To think that "97% of women can breastfeed" is a load of crap

I must read this

Autoimmune disease was the main contributor to my low supply. I had no idea it would affect my supply.

On the note of the ED studies comparison, I found it so frustrating when researching supply and milk quality issues that I found studies regarding lactation in farm animals for agriculture purposes much easier to find, and they explored areas that I’d never found human studies on.

And finally one similar point, I only recently learnt that iron deficiency affects supply. A frustrating rabbit hole to go down is what the nhs will say normal ferritin levels are compared to what specialists say is ideal for health.

@JustGotToKeepOnKeepingOn

a woman on the till at Sainsbury’s thought it was a good idea to tell me how bad formula is for a baby and how she was pleased that I wouldn’t get any Nectar points for the formula I was buying

what a disgusting thing to say.

FWIW I don’t agree with not giving points for that. It’s an item of shopping like any other. Some need it, some don’t. Like tampons. Shall we take the points off those too because it isn’t fair that male customers won’t get them?

Considering that around 18% of women don't have children at all, I don't see how they can arrive at those figures.

Last week my Mil called breastfeeding 'trendy' and that's why I'm still doing it with 8 mth old DD 😂

I don’t know what percentage of women can breastfeed, but I know that I didn’t because I had no milk. I was devastated. It was a very difficult thing to accept. The support was non existent and the criticism was everywhere. The worst was when a woman on the till at Sainsbury’s thought it was a good idea to tell me how bad formula is for a baby and how she was pleased that I wouldn’t get any Nectar points for the formula I was buying.

So I can understand why the OP is cross about the ‘97%’ report but it’s really just the same as everything else with women and childbirth. It’s all underfunded, unsupported and we’re left to get on with it. My baby is now a strapping 18 year old, so the formula didn’t do any harm.

the Economist magazine has a leader and podcast on this topic this week.

The title is: "Mothers who cannot breastfeed have been given terrible advice"
From that article:
A search for “low milk supply” or “low milk production” returns a meagre 14,000 academic papers on PubMed, a database of 40m medical-research papers. “Erectile dysfunction”, which afflicts perhaps 300m men (mostly minimally), elicits 32,000 studies. This neglect matters.

And:
For years doctors assumed this problem was rare: that no more than 5% of mothers suffered from inadequate milk supply.Recent research, by scientists who have bothered to look, suggests that the true figure is closer to 10% or even 20%. The causes of low milk supply are often linked to complicated biological pathways beyond a new mother’s control, as we explore in our “Weekend Intelligence” podcast. Some are genetic. Others may involve conditions like obesity, diabetes or autoimmune disorders, which expectant women cannot just wish away by willpower alone.

Why can’t it be true? I can assure you my milk didn’t come in. I tried so hard to feed my baby. But there was just no milk. No engorgement. Nothing when I pumped. I was devastated. Women should be supporting women not kicking them when they’re down.

97% can lactate. That isn’t the same as having enough milk to feed their baby. My understanding is 80-90% of women can produce enough milk to sustain their child(ren) fully, which is still most but given 10-20% of women can’t exclusively breastfeed due to supply issues it is hardly rare.

This is what I struggle with, I hear “my milk didn’t come in” SO often and it simply can’t be true in all the cases I hear it, also, I remember what those early days felt like. When it felt like your baby was getting nothing, I suspect a lot of the women who think their milk didn’t come in actually did it just wasn’t how they were expecting, and that comes down to lack of support (and less community knowledge I guess, I was lucky to be surrounded by BFers who put my mind at rest).

Agree re the pressures not to breastfeed. MIL was very sniffy about it and constantly asked me when I was stopping. She would ask if I was ‘still breastfeeding him’ in hushed tones, when he was 6 months old.

