Aibu? to be pissed off at this: "The cost and social implications of using an infant milk should be considered when deciding how to feed your baby."

[Selyna]

WTF do Hipp mean by social implications?

Both methods of feeding a baby are acceptable so fuck off with the whole acting like ff is poison! my dd is perfectly fine but i hate this constant making me feel like a failure because i failed to bf although i tried so so hard!

We do seem to struggle with it more in certain countries and cultures than others, though...

The less it's the 'done thing' the more women in those societies struggle, IMO.

I'm no longer in the UK (both DC were born there, though - and i was part of the tiny minority of EBFers) but the UK does seem to have very low BF rates and women seem to struggle so much more and give up (I don't mean that in any sort of negative way; not sure how to write that in a non-prejorative way) so much earlier. I'm sure there's a very obvious correlation.

Other societies/cultures/countries don't see to struggle so much with what is, after all, a very natural thing. Is it...

More support?
More life-time exposure to it?
A better understanding of how it all works by the time you come to have your own baby?
Better birthing and post-birthing practices?
Less of a move away from fundamentals and so more of an innate understanding of what to do with your baby right after birth and when you first feed it?
Skin-to-skin?
4th trimester theory?
Co-sleeping looked on favourably vs non-favourably?
Etc...
Etc...

I don't know, and don't pretend to know. I just find it interesting that certain cultures and societies struggle with it SO much more than others. We're all human and biologically built the same way. Why do some humans struggle with it more than others, depending on seemingly little more than where they live?

Presumably we have no stats of how many cave dwelling children died because of BF 'failure' of the mother. Childbirth is also something the human race has been doing since it began. It is still damn hard and we sometimes need help...

Yes exactly, scrablet but before we had that help be it medicine or intervention, we had a much much higher rate of death in childbirth, for mother and baby.

I feel sure that if you take away any factors to do with water quality and sterilisation I feel quite confident that FF has probably contributed more to saving babies' lives than to ending them, all things considered.

And Whatmeworry, you are the only one you seems to think that woman need to eat an extra 500 calories. Of course no one is going to set out to eat 500 calories of lemon curd to support breastfeeding. It's a wonder the human race ever survived - I mean what did those poor cave women do not having calorie counters to ensure they ate an exact extra 500 calories a day to support breastfeeding

Yes it scares me that I'm the only one who seems to understand that feeding is about energy input and output and not fluffy woo.

Do you really believe that your body magically provides the extra c 500 calories a day to feed a baby without you taking it in at some point? Really?

Those poor cavewomen ate more, like we do today. If they could. If they couldn't they used up whatever body fat they had until there was no more and then their babies died, as happens in famines today.

I feel sure that if you take away any factors to do with water quality and sterilisation I feel quite confident that FF has probably contributed more to saving babies' lives than to ending them, all things considered

Formula was invented c 100 years ago to precisely solve the problem of babies/mothers who were unable to BF and reduce infant death.

I suppose they would have lived in a more or less permanent state of mild dietary ketosis due to a lack of carboydrate rich foods (until agriculture) and they would have fed and fed until their teeth fell out and they were like living skeletons, if they had no more body fat to spare.

If they did not have enough food at all their bosies would have gone into starvation mode (where it holds onto whatever little body fat there is, just to preserve life) and their periods would probably have stopped, thus no more babies for a while until regular/sufficient food returned.

I am not sure actually, if you are literally starving, whether your body would opt to keep producing milk first, so the baby lives but you suffer, (teeth falling out, organ failure etc) or whether your milk production would dry up in order to preserve your own life, n which case the baby starves. Unless it is old enough to wean, and assuming there was any food for it to be weaned onto.

Well the world health organisation states that even during pregnancy women should be having an extra 200-300 calories a day

here

Well there were also wet nurses etc and in some cultures it is very common to feed other people's babies etc so I think in those situations, if a woman was struggling for whatever reason, there were/are alternatives available to formula.

