Babies shouldn't be eating crap that comes in a package anyway. They should be drinking breast milk, and eventually graduate to eggs (not the plastic kind) and normal human food.
See: http://www.ntnu.edu/news/breastfeeding, http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/are-the-benefi..., http://jhppl.dukejournals.org/content/32/4/595.full.pdf+html, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1200943/So-breast-..., http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-02/breast-feeding-is-n..., http://www.halfsigma.com/2007/11/breastfeeding-d.html
From the last article: "In one analysis of multiple studies, combining data from more than 5,000 children, the IQ differences associated with breast-feeding were eliminated when the mothers’ characteristics were taken into account. Among 332 pairs of siblings in which one was breast-fed and the other bottle-fed, researchers also found no difference in IQ."
At the same time, breastfeeding is insanely expensive. It is insanely difficult for a working woman to breastfeed, and breastfeeding makes it extremely difficult to share the child-rearing burden between the mom and the dad.
Like with most recommendations having to do with child-rearing, those involving breastfeeding are both unscientific and aren't subject to cost-benefit analysis. Given the extremely tenuous proven benefits of breastfeeding, a baby is almost certainly better off in the long run from the mom's increased earning power from not having to downshift her career to breastfeed.
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/99/6/e5.short
"The crude incidence density ratio (IDR) revealed a protective effect of breast-feeding on respiratory illnesses (IDR=0.66; 95% confidence interval (CI), 0.52 to 0.83), on gastrointestinal illnesses (IDR=0.53; 95% CI, 0.27 to 1.04) and on all illnesses (IDR=0.67; 95% CI, 0.54 to 0.82)."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7844664
"Overall, children who were ever breastfed had 0.79 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.67–0.93) times the risk of never breastfed children for dying in the postneonatal period"
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/113/5/e435.sho...
"Infants exclusively breastfed ‘at discharge from the obstetric hospital’ (odds ratio [OR]=0.52, 95% confidence interval (CI):0.35–0.71) and during the last 2 days (OR=0.65, 95% Cl:0.46–0.91) had a significantly lower risk of SIDS than infants not breastfed after controlling for potential confounders."
http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/22/5/885.short
"Exclusive breastfeeding (EBF) may substantially reduce breastfeeding-associated HIV transmission."
http://journals.lww.com/aidsonline/Abstract/2005/04290/Early...
Exclusive Breastfeeding Reduces Acute Respiratory Infection and Diarrhea Deaths Among Infants in Dhaka Slums
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/108/4/e67.shor...
Breastfeeding improves survival, but not nutritional status, of 12-35 months old children in rural Bangladesh.
http://europepmc.org/abstract/MED/2606091/reload=0;jsessioni...
Yes, but by less than a factor of 2 for a digestive condition that, while a killer in the developing world, is at most an inconvenience in the developed world.
> "The crude incidence density ratio (IDR) revealed a protective effect of breast-feeding on respiratory illnesses (IDR=0.66; 95% confidence interval (CI), 0.52 to 0.83), on gastrointestinal illnesses (IDR=0.53; 95% CI, 0.27 to 1.04) and on all illnesses (IDR=0.67; 95% CI, 0.54 to 0.82)."
It's interesting that you leave out this part of the text: "The protective effect of breast-feeding on respiratory illnesses persisted even after adjustment for age of the infant, socioeconomic class, maternal age, and cigarette consumption (adjusted IDR = 0.78; 95% CI, 0.61 to 1.00)." There is no reason to ever report IDRs not adjusted for socioeconomic class, maternal age, and cigarette consumption, because breastfeeding rates are not uniform among these groups. So the first set of numbers is meaningless. An IDR of 0.78 is not a big benefit. It means that if something happens to bottle fed infants 10% of the time, it'll happen to breastfed infants about 8% of the time. And remember, this is just the first six months of life--the available studies show these sorts of effects diminishing as the child gets older.
> "Infants exclusively breastfed ‘at discharge from the obstetric hospital’ (odds ratio [OR]=0.52, 95% confidence interval (CI):0.35–0.71) and during the last 2 days (OR=0.65, 95% Cl:0.46–0.91) had a significantly lower risk of SIDS than infants not breastfed after controlling for potential confounders."
The number of babies that die of SIDS each year in the U.S. is about 2,500 out of 4,000,000+ births each year. With an OR of 0.65, we're talking about a roughly 0.075% risk versus a 0.050% risk. For comparison, your child has a 1.2% chance of ever dying in a car accident.
> "Exclusive breastfeeding (EBF) may substantially reduce breastfeeding-associated HIV transmission."
This is the only one of the lot that's actually worth talking about. We're talking about OR's of 2.5-4 for something that has an overall incidence rate of 12.1%. So if you're HIV positive, exclusively breastfeeding can substantially reduce your chances of transmitting the virus to your child.
