would have, weak, sickly, obese or with a deficient intelligence quotient, you’re looking at it.
This column was written by a Cow & Gate baby – and that would be 1960s formula milk, not even today’s more scientifically perfected variety.
All three of my sons were raised on formula milk, too. Are they short, obese, sickly and stupid? Most definitely not. Obese, indeed – the only thing that makes babies, children and adults obese is a genetic predisposition coupled with their diet in the present. I ate like a horse all my life, thinking nothing of scoffing a packet of biscuits a day if that’s what I felt like doing, and until a few years ago I was rake-thin to the point of being skeletal. Yes, despite being a Cow & Gate baby.
The trouble with all these studies is that the controls are hopeless because you can’t bring up the same child twice and have no way of knowing whether it would have been different if fed breast over bottle or the other way round.
So maybe I would have been six feet tall and an astrophysicist with the strength of Hercules who got a cold once in a lifetime instead of once every three years, and a size 4 instead of a size 8 for most of my life (which is actually impossible for a tall woman) had I been breastfed, but you know what? I don’t think so.
And my children couldn’t possibly have been thinner all their lives – because that’s just it, it’s the genes and the food you eat in the present, not the milk fed in infancy.
So quite frankly, I think Chris Fearne and the rest of them should mind their own business. In many cases, bottle is best for both mother and child, but in general, it makes no difference at all. Really. People like me are living proof of that.
Most of my generation were bottle-fed and the variety among us in adulthood is enormous – just as you would expect it to be. I don’t remember anybody except one girl being obese when we were children, and – bingo – she came from a family of famously fat people, Billy-Bunteresque.
In those days when bottle-feeding was the absolute norm, there were few or no fat children. Fast-forward a generation to the results of increased breast-feeding all round, and Malta is full of fatties. So if you were to take it at face value, you would say that it is the breast-feeding which is creating all these fat children, but you can’t look at it like that.
The difference between the thin majority of my generation and the fat majority of today’s is DIET and not formula or breast milk. Nobody had sweets or soft-drinks or cakes or pizzas or fast-food when I was a child, except really rarely for a big treat. And our food was rationed. There was just enough at meals and no raiding the fridge or being provided with snacks by indulgent mothers in between.
Instead of banging on with their breast campaigns, Chris Fearne and the Breast Nazis should focus on where the problem really lies: what mothers feed their children AFTER they have been weaned. And what they feed them then is absolutely disastrous, so bad that no amount of breast-milk they have previously absorbed will save them.
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http://www.independent.com.mt/articles/2014-06-26/opinions/doesnt-chris-fearne-have-anything-more-important-to-do-than-boss-ladies-about-breast-feeding-5627052032/
Dan il-bullying isir ukoll mill-midwives fl-isptar. Jaghmlu pressure qawwi dwar il-breastfeeding fuq l-ommijiet ghax jiena rajt b’ghajnejja omm tibki ghax mhux qed jirnexxhielha u midwife tghidilha la l-mummmies l-ohra qed jaghmluha int tista taghmilha wkoll.
Dan kollu ftit sieghat wara li welldet. Din il-povra mara bdiet tiddispra u thossha inkapaci. Jien ma flahtx u mort fuqha u ghidtilha li meta tkun id-dar tara hi x’inhu l-ahjar ghaliha u ghat-tarbija u li l-bottle qatt ma qatel nies.
Il-breastfeeding huwa tajjeb imma mhux worth it tqabbad depression lill-omm jekk ma jkunx jghodd ghaliha.
Jiena ghaddejt minn zmien difficli sakemm irnexxieli nitghallem il-latching sew. Bkejt pero sibt sapport kbir mill-breastfeeding clinic u l-midwives. Illum tista tigbed il-halib u titma t-tarbija mill-flixkun. Il-mara trid tara c-cirkostanzi taghha imma hija haga sabiha li tinkoragixxi xi haga tajba. Jiena nipretendi li gurnalista tajba ghandha taghmel ricerka u tikwota studji xjentifiki fuq it-tema qabel ma xxandar artiklu li hu bbazat fuq opinjoni personali.
[Daphne – ‘Nitghallem il-latching sew’. I love it.]
Oh dear, Daphne has taken up one of her hobby horses again.
Here is some advice from one of the breastfeeding bullies, this time from the the other side of the world:
http://www.health.qld.gov.au/breastfeeding/importance.asp
And one closer to home:
http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/pregnancy-and-baby/pages/why-breastfeed.aspx#close
Frankly Fearne is stating the obvious. No substitute is as good as the real thing.
[Daphne – Wrong, Chris. Formula milk is not a substitute for human milk. It is a separate and individual product and it is just as fit for purpose as human milk. Many times it is fit for purpose where human milk is not, because human milk is variable and formula milk is not unless deliberately watered down or badly made up. Human milk depends on how the mother is feeling physically and mentally, what she has eaten, her general health and many other factors. Formula milk is made to formula.]
Yes it’s uncomfortable and messy (which is why 16th century mums brought in a nurse maid as quickly as possible) but hey, having children is uncomfortable and messy.
[Daphne – Why 16th century? People continued to use wet nurses well into the 20th century. And it wasn’t ‘mums’ who used them, but those well-off enough to pay for the service and with a home large enough to house the wet-nurse. The reason they used a wet nurse was not because it was uncomfortable or messy but because civilised women had strong reservations about being reduced to the status of an animal by breast-feeding. Their situation was bad enough as it was without that as well. And there were health reasons too, more crucially. The alternative to human milk was unpasteurised goat’s or sheep’s milk, straight from the teat into a bucket on your doorstep, with no refrigeration.]
And no I am not saying this because I’m a man.
[Daphne – You are. Men of our generation and older always think they know what’s best for women. Fortunately, our generation of women has done a better job of bringing up the new generation of men, which is why they are not so patronising.]
Chris, don’t speak about breastfeeding being uncomfortable and messy until you’ve had the pleasure of being forced or heavily pressured to breastfeed. Seriously, on these matters (and many others), men should just learn to shut up.
