Antibreastfeeding?

[Redebs]

Having just browsed some of the 'Help articles' on here, I'm shocked at how Mumsnet is discouraging breastfeeding.

There's one on how normal it is to wean off the breast at two months because of all the 'problems you will have'.

There's one on 'combi feeding', which is about giving formula feeds to breastfed babies - the surest way to reduce your milk supply in reality.

There's another one about packing dummies and bottles in your hospital labour bag. This is definitely going to interfere with newborns getting colostrum and learning to latch. If a baby needs anything, the hospital will provide it in reality.

I know some women choose to formula feed, but these are insidious, supposedly helpful, undermining tactics aimed at new mothers trying to breastfeed. Most of these are sponsored by the baby bottle manufacturer MAM.

If formula companies were promoting this, they would be, rightly, in contravention of advertising rules.

All medical and scientific advice is to give exclusively breastmilk for the first six months and to continue to at least twelve months or longer.

I don't doubt that he will get more poorly when he starts nursery. But I'm sorry I know breastfeeding has helped so far and I know some illnesses he probably won't get or will get less.

If it helped that much he wouldn’t have got sick at all.

You clearly don’t understand epidemiological research! Or population studies for that matter.

ask a bunch of moms how often their kids got sick. You really think that’s it?😂😂😂😂😂

THANK YOU!

Women are strong armed into breastfeeding more than enough. FF treated like a shameful secret that no one can talk about. If you're one of the type who lectures other women about how their baby should be fed, why not just fuck off and mind your own business.

What you posted wasn’t even a study. It just collated other studies to produce an overall result. And yes that’s exactly what most of them did. Recorded feeding method, how often the babies got sick and with what, and the level of illness including hospitalisation. Why, what did you think they did? I also noticed that:

The protective effect of breastfeeding in their study was substantially diminished when the data were stratified according to the severity of infections in order to minimize the potential surveillance bias.

Which actually suggests breastfeeding doesn’t affect the severity of illness at all, they were just slightly less likely to get the illness to start with.

Because they need to feel special and validated and like they’re ‘better mothers’ than everyone else. And they use faux concern for the welfare of other mums and babies to cover that up. And if like me you breastfed for quite a long time and don’t agree with them, they’ll just say you didn’t really breastfeed or that you must have some kind of hang-up. It’s nuts 😂

On the NHS website.
Benefits of breastfeeding
It's never too early to start thinking about how you're going to feed your baby. But you do not have to make up your mind until your baby is born.

Some of the benefits of breastfeeding are:

your breast milk is perfectly designed for your baby
breast milk protects your baby from infections and diseases
breastfeeding provides health benefits for you
breast milk is available for your baby whenever your baby needs it
breastfeeding can build a strong emotional bond between you and your baby
Formula milk does not provide the same protection from illness and does not give you any health benefits.

Health benefits of breastfeeding for your baby

Breastfeeding has long-term benefits for your baby, lasting right into adulthood.

Any amount of breast milk has a positive effect. The longer you breastfeed, the longer the protection lasts and the greater the benefits.

Breastfeeding can help to reduce your baby's risk of:

infections, with fewer visits to hospital as a result

diarrhoea and vomiting, with fewer visits to hospital as a result

sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS)

obesity

cardiovascular disease in adulthood

Some studies have also found that breastfeeding for at least 6 months may reduce your baby's chance of getting childhood leukaemia. But more research is needed into this.

Giving nothing but breast milk is recommended for about the first 6 months (26 weeks) of your baby's life.

After that, giving your baby breast milk alongside solid foods for as long as you and your baby want will help them grow and develop healthily.

Breast milk adapts as your baby grows to meet your baby's changing needs.

Health benefits of breastfeeding for you

Breastfeeding and making breast milk also has health benefits for you. The more you breastfeed, the greater the benefits.

Breastfeeding lowers your risk of:

breast cancer

ovarian cancer

osteoporosis (weak bones)

cardiovascular disease

obesity

Yes Emma but by how much? You can’t just keep repeating the same old tired ‘statements’ without quantifying them. The fact is while it has a small benefit, overall the difference is negligible. That’s just a fact whether you like it or not. You can’t love ‘facts’ when they’re simple statements like what you pasted above, but then suddenly ‘not like facts’ when the actual numbers make those statements look less impressive.

Well he's obviously going to get ill but he recovered super fast thanks to my breastmilk

Mine didn’t get sick at all for 14 months. Is that because mixed feeding made her healthier? It is by your logic (not by mine though)!

Ah bless you. Yes breastfeeding helps as it can provide antibodies (provided mum has had the illness and already produced them) but the research around limiting illness says clearly that gastric is the main thing rather than stops them getting colds etc. This isn't denying there are immunity benefits but similarly its good to be realistic.