Your Bangladesh (my home country!) example is irrelevant to people in the developed world. The water in Bangladesh is full of arsenic and disease. Of course breastfed infants, who don't drink the water, are going to be much healthier than bottle fed infants who do.
Sure. Your area of concern seems to be the over-selling of breast-feeding in the developed world. Mine is the over-selling of infant formula in the developing world, including China, to the point of people never breastfeeding their infants. The above was a fairly cursory attempt to find a few examples of recent, post advertising ban, research on the subject.
By the way, you may not be aware of this, but the Daily Mail is a tabloid and the author of:
http://jhppl.dukejournals.org/content/32/4/595.full.pdf+html
is a professor of Women's Studies.
Suboptimum breastfeeding still accounts for an
estimated 1.4 million deaths in children under
five annually
See my other post for some examples of the research that's been done in the area of infant mortality and insufficient breastfeeding:
Everyone responding to you is going to say mothers can't breastfeed. Bullshit. Only perhaps 5% of mothers can't breastfeed because of medical conditions. 71% of babies in China aren't breastfed. Do you see a discrepancy here? Framing it in terms of being physically unable to breastfeed is disingenuous.
Among other reasons, women aren't breastfeeding because they are being misinformed and marketed to by corporations. It really is ridiculous when poor families who have a free way to feed their children are putting in the time and expense to get subpar nutrition from overseas.
>However, Save the Children said in its report that a quarter of mothers in China have received gifts from dairy companies, while 40% were given samples of baby formula from companies including Nestle, Wyeth and Mead Johnson.
>The British group also found that 16 out of 35 food shops in six Chinese cities had promoted breast milk substitutes through salespersons, posters or gifts.
>Save the Children said such marketing has resulted in the percentage of breastfeeding mothers in East Asia and the Pacific to drop from 2006's 45% to 2012's 29%.
http://www.wantchinatimes.com/news-subclass-cnt.aspx?id=2013...
>But even Wolynn, who is also a certified lactation consultant, seemed skeptical when I related Kelly's tale -- usually women struggle because they haven't had enough support in the first few days after giving birth, in his experience. "Very few women really can't breastfeed," he said. "That's very, very, uncommon." It's a "normal mammalian function," he said. Almost everyone can do it.
> It really is ridiculous when poor families who have a free way to feed their children are putting in the time and expense to get subpar nutrition from overseas.
Breastfeeding is only free if a woman's time has no value. This is especially relevant in poor families where women have to get back to working as quickly as possible to help support the family.
>(the technical term for it is appeal to nature fallacy).
A couple hundred million years of evolution is just a hippie fantasy, I guess. If the evidence isn't there, fine, but I can't for the life of me understand how the null hypothesis among hackers is always natural = bad.
>Breastfeeding is only free if a woman's time has no value.
First, why couldn't they pump? Are you saying they don't have time for pumping, but they can afford child care and formula? These people are buying formula from overseas. From a quick search, it appears western families are paying $100-$200+/month (that doesn't include shipping) for formula and I'm not convinced poor Chinese workers are earning much (if any) more than that.
I didn't say there were no proven advantages to breastfeeding. I said that advantages to breastfeeding that have been proven are extremely tenuous (thin). There have been a ton of controlled studies on breastfeeding--it's not an area that's lacking in data. What the studies have proven is that, once you control for the fact that higher-income mothers are more likely to breastfeed, the benefits from breastfeeding are minor.
>(the technical term for it is appeal to nature fallacy). A couple hundred million years of evolution is just a hippie fantasy, I guess.
That's exactly what the "appeal to nature" fallacy is.
> If the evidence isn't there, fine, but I can't for the life of me understand how the null hypothesis among hackers is always natural = bad.
You're confused about what the situation is. It is not that "we don't know enough about the advantages of breastfeeding, so we'll assume that natural = bad." It's that "we do know about the advantages of breastfeeding, and they are tenuous, and therefore we should balance those minor benefits against the costs of breastfeeding."
> First, why couldn't they pump? Are you saying they don't have time for pumping, but they can afford child care and formula?
Most women produce less milk pumping than breastfeeding, and pumping enough milk during the day to feed the baby through the next day is a huge hassle because it's time consuming and you have to do it several times a day to get enough supply. Most women don't have the luxury of taking multiple 15-20 minute breaks to pump (especially in a country without worker protection regulations like China). Also, lactating in work clothes is a pain in the ass.