Perfect. It is exactly my opinion all the time. We did not have ” sweets or soft-drinks or cakes or pizzas or fast-food… except really rarely for a big treat. And our food was rationed. There was just enough at meals and no raiding the fridge or being provided with snacks by indulgent mothers in between.”
And we ate naturally fresh food in season.
[Daphne – Not really, no. There was very little on those greengrocer’s vans: wilted lettuce, pumpkin, potatoes, cabbage, kohl rabi, beetroot, carrots and courgettes. Practically no fruit in winter on those vans, except for the usual oranges and bananas. We were thin not because we ate healthy food but because there wasn’t much of it. People just didn’t pig out or ‘waste food’. It was really frowned upon.]
How very true.
All this does is create unnecessary pressure on women who are possibly in the throes of post-natal depression, vilifying them for being unable to, or unwilling to, lactate.
Lovely turn of phrase: “Fearne and the Breast Nazis.” So typical though of the Socialist control freaks in power. And yet, that’s what voters seem to prefer.
You’re spot on about this. I remember when my eldest was born, the flow of breast milk was not enough to cover the demands of the child. Hence my wife decided to use formula milk to cope. The look we got from the midwife was of absolute horror. It was like we were going to give her poison.
Well fucking said. About time someone puts the breast-feeding brigade in their place..
My grandmother had 9 kids, my mother had four and my sister had 3.. all bottle fed, all healthy, intelligent and quite frankly good-looking people, none of whom are obese.
The government should tackle the likes of McDonalds, feast trucks, soft drinks makers and junk food pushers to counter obesity.
When it comes to respiratory disease how about regulating the construction industry, improving public transport and protecting the few trees we have left?
Of course, it is much easier to bully a new mother by dictating to her what to do with her own breasts.
ps: where the hell is National Council of Women, MCWO?
It’s not enough that at parentcraft lessons mums are brainwashed into breast feeding. So now we are going to have a national policy on human milk.
I think this is a personal choice and many times it is dictated by circumstances. I would have liked to breast-feed longer but my baby didn’t want to.
It’s hard enough that some midwives make you feel guilty – now we have the government piling it on.
And for the ultimate contradiction, they’ve kept their options open on abortion.
I’m sorry but you cannot throw into the rubbish years of peer reviewed published studies just because of anecdotal accounts. It’s just totally unscientific analysis.
I too have quite a fast metabolism and was raised on formula milk. That doesn’t mean that formula milk has antibodies (it doesn’t – it’s basically what formula milk lacks compared to breast milk).
That doesn’t mean that formula milk is as easy to digest as breast milk for an infant. And when people argue that formula milk is better because it makes an infant fuller – that is what may lead to obesity later on.
Don’t take my or Fearne’s word…take WHO’s recommendation and studies:
http://www.who.int/topics/breastfeeding/en/
http://www.who.int/maternal_child_adolescent/documents/infant_feeding/en/
[Daphne – As the accompanying pictures and the Guide to HIV and Infant Feeding subtly indicate, those documents are for and about the Third World. But we’re not allowed to say that.]
If Chris Fearne wants to control obesity he should start with a census of all pastizzeriji located next to schools and in main thoroughfares.
Share the info with Joe Mizzi to help combat traffic congestion due double parking. Improve the bus service.
Pastizzi and pies are sold at Mater Dei Hospital, where vending machines dispense junk food and sugary snacks. There a donut vendor on the main road outside the hospital, and outside many schools in Malta’s central area.
Times of Malta’s file photo for ‘Mater Dei’ shows a woman with a massive arse, in leggings, leaning against the ‘Sptar Mater Dei’ sign, smoking away.
Encouraging breast feeding is positive but it’s not for the minister to do so. There are doctors, nutritionists and researchers for that kind of thing.
The maths behind significance testing is more rigorous than any of the arguments presented here. With statistical analysis there is no need for the same child to be born and raised twice to infer on diet genetics and obesity.
[Daphne – The ultimate evidence, mathsdrivesme, is not statistics but reality. With or without human milk, people are living longer and healthier lives (and growing taller and stronger) than they did when there was only human milk with a bit of sheep’s and goat’s to bolster it. The reasons are not milk but better healthcare and better food, while an abundance of the wrong sort of food is the reason for an obesity in this generation which did not exist in previous generations, whether breast-fed like my grandparents’ generation, or bottle-fed like my parents’ generation and mine.]
Totally off topic, but I think an item which merits discussion is this article:
http://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2014/jun/20/ireland-childprotection
I have always felt that there was much that was similar between Malta and Ireland. Whether because we are both Catholic, both islanders, both on the periphery, both with the mindset of a small village/community or both colonised for long periods, or maybe all of the above.
And if you want to see the whole thing on a larger scale simply turn your gaze over the pond to the USA, which unfortunately, has bigger toys to play with.
[Daphne – I read the news report about the remains of 760 children in a septic tank at an Irish care home in, of all places, Times of Malta. I found it extremely distressing.]
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/correction-ireland-childrens-mass-graves-story-24236573
That news story was a lie and a fraud.
“the researcher has since clarified that without excavation and forensic analysis it is impossible to know how many sets of remains the tank contains, if any. ”
The focal point of the above sentence is “if any”
Don’t you think this is more a case of corellation rather than causation? Honestly Daphne we’ve come to expect better from you.
[Daphne – Correlation has two rs and one l. It is neither causation nor correlation. It makes absolutely no difference to a child’s development whether that child is raised on formula milk or human milk, except when it does. This means that if your child is clearly not thriving on breast-milk (they always thrive on formula milk because it is perfectly balanced and uniform, unlike human milk which depends on the vagaries of the mother’s health, sanity and diet) and you persist with the breast-milk and don’t switch to formula, then yes, your child will fail to thrive. But that is not the difference between human milk and formula milk. That is the difference between poor or inadequate milk and good milk. Your baby will also fail to thrive if you water down your formula.]
Perhaps Chris Fearne and Co. should look into creating a milk bank. When I was asked to express milk for my daughter who was in the neonatal ITU I did so for two months, but I was never told to stop expressing even when her death was close, until her demise.
