to think childcare "professionals " make i up as they go along

[moogster1a]

So, this morning on radio 5 is a new report saying research shows EBF for 6 months is too long and weaning should start at 4 months.
Do they decide these things at random?
I'm glad I had the confidence to give my litle Monsieur Creosote food when he wanted it rather than waiting another 8 weeks.
( will shuffle into kitchen to give 5 month old another breadstick)

YABU

iswym, BUT you need to learn to take advice in its context (as do the newspapers).

The 6month guideline is a WORLDWIDE guideline. It applies equally to big, healthy babies as to small, premmies. It applies to babies in Britain where everything is dettox'd and to babies in Africa where food and water has a much higher chance of contamination.

Overall, more babies will live and be healthy ACROSS THE WHOLE WORLD if everyone EBFs until 6months, even if in Britain many babies would be SLIGHTLY better off doing it a little earlier.

It would be interesting to see who sponsoered the research. if it is a company with links to the baby food industry, of course they would try to skew the results to their own ends. They want to make profit. They don't actually give a damn about what is best for babies. as a general rule.

doesn't everybody? i know i do. it's all about bluffing with a convincing tone and a straight face.

That's the problem with taking any research too seriously. The aim of the game is to prove that you were right and the other guy was wrong, so the minute someone said 6 months world-wide is a good guideline, someone else was going to set out to prove them wrong.

Viewing any research as an isolated authority on the subject is dangerous. Quoting it at large even more so. The damage done by weaning worldwide at 4 months would probably be more significant than weaning worldwide at 6 months, and in the countries where weaning early makes the most difference to long term development (as opposed to short term risks of gastro/cholera/malnutrition) parents are more likely to question the advice they're given anyway. Plus IMO the problem sometimes isn't necessarily with the 2 months extra BFing, it's the snails pace that weaning is taken by many people and the additional delay in introducing certain foods because people are overcautious.

So perhaps YANBU to feel there's conflicting info but YABU to say they all make it up. It's only the hypothesis that gets made up! Then you have to prove it.

they do specify for Western babies
www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-12180052

The 4 months is for Western babies, as carried out in a Western context, the previous advice was from the WHO carried out in a worldwide context with the aim of producing a single world guideline. The fact that this was adopted as a UK guideline was the decision of the DoH. So they're not making it up, they're subjecting the (perfectly valid) conclusions of the WHO to more specific scrutiny by reducing the variables. The provenance of the research is paramount, as is funding, as pointed out by secretnutellafix. Nutella....yum.....feeling peckish...

The problem is not really with the research or the guidelines, but with parents desire for definite answers and outcomes.

Life isn't like that unfortunately. We focus on the small % of things we think we can control (breastfeeding/diet/SAH/WOH etc.) and look for definitive answers on what to do in these ares when the effects are so small and/or complex that you aren't going to get one.

Many of the things we CAN control have much smaller effects than the things we can't control such as genetics, social class and poverty, where cause and effect is much clearer.