> These people are buying formula from overseas. From a quick search, it appears western families are paying $100-$200+/month (that doesn't include shipping) for formula and I'm not convinced poor Chinese workers are earning much (if any) more than that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_wages_in_China
These are obviously not people in China making minimum wage who are shipping in formula from overseas. These are middle class people. And for them, as for most working mothers in the U.S., child care and formula does indeed eat up most of the wages from working. Mother continue to do it because some money coming in is better than no money coming in, and because taking time off work to raise children is a career-ender. Employers treat a mother who took a year off to raise kids even worse, if that's possible, than someone who was unemployed for a whole year because they couldn't find a job (and see the recent HN thread about what a disaster long-term unemployment is even without the stigma attached to motherhood).
That kid that you don't breastfeed is going to end being more expensive in the future, when his/her grades aren't as good as the kids who were breastfed, ends up getting a lower paying job, and ends up with a higher chance of getting a disease.
"Science" has only existed in its current form (empirical science) for the last 600 years or so, while the knowledge that the earth is round goes back to ancient times.
> All matters of health and nutrition should factor in biological anthropology (hippie bullshit, apparently).
I can't think of anything more deserving of the title "hippie bullshit" than anything anthropology related, and especially "biological anthropology" which is as far as I can tell an oxymoron or at least the worst sort of snake-oil, cargo-cult pseudo-science (http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm).
> That kid that you don't breastfeed is going to end being more expensive in the future, when his/her grades aren't as good as the kids who were breastfed, ends up getting a lower paying job, and ends up with a higher chance of getting a disease
That would be relevant to the cost benefit analysis if it were true, but the evidence shows that the health benefits, while statistically significant, are not meaningful in magnitude. How much money you spend on an SAT tutor is going to have a bigger impact on your kid's life than whether you breast feed or bottle feed.
I do work full time, and I have to pump twice a day. Which makes it less convenient. But it takes less than 15 minutes each time. I'm fortunate to have a very flexible work environment though.
It's true his father can't help with the feedings this way, but there are plenty of chores to go around.
The baby still wakes up to eat twice at night, and I take the night feedings. It's a huge benefit for us to be able to do that, because my wife needs 6-7 hours of uninterrupted sleep to function the next day, while I don't. As for other chores, they're trivial and easily outsourced. If I couldn't take on some of the feedings, I just wouldn't be carrying my weight.
And for a career woman, starting out from day 1 with the husband taking a lesser role in child-rearing is a sure way to become the primary care giver and the one who will ultimately have to downshift if push comes to shove.
I'm glad it works for you, but it would be very inconvenient for us, and given the tenuous medical benefits of doing so it isn't worth it to try and make it work. And I think if doctors encouraged women, especially women with careers, to evaluate the costs and benefits of breastfeeding rationally instead of regurgitating highly unscientific dreck the way they do, a lot more women would bottle feed without feeling guilty about it.
What grates on me is that a lot of people who breastfeed make other decisions that endanger their children, totally guilt free. Living in a suburban area where driving is a necessity and it is common for teenagers to drive is going to have more of a practical impact on your child than whether you breastfeed or not.
I think that the breastfeeding advocates frequently don't mention how hard that first month of breastfeeding is, because they think it might be discouraging. But it is much, much harder than breastfeeding once it is established. Even if it goes perfectly, it feels like you are chained to the baby. To add to that, I had a lot of trouble the first two weeks, which was incredibly frustrating. Luckily, we got to see an amazing lactation consultant at Kaiser and it worked out.
So people start supplementing during the first month, and don't get to see how responsive to demand lactation is once supply is established. My son is 99th percentile, 29 inches and 22 pounds at 6 months. I pump about 18 oz a day for him in the two sessions, and that's a slight oversupply.
It's wonderful you were able to share night duties, that part was very hard on me. I don't think it's true that other chores are trivial though, the baby needs constant supervision, holding, diapering, etc, which my husband does a lot of. He also does most of the feeding of solids since we started that a few weeks ago.
I don't really think breastfeeding is any cheaper for us though, nursing bras and pumps are really expensive too.
However this is not a black-and-white issue, particularly in the Developing World. Some mothers cannot produce sufficient breastmilk for their offspring. Others cannot always be available to feed their offspring (and a care giver must do so) - as they must work to feed and shelter their children.
There are many and varied reasons why formula is actively needed to better, and even save the lives of children.
OP said: "They should .."
Emphasis on the "SHOULD". He didn't say "nothing but breast milk, and I don't give a damn if the babies die"
Creating a straw man for your someone signifies only one thing. Your bias, extremism, and inability to treat your "opponent" as human.
In your analogy, he isn't the voter, but the legislator, and it's perfectly valid to ask the question "and how many laws have you passed?"
2. shanev's post was expressing an opinion of whether or not breastfeeding is superior to formula-feeding. Is someone not allowed to have an opinion on the subject matter?
3. shanev did not 'command' anyone to do anything. He/she is stating the babies should be breastfed, which, in the context of the post, is just an opinion.