I asked if I could give the 10L left of milk to more unfortunate cases whose mothers were drug addicts and could not give them milk. The answer was no because we do not have a milk bank and we cannot take it.
So I had to throw it all away, and each time I did it felt like throwing away a part of me.
With my second pregnancy the midwives insisted that I should breast feed. When I noticed my daughter was starving I expressed the milk only to have drops, despite which they wrote ‘vigorous sucking’ on their notes.
I switched to formula and am very happy to have done that. No regrets.
Chris Fearne and Co, live and let live please. Stop making it about quotas and numbers, because you are assuming all expectant mothers have free-flowing milk which is not true, and you are making them go on guilt-trips if they do not have any.
[Daphne – And quite frankly, even if a woman has ‘free-flowing milk’, it’s nobody’s business if she chooses to free-flow it down the drain and give her baby a bottle. Chris Fearne the consultant paediatrician has got his priority-knickers in a twist: the real harm is not done by bottles of formula milk at six months but by bottles of fizzy drinks at six years.]
Ghall-erwieh. Finally some one saying it as it is. Well done.
While first preference should be breast milk, that does not mean that formula milk is inferior.
If a mother cannot breast feed, she can always resort to formula milk.
[Daphne – Breast milk should not be first preference but one choice of two, and mothers should know at the outset that both breast and bottle are equally good for their baby so they must do what suits them and not what suits others who appear to believe that private matters are public business.
Formula milk is not something to ‘resort to’ if a mother ‘cannot breast feed’. It is an equally good personal choice. Your statement right there sums up exactly what I am talking about: that formula milk is something presented to mothers as ‘failure to breast feed’. It makes me want to shout from the rooftops that actually in many cases formula milk is a whole lot better for babies than breast milk, which is exactly why many bottle-fed babies are often much bigger, stronger and tougher (and most certainly less whiny and clingy) than many breast-fed infants who so often strike me as failing to thrive.
Bottle-fed babies also sleep right through the night from around the age of four months – that’s another thing the Breast Nazis don’t tell you in case you’re tempted to switch – and they sleep in their own cots and not in your bed, because they’re not waking up five times a night for a prolonged suckle.]
It has been around for decades, hence the obvious conclusions. I don’t think it is appropriate to put undo pressure to breastfeed. Mothers to be should be given all the information and assistance they require, but final decision should be theirs and of their partner if that applies.
However, breastfeeding becomes of utmost importance in third world countries where formula milk is not available. Therefore, if a mother cannot breastfeed for one reason or the other the result is her child will starve to death.
Er, actually in your last paragraph it is formula milk that becomes of utmost importance.
This breastfeeding campaign is just like gay liberation, Chinese food, big is beautiful, feminism and all the rest of it. It’s another form of tyranny disguised as neohumanism.
Let’s put it this way; if breast feeding is going to cause upset or discomfort in the mother, there is no point to even consider it.
Speaking for the sake of accuracy, Daphne, this is not one of your better thought out articles. Of course bottle feeding is not going to produce the grotesque results you describe – if this were so, the product would have died out nearly right away.
Equally, obesity is more obviously a result of poor feeding habits, as well as a number of others, but the fact is that, all else being equal (and this qualifier is crucial), bottle feeding increases the tendency to later obesity.
This is not something that can be demonstrated with an individual or two because we are not describing a quantifiable absolute that can be applied equally to any individual chosen at random.
In other words, if you tested a thousand subjects, breast-fed half, bottle-fed the rest but otherwise reared them in the same way, more fatties would emerge within the bottle-fed group than within the breast-feds.
[Daphne – That is exactly what is wrong with the testing: there is no way of knowing whether those people would have become fat anyway. There are WAY too many variables, from genes to diet to exercise. My generation was almost exclusively bottle-fed, but it is a noticeable fact that obese 50-year-olds in Malta tend to come exclusively from a particular socio-economic background, which indicates that the main influences on obesity in those babies raised on 1960s formula milk are not the contents of the bottle but what comes afterwards.]
However, there is no way on Earth of predicting exactly how many fatties there would be in either. This sort of data is subject to too many variables for it to be verified using small test samples (a thousand is not very large for this sort of data-gathering) but it becomes greatly more accurate as the test sample grows.
The growth of sample size is roughly proportional to the ‘ironing-out’ effect on the other factors involved. The bottle-feeding data emerges from enormous sampling, obtained globally (somewhat weak in Asia, admittedly), over large periods of time and is statistically factual.
Stats is a wonderful branch of maths but, like any science, it is all too easy to mis-use if principle criteria are not rigidly adhered to. Regrettably, although many claim to understand this science, few actually do.
Daphne you may disagree with the way the study was carried out, however this is the norm in such scientific studies. The fact that there are so many variables is what ensures that there is no other factor (besides the bottle/breast feeding factor) that affects the outcome of the study. Any large differences between the groups would therefore be down to whether the child was breast fed or bottle fed.
Being breast fed does not guarantee that you will not become obese, as being bottle fed does not guarantee that you will become obese either. But the general norm is that bottle (powder milk) fed babies are more likely to be obese later on in life. I think what you are trying to say is that although obesity and bottle feeding may be ‘correlated’ it does not mean that bottle feeding causes obesity. I think this is the main argument you should be pushing in your article, as opposed to simply slamming the study and its results.
[Daphne – I am afraid I have to slam the study and its results. Noticing that bottle-fed babies tend to be obese in later life and linking this to the bottle-feeding is like noticing that working-class people are more likely to be obese than non-working-class people and linking this to the genetics of their class (it has indeed been done) when the real reason – at least in Malta – is DIET. Working-class people in Malta have a diet that is guaranteed to store up fat: huge amounts of bread and pasta, loads of pastizzi, packaged food, fast food, and crates of fizzy drinks. When I was a child, working-class people were SKINNY. Why? They ate minestra, and the bread had to be shared between a family of 15 to 20. Equally, when I was a child, old people tended to be fat, many of them VERY fat. And having been born in the early 1900s, they were most definitely not fed on formula milk.]
