Boys and Girls may get different breast milk
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
Also what about formula milk?
Studies like these are valuable, but it's tempting to jump from interesting observation to policy recommendation without keeping in perspective (or even bothering to quantify) the magnitude of the impact.
An excellent blog post on the state of research into breast feeding: http://www.skepticalob.com/2013/06/two-crappy-new-breastfeed...
This is a joke, right?
Simple reasoning and deduction will lead you to the right answer. We evolved to drink the milk of our mothers, not a chemical concoction derived from the milk of cows fed by corn.
I believe rayiner's point is that infants can thrive on formula milk as well as breast milk. Please don't mock parents who choose to formula feed; there are many cases where it is preferable and/or necessary, just as there are cases where it is necessary to use antibiotics to supplement the body's immune system.
And where have I done that? Formula is a fantastic invention that can specifically assist in very difficult situations.
But just as it is clearly inferior to take antibiotics daily because it is too inconvenient to wash one's hands ... so to is it clearly inferior to use formula when the mother is capable of breastfeeding, but can't be bothered.
Babies in the first world are: 1) not exposed to that many dangerous pathogens to begin with; and 2) in the rare cases they do become infected, are easily treated with antibiotics, etc. Sure, breast milk has live immune cells, etc, but does that matter in any practical way?
Remember, the couple of generations of Americans grew up on formula feeding. Breastfeeding rates were down to the 20% range in the 1970's. Yet, there is very little evidence showing any long-term negative impact in those generations.
I can easily see the possibility that long term benefits are masked or "washed out" by other factors. Short term benefits, on the other hand, are unequivocally and easily empirically established. The fact that immune systems and richer nutrients are passed through breastmilk undeniably give breastfed babies an advantage over formula-only babies.
Given such evidence, it has been recommended that in the first six months of life, every child should be exclusively breastfed, with partial breastfeeding continued until two years of age.
That's WHO guidance. They don't broker much consideration for formula milk in that statement.
It's stupid to take WHO recommendations, or medical recommendations generally, at face value, because they generally are devoid of any cost-benefit analysis. Take this study of short-term benefits done in the U.K. http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/119/4/e837.ful.... It found a 53% reduction in diarrhea hospitalizations from exclusive breastfeeding, and a 27% reduction in lower respiratory tract infections. This is a very strong result and justifies the "breast is best" recommendation. Yet, when subjected to cost-benefit analysis, the result isn't so clear. The incidence of these conditions in the sample of infants was only 1-3% to begin with. In other words, exclusive breastfeeding reduces the chance of a diarrhea hospitalization from 1.1% to 0.5%, and for a lower respiratory tract infection from 3.2% to 2.3%. And remember, both conditions are easily treatable.
On the other side of the scale, exclusive breastfeeding guarantees that the mother will be saddled with the primary role of feeding the infant for six months to a year and cannot easily delegate the task to the father (even with pumping, the father remains wholly dependent on the mother). Does a statistically significant, but small, reduction in an unlikely outcomes really justify blanket recommendations to exclusively breastfeed? Do you apply that same sort of extreme caution to every parenting choice? Given that motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death in children at every age from 2-14, shouldn't the WHO recommend that everyone move out of the suburbs into cities where they don't have to drive?
Here's an interesting link: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=gender%2C+sex&...
Gender is the range of physical, biological, mental and behavioral characteristics pertaining to, and differentiating between, masculinity and femininity. Depending on the context, the term may refer to biological sex (i.e. the state of being male, female or intersex), sex-based social structures (including gender roles and other social roles), or gender identity. ... the meaning of gender has undergone a usage shift to include sex or even to replace the latter word. .... Gender is now commonly used even to refer to the physiology of non-human animals, without any implication of social gender roles.
>The modern academic sense of the word, in the context of social roles of men and women, dates from the work of John Money (1955), and was popularized and developed by the feminist movement from the 1970s onwards (see Feminism theory and gender studies below). The theory was that human nature is essentially epicene and social distinctions based on sex are arbitrarily constructed. Matters pertaining to this theoretical process of social construction were labelled matters of gender.
I think most places people hear it is that gender is the male/female/other self-description, and sex is the physiological state.
The vast majority of the people out there don't distinguish between gender and sex. Especially since only about 0.5% of the population identifies as a gender other than their physical sex.
http://www.latimes.com/health/boostershots/la-heb-women-brai...
Note that I have no basis for this claim, but one of the many ways the body communicates is through hormones, so it certainly wouldn't be outside the realms of possibility...
I think if you repeat this test on different circumstances where the child is valued or not, whether boy or girl, you will find similar results that remove the sex factor.
As the father of a little girl, I find this sentence more ominous than was probably intended. The formula aisle is already overly complex with Regular, Iron Enriched, Omega Enriched, Soy, Low-Lactose, and No Lactose, among the many yogurt sounding ones (pre/macro/post/whatever-biotic).
However, I am worried (perhaps due to cynicism) that instead of rationally simplifying this system, it might be dumbed down to Boy and Girl formula. Though I guess there may be benefits as well. sigh - glad I'll probably be done having kids by then :D
Sex. Infant's sex. Gender is rarely known at that stage.
Would love your thoughts!