I also breastfed DS until he was 3 but he has asthma and was often hospitalised with his chest as a baby/toddler- if only my breastmilk would have been as magical as yours.

It’s not magic. It’s maths.
Let’s take an easy example. The combined pill is 99.7% effective with perfect use. Which means that over 1 year, 3 in 1000 women will become pregnant while using the combined pill correctly. If you’re one of those 3 in 1000, there is a pretty significant impact on your life - you are pregnant and have to decide what you want to happen next.
So if we know that breastmilk is somewhat protective against illnesses because of the antibodies that can be passed through it, then we can do a similar set of calculations. These are not real numbers, I’m just trying to explain the principle.
Say a 2 month old baby is exposed to chicken pox. And the baby has a 1/4 chance of catching it. Then babies who catch chicken pox have a 1/1000 chance of having a severe case requiring hospitalisation. So from that exposure, the baby has a 1/4000 chance of becoming sick enough to need hospitalization. Ok, let’s add breastfeeding into the mix. Maybe breastfeeding when the mother has antibodies to chicken pox reduces the odds of catching the disease from 1 exposure to 1/6 rather than 1/4. And maybe it can also reduce the seriousness of the disease if the baby does catch it. Perhaps 1/2000 babies with chicken pox who are breastfed require hospitalization. So, only 1/12000 breastfed babies exposed to chicken pox on one occasion will become sick enough to need hospitalization. So 3 times less likely to need hospitalization. Which means that, out of those 12,000 babies exposed to chicken pox, 2 of them avoided hospitalization with chicken pox as a direct result of breastfeeding. That’s how breastfeeding can have a big individual health impact without you ever knowing it did.
If the benefits are smaller then you need bigger numbers of babies to be sure to include cases where serious illness was avoided.

My family are very strong breastfeeding advocates. I don’t think any of my 4 aunts and uncles or 15 odd cousins were bottle fed. An unhealthier bunch of people you could never meet - most are obese, and riddled with autoimmune disease. We have every chronic condition under the sun between us! Type 1 diabetes, asthma, eczema, immune arthritis, coeliac, intolerances, the works.

Okay, that’s just our family, but it makes me laugh (in a non funny way) when I think about what must’ve been literally years between them breastfeeding only to end up like something from a medical textbook.

By comparison DH and his bro were bottle fed from day 1 and both are completely healthy - not so much as high blood pressure or a food intolerance between them. They’re also very ‘high energy’ people who cope well on 6 hours sleep and never even get colds! It’s madness.

Oh and my family still bang on about breastfeeding 😂 they’ve checked more than once that I plan to breastfeed this baby because ‘he’ll be one of those sickly babies if you don’t’. Okay let’s ignore the fact all of them have something it’s supposed to protect against!

Times 10000000000000000

Why did you tell an earlier poster that her anecdotal evidence of having a breastfed baby who was rarely sick is meaningless, if now you’re trying to argue that the anecdotal evidence of your breastfed relatives having poor health is relevant? Neither example is proof of anything.

Because if we’re going by anecdotes one 9 month old baby is a much less reliable study than 20 adults! Regardless, I don’t think my family represents the entire picture, but she thinks that about her one relatively young child 🤔

Can you point out the study I posted please?

I combi fed all three of my babies and found it great. There is no way I would have breastfed for as long if I hadn't combi fed. For me it was the best of both worlds.

It’s your study, you should know 🤷🏼‍♀️

My kids are I in primary and secondary school and I can count on one hand the times they’ve had a fever or vomited. One of them needed antibiotics once for a skin infection but it cleared right up. I tried to BF but I couldn’t get it going — there were reasons but not worth getting into. So they were all primarily formula fed from birth.

If I didn’t understand how medical studies on correlation work I would probably chalk their good health up to formula feeding. But it doesn’t work that way.

I think maybe it was one of the studies I posted.
@Cuppasoupmonster metastudies are a good thing. Combining the results of lots of earlier studies helps to rule out the effects of other variables or sheer chance. Metastudies are not inferior. They are important and we need more of them.

@Emmamoo89 you're on every single breast feeding thread talking about how amazing your baby is, how you're a super hero for breast feeding, how he never gets sick, how your bond is superior to all your friends. I hope you're not this sanctimonious in real life because you can't have many friends if you are

@Newnamenewme23 didn't post the studies, @LittleLegoWoman did.

I think you've made some valid comments on this thread @Cuppasoupmonster , but the fact you're dismissing the results of a large scale, longitudinal study into the benefits of breastfeeding is really showing your bias. You've slammed a PP for providing anecdotal evidence, but done the same thing a few posts later.

Which actually suggests breastfeeding doesn’t affect the severity of illness at all, they were just slightly less likely to get the illness to start with.

...you say this like its a bad thing?