Hence the correlation versus causality comment. I am not agreeing with the results of the study, I am just explaining what the study brings to light. Yes, if you are bottle fed you are more likely to be obese later on in life but it does not necessarily mean that being bottle-fed leads to obesity. They are simply correlated. Like the correlation that working class people (who are less likely to have passed through further formal education) are more likely to eat pastizzi and fizzy drinks. These observations are correlated, but it does not necessarily mean that if you are working class then you will most definitely live off a diet of pastizzi and kinnie. If I were you I would refrain from commenting on scientific studies. It is not your area of expertise, and although you are entitled to your opinions on the matter, it does not make you right.
[Daphne – Oh, I am right. This argument is not about science. It is about life, personal liberty, the bullying of women and the undisputed fact that many babies thrive on formula milk but fail to thrive on human milk. Now let’s apply your stance and that of Chris Fearne to HAVING babies rather than feeding them. The optimum biological age for having a baby is in our early 20s. It is also much better for children to have younger mothers because they tend to be less fixated and neurotic and are also more in tune with what’s going on during the ghastly teenage years. It is not, however, the best time for a woman to have children in non-biological respects, including the most obvious one that she might not have met a suitable mate yet. So, using the ‘mothers must breast feed regardless of whether they want to because human milk is best’ argument, is Chris Fearne now going to start a campaign to browbeat women into having their babies at 24 instead of 34? Logic may not be a major component of your form of science, but I suggest you deploy it at times. Arguments are tested by precisely this method of taking them to their (logical) extreme. If Chris Fearne doesn’t feel he should interfere in whether women have babies at the optimum biological age, then how does he justify his interference in whether they feed them what he considers to be the optimum biological milk? THIS is what my subject is: everybody should stay out of everyone else’s baby business, and that pressuring women into feeling they have to use human milk can actually be a recipe for disaster.]
The point is not being fully appreciated here : there is no way of knowing whether a given individual would have become fat anyway but you can predict with extraordinary certainty that a percentage within the group will. It is exactly the same with cigarettes and lung cancer, for instance – approximately 35% of heavy smokers will develop a form of lung cancer. This is fact.
There is no way of pinpointing a single individual and stating that he or she will develop lung cancer but you can be pretty certain that out of a random group of 100 heavy smokers, 35 will.
The difference is that smoking is a powerfully dominant causative factor for lung cancer whereas bottle-feeding is not nearly as dominant a causative factor for obesity and it is easily eclipsed by more dominant ones, such as those you point out above. This does not mean, however, that it doesn’t operate – it most certainly does but its effect is less easily observable than that of others.
Whether, or not, the comparatively undesirable effects, mild or otherwise, of bottle-feeding are used in order to control women is an entirely different argument – but you cannot use this speculative social observation as proof that the scientific observation is false. This is an important distinction because it turns up in many of the more profoundly controversial arguments that beset human society today.
[Daphne – I’m afraid your comparison is far from suitable because cigarettes are a pollutant and formula milk is a food. Whether you develop lung cancer or not, cigarette-smoking will harm you in one way or several, to a greater or lesser extent, precisely because it is a pollutant. Also, you can link lung cancer and yellowed skin directly and undeniably to cigarettes. You can’t do the same with formula milk and obesity in later life. Is that 40-year-old woman fat because her mother fed her on Cow & Gate in the early 1970s, or is she fat because she has eaten a loaf of bread every day for the last 25 years? On the other hand, if the same woman smokes 40 cigarettes a day and develops lung cancer, you know for sure what caused it. I think a school packed with 400 bottle-fed girls (nobody was breast-fed back then), none of whom were obese and only a couple of whom were fat, is a pretty obvious statement, wouldn’t you say? I hate to have to repeat myself, but I can see for a fact that are a really large number of fat and obese children among today’s breast-fed generation whereas I can only remember a couple among my bottle-fed generation. It’s back to diet again.]
Ahhh … I wish we could sit down together and clear this. The easily observable cause-and-effect relationship is irrelevant to the statistical accuracy of the phenomenon. The numbers for the bottle-feeding / obesity link are valid beyond argument, when you subject them to strict mathematical scrutiny … only, the casually observable effect is not obvious because it is overshadowed by much more easily observable ones. In other words, the 400 subjects you refer to were more greatly influenced by other social factors than by the fact that they were bottle-fed. Nonetheless, it remains a near-certainty that a fixed percentage of the fatties (and I think you’ll find that your recollected perception of the numbers is ever so slightly exaggerated) would have been a tad less so had they been breast-fed. And yes, you’re quite right – diet is a more powerful factor than breast-feeding when it comes to obesity. Eppur, bottle-feeding contributes to the phenomenon.
Except Paddy there are no scientifically sound studies that show a link between obesity and breast-feeding. Just like the link between high cholesterol level and heart disease, this is a widely accepted fact that has no sound scientific basis.
Absolutely correct – but with one minor objection to your dismissal of controls. Scientifically and statistically there are ways and means around that problem, of which I will not go into detail here.
My greatest worry is that as a consultant paediatrician, Chris Fearne should, in matters of evidence-based medicine, be consulting scientific literature and following from its conclusions. This is blatantly not the case here.
Breast-feeding is of course important to the newborn as it transfers antibodies and proper nutrition for the immature digestive system. But once the initial ‘colostrum’ phase is complete, there is really no difference between breast-feeding and formula, especially with regards to weight.
Properly conducted studies have shown no significant difference in population weights between formula and breast-fed infants. More importantly a recent study (Am J Clin Nutr. 2014 May;99(5):1041-51) has shown that it is the calorific intake of the feed, rather than the feed itself, that will influence body mass in later life.
For those who are interested I suggest reading a review on the subject by Cassazza et al. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10408398.2014.922044?url_ver=Z39.88-2003&rfr_id=ori:rid:crossref.org&rfr_dat=cr_pub%3dpubmed&#.U62Tb_ldWQB
Precisely. It is the initial stage of breast feeding that is the most important due to the antibodies transferred from the mother’s mature immune system to the baby’s undeveloped one.
In terms of nutritional value breast milk and formula are very similar. Ideally, the initial couple of feeds should be breast milk due to the benefits to the baby’s immune system, but apart from that the issue should hardly be made into a national battle horse. It is purely the mother’s choice and no one else’s.