Well of course both things can be true.
Even if we assume that the oft quoted 97-98% is accurate, that means 2-3% or about 1:50 to 1:30 are not physically able to breastfeed exclusively. That may be a minority but it is a lot of women over all. It seems probable that most of us would know at least one or two people possibly more in that group when you consider how many other Mums you meet over a lifetime. It's not that rare.
Equally there are lots and lots of Mums who are led to believe that they don't make enough milk because their babies feed fequently, cluster feed or are deemed to be "unsettled". I was born in the 60s, my siblings in the late 50s, and my Mum was very much of the "give a bottle every 4 hours and leave the pram in the garden" school of baby rearing that was prevalant at the time. Formula was promoted as "modern" and "scientific" and babies needed to be fed by the clock and keep in a strict routine. She was convinced that there was something badly wrong when I had a newborn who was latched on pretty much 24/7. Those beliefs and habits still hang over even now. A "good" baby feeds regularly, not too often, and sleeps all night. That's not biologically normal but it has become the social norm and lots of new mums get their confidence knocked when their babies behave, well, like babies.
So women with genuine supply problems most certainly do exist, but they are outnumbered by women who are made to believe they do. Plus of course that not infrequently becomes a self fulfilling prophecy as the suggested "solutions" do then lead to a drop in supply.

It isn't, or at least if it does we don't have sufficient evidence to be able to prove it. Because that would require us to be reliably identifying autism across the population, which we haven't got remotely close to doing. Reading down the article, they're citing studies as far back as the 80s and 90s, when the diagnostic landscape was so utterly different.

I don't get why some people are so attached to the dafter and more spurious claims about the benefits of breastfeeding, when there are some absolutely irrefutable pros they could focus on like fewer gastro problems.

Most allergies you are born with though. I don’t understand what you’re saying? People develop allergies because they’re exposed to foods from other cultures? Is there a source for this?

Anecdotally, a lot of children later identified as autistic were extremely unsettled as babies or have difficulty in breastfeeding, so the causation could also be the other way around - autistic children have more trouble breastfeeding perhaps due to gastric distress, muscle tone issues (esp if we are thinking it applies to the children more likely to have been identified as autistic in the 80s/90s) or connective tissue disorders e.g. EDS, all of which are highly correlated with autism. Or sensory issues/oversensitive nervous system, again correlated with autism, causing high amounts of crying/distress which is interpreted as difficulty feeding or could lead to difficulty feeding (baby in distress/survival mode is more likely to land on a shallow latch causing poor milk transfer) plus the huge one that premature babies are far more likely to (independently) be formula fed, and autistic - there are so many reasons that autism could be correlated with formula feeding which don't come down to "formula causes autism" or "breastfeeding prevents it".

Or perhaps they just prefer the bottle feeding routine (that one is a joke, don't come at me!)

In fact some of the longest term cases of breastfeeding I've heard of where DC are still feeding at 7, 8 years the children have been autistic. So it doesn't seem to have been especially preventative in those cases.

Because overall non breastfed kids are more likely to suffer from a number of conditions including leukaemia, asthma, allergies and autism. All of which are on the rise. Of course most who are formula fed don’t suffer from these but overall ff babies are more likely to than BF.

So it does affect society as a whole.

That’s why it matters.

Honestly ,20+ years down the line I really am not sure it matters
I was very,very keen to Breastfeed
3 DC
First BF was a disaster
Second was okayish BF for 6 months
Third BF for 14 months
I can’t see any difference in their health or anything else

Bf might offer some protection to start with but makes no difference in the long run because a person's living, eating and general health habits end up having the biggest impact throughout their life.

Foods from all around the world weren't available like they are today, so it's natural that allergies could be more common to foods less familiar. Celery for example is one of the 14 major allergies (within the EU) but in the UK it is not very common as it's been grown here forever and is in so many things our immune systems are used to it.

They recommend that you eat all allergens- including nuts- whilst breastfeeding as it reduces the risk of allergies, so you can let that guilt go.

It isn't, or at least if it does we don't have sufficient evidence to be able to prove it. Because that would require us to be reliably identifying autism across the population, which we haven't got remotely close to doing. Reading down the article, they're citing studies as far back as the 80s and 90s, when the diagnostic landscape was so utterly different.

I don't get why some people are so attached to the dafter and more spurious claims about the benefits of breastfeeding, when there are some absolutely irrefutable pros they could focus on like fewer gastro problems.