And even if the colostrum phase is missed for some reason or other, in our modern, germ-phobic antiseptic environment, the baby will have time to build a healthy immune system of his own from scratch without the risk of dying from some nasty unknown bug in the meantime.
Perhaps he will get the sniffles a bit more often when he starts school, but those are hardly avoidable even if you stuff ’em with breast milk like there’s no tomorrow.
I’m going to have to partially disagree with you on this one, Daphne. Breast milk helps pass on one thing that nothing bought from a packet possibly could, and that is antibodies!
[Daphne – And that, too, is total rubbish. If the antibodies in breast milk are so wonderful and effective, then the infant mortality rate wouldn’t have been so horrendously high right up until the Second World War, with breast-fed babies dying like flies. Antibodies my eye: the infant mortality rate shrank with the advent of formula milk. The two are not related; the real reason is better health care, much improved hygiene, penicillin and more understanding of disease and its treatment – all of which make the temporary antibodies in breast milk totally redundant. Not that they were ever any useful good anyway, as the infant mortality rate in 1900 should tell you.]
I don’t see anything wrong with women being urged to breastfeed, even just for a few weeks. It really helps babies build a wall against contagious illnesses and helps them develop a healthy digestive system (I am not saying that powdered milk makes you obese in the long run – that’s mostly due to pastizzi).
[Daphne – Immunity to disease has nothing to do with breast-milk. Again, it is all in the genes. Some people are just stronger than others. And no breast-milk on earth is going to protect a baby against German measles, measles, chicken pox, mumps or whooping cough. There are vaccines for that. Indeed, that’s why there are vaccines, because the so-called immunity provided by breast-milk is largely fictitious. It might guard against a cold, but what’s a cold in the grand scale of things? Certainly not worth two years of inconvenient suckling and mother-baby neurosis just to reduce the likelihood of a cold here and there.]
And although some children are lucky enough to develop a healthy immune system through contact with others, these children should just count their lucky stars as they are the exception not the rule.
The problem with this breast milk campaign is that women are being brainwashed into thinking that breast is the only way – it’s not, a few weeks of breastfeeding (1 or 2) is enough to pass on these proteins….women can then switch to formula. What’s the big deal?
[Daphne – Exactly. The reason is that this is not about the benefits of breast milk. This is about telling women what to do and using breast-feeding as a way of controlling them. That’s why they’re talking about 18 months and two years. The ways in which men (and bossy women) can control women are fast disappearing with changes in the law and cultural attitudes. Reproduction and its associated aspects are the few remaining avenues left to boss women and control them, through guilt, misinformation or worse.]
The medicines available to treat babies nowadays is not comparable to the treatment and care that babies were given in the past. To even compare the two is laughable.
Furthermore, when a new string of contagious disease develops the mother herself does not contain the anti-bodies and therefore had no way of passing them on to her child (as she had not developed them yet herself). You cannot pass on immunity to all diseases, but maybe a small percentage…but that small percentage is still higher than the 0% antibodies available in powdered milk.
Your disposition to influenza and similar viruses does not necessarily boil down to your genetic composition, but can also boil down to whether you have been exposed to the virus before or whether you contain the antibody to fight it.
That is why in most winters you rarely catch the same virus twice (and before you say you’ve caught a cold twice in the same winter, please bear in mind that viruses are as vast as human beings, there are millions of different strings).
The reason vaccines exist is because our mothers have not been exposed to all the viruses in the world, viruses morph from one year to the next, hence if you get vaccinated this year…you will still need to get vaccinated next year to protect yourself against a new string of disease.
Many people have died from colds, and this is not only in third world countries, but all over the world, even in countries which boast immaculate health care systems.
[Daphne – Those people would have died anyway. Or as my GP once put it in unemotional terms: improved medicine and health care means that people who shouldn’t have lived at all in nature, and who would have been part of the huge infant mortality statistics had they been born 80 years ago, now have their lives ‘artificially prolonged’ and then pop off unexpectedly with their deaths described as ‘premature’ when really they are the opposite of that.]
You do not need to breastfeed for two years. A couple of weeks is enough. Even one week which is the bare minimum…women who breast feed for two years do it because they feel a bond with their child (a bit weird in my opinion but anyway) and do this mostly out of selfishness.
I have recently met a woman who refuses to give up breast feeding because she is enjoying it so much.
[Daphne – I firmly agree with you on that. Women who are reluctant to wean their walking, talking children do not realise (if they did, they wouldn’t speak about it) that the pleasure they feel doing it is actually sexual, and that in this context it is 100% perverted.]
I do not agree with brainwashing women to breastfeed for prolonged periods of time. That is up to the individual. But there is nothing keeping women for breastfeeding a few times, or even “collecting” their breast milk and feeding their young ones through a bottle.
The antibodies argument has an inbuilt counterargument: all of the mother’s infections are passed onto the baby through breast milk.
In the 50’s when many mothers breast fed their babies – you could see mothers on the on the doorstep, breast feeding and I even remember a mother breast feeding in church – during mass.
As to antibodies, the mortality rate of babies was very high. Children died of whooping cough and measles and all sorts of other ailments. I still remember altar boys carrying the white coffin. And the church bells often rang out (I cannot say tolled) the “Gloria” signifying that a baby had died.
So breast feeding wasn’t as effective as it is made out to be.
I agree with Daphne that the whole thing is really about controlling women.
Thank you for this article, Daphne. You really don’t know how much you’ve helped me.
I’m fed up of feeling guilty because I’m not giving my children what’s ‘best’ for them. Thank God I have my husband’s support because I know a few who don’t and they are devastated and on the verge of depression.
[Daphne – That’s exactly why I write about the subject, my dear. I know exactly what it feels like. People tend to forget that I had three children in the space of two and a half years and that consequently I have a fair amount of experience in these matters. The drive for breast-feeding was at its worst in the early to mid 1980s and I got the tail-end of it when I had my first child in 1986. The health of the mother and baby had nothing to do with it. The government’s policy on breast-feeding was part of its import substitution policy: not importing anything that could be made in the domestic economy. Women were harried into breast-feeding to reduce the tonnage of formula milk imported and cut down on the amount of money leaving the country to pay for it. The bullying was extreme. By the time I had the third one I felt very comfortable telling the hospital staff where to shove their breast-feeding. I clearly remember telling one of the nurses that if she thought I was going to sit around for hours with a newborn hanging off my chest while a two-year-old sat on the potty and a one-year-old ripped off his nappy and ground the contents of the fridge into the carpet, she needed her head examined. People like that are on another planet.]
Wow, three children in two and a half years? Now I admire you more. I breastfed my first one in hospital and it was horrible. The pain was worse than labour. She was crying all the time and I didn’t sleep for a second. I thought I was going bananas.
[Daphne – Yes, they’re now 28, 27 and the youngest will be 26 in November. I know, the bullying is beyond terrible. They keep on and on and on at you as though it’s some exam you’ve got to pass, something that it’s absolutely essential you do, failing which catastrophe will result – and you in your weakened and vulnerable state just keep panicking and sinking. They really take advantage of the fact that bewildered new and inexperienced mothers are unable to stand up to them and resist their harassment.
I gave birth to my third baby at 2am. At 5am, when I was passed out in deep sleep, this nurse barged unceremoniously into my room with the howling and majorly alert baby in his plastic wheelie crib: “Zommu hdejk ghax qed iqajjimli l-kulhadd hemm gew. Aghtieh feed.” And off she went.
I got out of bed, wheeled crib and howling baby right back to the nursery, and told the nurse, “Zommu int ghax dak xogholok, u aghtieh bottle int ukoll jekk joghgbok ghax jien ghadni kif wellidt u jekk ma jimpurtax tergax tqajjimni. U jekk qed iqajjem il-kullhadd dik problema tieghek u mhux tieghi.” That’s the kind of handling they need, but it’s only the experienced mothers who feel able to do it.
When I had my first, there was a woman there having her sixth. They were too scared to even talk to her about breast-feeding. She was right there on the phone in the hall, loudly instructing her husband to buy a crate of SMA formula milk, Milton (that’s the sterilising fluid we used) and bottles because she hadn’t had time to do it herself before coming in.]
I had women from the breastfeeding clinic persuading me to continue and giving me all the ‘breast is best’ crap talking. As soon as I went home I gave her a bottle and she was like another baby, totally fulfilled and happy. Soon she’s going to be three, she eats everything, she sleeps all night and she’s certainly not obese.
Four months ago I had another baby and decided to give him formula as soon as he was born. That night I even slept for four hours because a very nice midwife offered to take care of him and feed him.
I really don’t know why all this fuss on breastdfeeding. Live and let live.
Well done once again, Daphne.
Chris Fearne has a fetish on lactating women. He wants to create a situation where this become a common place occurance in public places.
Telling women to breast feed is only part one of his plan. The second part will be a campaign to give the babies milk fresh from the teat.
I have a record of his browsing history – this is not just speculation. I have also paid the annual Data Protection Tax – which entitles me to have this data.
[Daphne – In the land of taking things literally, I find it necessary to point out that this is a satirical comment.]
I think that mothers should be provided with the information available and then decide themselves without any pressure.
[Daphne – Pregnant women are not sub-literate morons and do not need to be provided (by vastly superior and informed men) with information which they are quite capable of obtaining themselves because they can read and use the internet.]
Most of the medical literature suggests multiple small benefits for both the mother and the children although of course there is a lot of controversy on the details.
My wife breastfed our three children for varying lengths of time (6 months to 2+ years) and I had absolutely no say. It was her decision and she was working most of the time she was breastfeeding. Obviously breastfeeding will not work for everyone and I think it helps nobody to be extremist and say that breast is best or that formula is better.
Well, then we should scrap all public health communication because you can find everything online. In most countries the role of public health institutes is precisely that, to analyse the science and present it in a way which is understandable to most especially when there is controversy.
How many persons (irrespectively of gender and pregnancy status) do you know who can analyse the quality of a scientific paper?
And what do men have to do with it? Most of those working in public health departments (including Malta) are women.
[Daphne – There are no public health campaigns as determinedly bossy and patronising as those related to human milk. Because of political correctness and crass stupidity (to say nothing of the assumption that a woman about to raise a child in a complicated first world environment is considered too stupid to work out whether she wants to breast-feed or bottle-feed), information campaigns designed for the third world are used in Europe, where they are most definitely not required. Also, in the maternity hospital women who are about to give birth or who have just done so are bombarded with the same information regardless of whether they are university graduates who have held down a difficult job for years or whether they are 16-year-olds who have had an accidental pregnancy on leaving school. This is deeply offensive. The inherent impression received throughout the process is that giving birth reduces a woman to the status of an animal. It’s so uncivilised.]
It’s not just at the maternity ward either.
The first and last time I used the public health service (brain surgery with a lovely scar to show for it), the nurses and surgeons were talking to me as if I were a subliterate moron. Slightly irritated (my body, my choice, as the feminists say) I asked them a few pointed questions.
“Eh inti tabib?” was the answer.
At that point I had to make a quick decision. So I decided to lie, because it was the only way I was going to get my right to information on medical treatment.
What a bloody joke. Here’s one campaign for Albert Fenech, who looks more and more like he got into Parliament so he can crack jokes and twiddle his thumbs the rest of the time.
If breast milk is so beneficial for the baby then how come so many infants did not make it to childhood up to a couple of generations ago when formula milk was beyond the reach of most people and so many of them grew up short, stunted, with bad teeth and suffering from chronic illness that they caught when they were very young?
Once again, thank you, Daphne. The pro breast-feeding guys start brainwashing each and every expectant mother about the miraculous properties of breast milk, harping on and on about the creation of a special bond, antibodies, breast is best c**p.
Then, when you’re at your most vulnerable, experiencing hormonal havoc, with a newborn to take care of 24/7 and you can’t cope with breast-feeding, but for the sake of the antibodies and the bonding you feel you have to persevere but still you can’t cope. Finally you give in to that demon, formula milk, and that’s when the guilt trip starts.
Suddenly you’re a selfish mother giving your little one “second best”. You feel as if you’re committing a crime and depression starts kicking in. You’re a lesser woman because you didn’t manage or choose to breast-feed.
No mother should be submitted to this. I fed my children formula milk and two decades later they’ve grown up to be healthy (rarely getting ill, ever), intelligent and certainly not obese young adults.
As for the bonding, please rest assured that it’s the constant love and care that you show your offspring that creates that special bond.
I tried breastfeeding, but it simply didn’t work. I was harried by breastfeeding nurses and had plenty of strangers staring at me and probing and prodding while trying different positions to help the baby latch on. It was very awkward to say the least.
Finally I decided that enough was enough and switched to bottle-feeding. The guilt that I was made to feel was unbelievable. Thank God for my husband’s support in bottle-feeding.
Every woman is indoctrinated with the ‘Breast is Best’ mantra and failure to breastfeed becomes equal to failure in womanhood and motherhood.
I’m expecting again and this baby will be formula-fed from her very first feed.
I think that breastfeeding should be a choice, on an equal footing as formula-feeding. No woman should be made to feel guilty over her choice.
And no woman should be asked, ‘Are you breastfeeding?’ That’s no one’s business. I’m asked that question repeatedly about my eight month old daughter. Seriously? Do you really want to know whether I’m using my breasts in the way you think they should be used?
As regards to the ‘partially breastfeeding’ issue, I would recommend it to any woman who is breastfeeding. Just hand over your baby to your husband at 10pm, go to sleep, he can give a bottle at midnight (and have some bonding time with baby), then wake up again at 3am to give a breastfeed (or another bottle which is easier and faster), and go back to sleep till 6am in time for another feed.
Why should the minister dictate whether I formula-feed, exclusively breastfeed or partially breastfeed my baby? The minister should shove his opinion up his arse.
I have been made to feel like an inferior being by these Nazis for the past 14 years.
I am raising my third baby and I have no regrets in using formula milk.
I agree with all you said about living according to your home needs with other kids, work, relationship or the non-existent relationship with your husband while kids are so very young and dependent on us mothers.
There is already so much stress involved in raising children and coping with life in general that this added stress does nothing to improve our being better mothers.
I have no idea which option is better as I have not covered the the literature. But your article lost me at:
“The trouble with all these studies is that the controls are hopeless because you can’t bring up the same child twice and have no way of knowing whether it would have been different if fed breast over bottle or the other way round.”
Even if you could bring up two identical children twice and test each method on both – it would prove nothing, because children are inherently different. You would still have to test a large sample of different pairs to reach a conclusion.
You can achieve having ‘identical’ children by comparing attributes rather than children. I.e children with a single identical attribute, ex. Milk Type Vs Height at a certain age to get some a score which contributes to height.
Then, there is something called statistical significance.
Which brings me to the real point behind all this – arguing which method makes a child ‘stupid, obese or sickly’ is a flawed premise because of the generalisation as is arguing that you need two identical children.
The key is in finding correlations between certain variables. The fact that we’re talking medicine adds even more uncertainty too.
Sorry, but that comment made me cringe. This is the problem with scientific journalism.
[Daphne – I am afraid that I am a rational person, so you will have to deal with that. And to my rational mind, the only way to prove conclusively that breast is better than bottle (or any other permutation of the argument) is to assemble a few hundred pairs of identical twins, feeding one twin bottle and the other twin breast, then making sure that both twins eat exactly the same things in the same amounts at the same time for the next 40 years, while controlling other aspects of their lives like smoking, exercise, late nights, partying, alcohol & c & c. Then, if the majority of the bottle-fed half of the pairs drop dead, are ill all the time or billow up to 120 kilos, while the majority of the breast-fed half of the pairs stay slim, hale and hearty, you’ve convinced me. So yes, you can bring up the same child twice, once on bottle and once on breast: the answer is identical twins. But that’s not going to happen, is it.]
You missed the point: If you ask a silly question, you will get a silly answer. “Does ___ make children obese?” is a silly question, because you cannot control it, as you correctly point out.
But that does not make studies related to any side of the argument irrelevant because you will not find any real scientific studies which directly address that question.
Rationally speaking, that comment is illogical because it is a loaded question. I’m an avid reader of your articles but I cannot stand it when science is oversimplified to make an argument, and more so, an incorrect one.
Instead, you have better luck building such an argument on correlations between several variables – but even then, you can never definitely answer the question because this is medicine and variables are not as simple as in other fields. In fact, medicine is not defined as a pure science because of such reasoning.
[Daphne – The most variable factor in these studies is the most obvious one: the human milk itself. Unlike formula milk (the clue is in the name), it is not at all constant and varies immensely in quantity and quality.]
Daphne,
You have done a lot of women and babies a disservice, considering how influential your blog is, and how many people hang onto your every word.
Your blog makes it sound as if formula is as good as – or even better than – breast milk. This is far from the truth. You have no knowledge on this subject, so I will attempt to shed some light on this for you.
First of all, you’re saying that it’s the children’s diet, which makes them fat. Fair point and I completely agree. However, the reason formula contributes to obesity is because it stretches the stomach. You see a newborn baby being given a full bottle, when the size of a newborn’s stomach is the size of a marble. A stretched stomach will eventually start wanting more food. Hence the obesity.
This is also what makes formula-fed babies sleep longer – compare it to when you’ve had a full meal and it makes you sleepy. By the way, this is also one way in which formula contributes to a rise in Sudden Infant Death Syndrome: The babies fall into a deep sleep and don’t wake up. Breastfed babies wake more often, because formula is quickly and easily digested and they do not fall into such a perilous state of deep sleep.
Your children are not fat. Congratulations! I was formula-fed and I am not fat, either. Just because you and I (and your children) did not suffer from this side effect of formula, doesn’t mean that no one else on the planet has or will.
Formula is made from cow’s milk. Granted, it has been modified, but it hasn’t been modified enough to be as good as mother’s milk. Cow’s milk is tailored for calves, who need to grow quickly and run away from predators. Human milk is specifically tailored for growing infants’ brains: In fact, it is optimal if given in the first five years of life (yes, this is actually normal around most of the world, and it is not weird or even gross). This is also where the I.Q argument comes in. Once again, yes, your children are very clever, well done.
Formula is responsible for a lot of problems in modern-day society. These include (but are not limited to):
Ear infections;
Diabetes;
Obesity;
Leukaemia;
SIDS;
Allergies;
Coeliac disease;
Rheumatoid arthritis;
Multiple Sclerosis;
Dental caries;
Acute appendicitis.
That is just for the babies. Mothers reduce their risk of developing breast- and ovarian cancer through breastfeeding. A mother who breastfeeds for 8 years has practically no chance at all of getting breast cancer, and a mother who breastfeeds daughters, reduces their chance of developing breast cancer by 25%.
I am not saying that breastfed babies will never develop any health problems, but if they do, it’s usually to a lesser extent than formula-fed babies.
Why do you think politicians are getting involved in this? There are no bribes one can take from promoting breastfeeding, because it is free. However, one can take bribes from formula companies to promote their product. The reason politicians are getting involved, is because in the long run, it saves the government millions of Euros, due to a decrease in hospital admissions from all the diseases I mentioned.
Here are a few websites you may want to look at:
http://bit.ly/1pMokkf
http://bit.ly/1yZlA9r
http://bit.ly/UXrubt
http://www.llli.org/
[Daphne – On this subject, Amanda, I think you should learn the value of minding your own business, which is exactly what my argument is here. Any woman who is grown up enough to have taken the decision to have a baby, who holds down a job and runs a household, who has long years of education behind her, is perfectly capable of deciding for herself whether her baby is going to be fed on human milk or formula milk. To suggest otherwise is offensive to women and deeply insulting. The only way a grown woman with an education and a life of responsibility can be browbeaten into feeling doubt in her own judgement is with these constant campaigns and with a veritable onslaught of bullying when she is at her most vulnerable. The purpose of my writing about this is to reassure women that their judgement is best and that it is perfectly all right to tell the midwives and the nurses and even family members to back off and mind their own business. As for not knowing about the subject, please spare me your insults. I know more about it than most through direct experience. Once more: learn the value of minding your own business. Despite some evidence to the contrary, Malta is not a Third World country.]
Rubbish Daphne, Amanda has every right to correct you on this, she would be doing the public a disservice not to have pointed out the facts above. Just because you & your children were not breast fed obviously shows why you are so biased.
Any woman obviously can make her own decision, as long as she is well informed.
[Daphne – Actually, Annie, the only reason I mentioned that I and my sons were raised on infant formula milk is to illustrate the fact that infant formula milk does not stunt height, cause obesity, reduce intelligence or negatively affect health. Similarly, you will find that breast milk does not make babies taller, cleverer or generally healthier than infant formula milk, and the only reason they might be thinner is generally because they are undernourished and not because they are genetically thin. Ear infections? Sparing your baby the off-chance of a random ear infection that can be cured in a jiffy is no reason to breast-feed for six months to two years.]
Sorry Daphne, your argument is flawed, I understood fully the reason you mentioned you were raised on formula, but you have to compare yourself & your children brought up on formula with yourself & your children brought up on breast milk next time round to prove that point, which is not possible. What about the rights of the young infants themselves who have no voice? It’s lucky Chris Fearne is speaking up for them. One final point that seems to have been missed is that breast feeding is more than just providing nutrition. It is a way of forming an incredibly strong bond between mother & child, just by the intimate proximity & warmth flowing from one to the other, if a woman is capable of breastfeeding I suggest she should persist & find out for herself.
Hello Daphne,
I wasn’t breastfed, I am quite tall abd by the way there is one study that cites that breastfed are shorter, not the other way around. As an adult I am quite healthy, but as a kid I was quite sick, always having stomach bug and ostitis. Breatfed babes do have less of these sickness and therefore don’t cramped up hospitals. If you and I had been breastfed, we’ve probably have few higher IQ points like it or not, but technology permits to show the fact that breastfed people have more going on inside their skulls, believe it or not. What I believe is that you are playing the same ugly game of bullying. Breastfeeding compare to an entire life, is nothing, yes I do blame mothers who want it all. Children are not made to go in daycare early in life either. I have a kid and one more in his way and I jnow plenty of kids of pro career feminists, and I am happy I’m fallowing my prime animalistic instinct. Have a good day, I’m sorry you have this anger inside of you.
Sorry for the few mistakes, I am french.
Having education and a job and a household does not make you more just. If your body can provide the best nutrition for your baby who can’t decide for himself, but obviously the choice would be what nature intended! All the breastfed baby that I know find formula disgusting. I was on cowmilk formula too, I’ve decided not to be egoistic and selfish when it comes to my children, their worth is more than my liberty, that said fir just a few years. By the way most of wimen whi breastfeed’s have an higher education.
Someone sent me a link to the article and after I read it… I only gave a quick look at the comments.
It makes me wonder why people, including Daphne herself want to write anything AGAINST something which God Himself created and which formula ( processed cows milk ) can never , ever come close to what God intented human babies to have, Many forget that. YES , it should be their right, it is their health and their start to their future.
I can quote many studies re: the benefits of breastmilk & breastfeeding but it may be a useless task here.
If a person is truly honest , there shouldn’t even be a shadow of a doubt of its benefits.
I don’t care for politics one or the other, I only care what God’s will is for the country, which I am afraid to say both parties have failed miserably to follow God’s will ,
It is pathetic to get into politics over such a subject as breastfeeding ..if there is a person at the moment who believes in a mother breastfeeding her child …why on earth do we have to get politics into such a beautiful art such as breastfeeding one’s child.
Breastfeeding and politics don’t go together. Be mature instead and dig deeper into the subject if anyone is truly interested to know whether breastfeeding is truly beneficial or not..,
By the way, I would advise anyone not to look for any study which has been funded or promoted by a formula company.
In regards to what I just shared when I mentioned that if there is a person at the moment who believes in a mother breastfeeding her child , I was referring to the fact that if this person in politics believes in this do we have to attack breastfeeding because someone differs politically to this person?
That is why I said, it is pathetic…