I'm no longer in the UK (both DC were born there, though - and i was part of the tiny minority of EBFers) but the UK does seem to have very low BF rates and women seem to struggle so much more and give up (I don't mean that in any sort of negative way; not sure how to write that in a non-prejorative way) so much earlier. I'm sure there's a very obvious correlation

It's simple economics - nothing says "comfortably off" more than being able to take many months off work, and natural nurturing of baby plays better than coffee mornings and book clubs. In the rich West working class women have always had to work, and they don't typically work in naive offices where there are fridges they can store expressed milk in.

Also, as I have shown, apart from following the Tesco Value Lemon Curd Diet, BF is not anywhere near "free" - and we haven't even started to talk about opportunity costs of those hours not earning money.

So they can't BF for all practical purposes.

The one I admit I don't understand is why BF hasnt taken off among the unemployed if it is so much cheaper.... Oh, wait

Agree whatmeworry. The unwaged often get free formula.

I have done both. A large part of increasing dds formula was.the knowledge I was returning to work at 5 months and she would need a bottle by then.

I have felt embarassed by giving a bottle and bfing in public too.

Lemon curd maths: I know cal (often used as a synonym for kcal, as it happens, something I have done on this thread, too) is 1000th of a kcal. entropy's maths used kcals - and you rubbished her calculations which were, nevertheless, correct. 17 p per calorie is the same as 0.017 p per kcal - which is what entropy said. I rubbished your maths, assuming you were using kcal as a synonym for cal.

Novak, I am at a loss to help with your questions.

Women lay down fat stores in pregnancy. It's a biological fact. Why are you accusing me of making it up? I have directed you to a good source where this is explained, but honestly, any midwifery/obstetrics/good quality pregnancy book for mothers will include it.

I'm trying to find an up to date reference for you, but this stuff is so well-established current research is really only looking at how it's done, how to measure it, how it's used up, what sort of fat it is, not whether it actually happens.

Will this do? onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-3010.2011.01891.x/full It's a bulletin, not an original research paper, which summarises what is known, with references.

whatme - there is nothing magic about the body not needing to take in 500 extra calories in order to make milk.

Even if it was a simple matter of exact energy in = exact energy out, without the caveats of bioavailabilty which entropy has explained and which I have attempted to give references for, the mother has already stored energy simply by dint of being pregnant - there is nothing she can do about this, it happens because of being pregnant, and is not an effect of breastfeeding - the body has no idea about choice in infant feeding.

Stored fat is one of the 'compensatory mechanisms' described in Akre's book "that allow for lactation to continue with much lower energy and nutrient intakes or even with no caloric increase".

I repeat my request for you to find anything, cherry picked or otherwise, from the field or from lab research into pregnancy and lactation, that contradicts this or even throws doubt on it.

whatme, while you are looking for some literature on the physiology of lactation, keep an eye open for a bit of education on bf/ff choices among working women.

Working is not a factor in bf/ff. UK infant feeding surveys have shown this from the start (the first one was 1980, IIRC). The sooner a mother goes back to work, and the more likely she is to return to work, the more likely she is to breastfeed.

Working class women are less likely to bf than middle class women, but the evidence is that actually working has very little to do with it.

And while I am still here :), your idea that formula was invented invented "c 100 years ago to precisely solve the problem of babies/mothers who were unable to BF and reduce infant death" is incorrect.

Your dates are wrong, for a start.

The first proprietary infant foods designed to supplement or replace breastmilk came out in the West about 150 years ago and just like many other new products, they were a commercial invention designed to make money.

Automated processing made large-scale production more feasible than before and far from saving babies' lives, it was known from the start that these foods and the lethal bottles and teats they were served in, contributed seriously to infant death and illness and under-nutrition. You can read commentary about this from official sources all over the developed world from the late 19th century to round about WW2 - a lot of it patronising and hand-wringing about feckless women and so on but springing from the widespread observation that doing anything but bf was harmful.

The invention of National Dried Milk in the 1940s was an attempt to standardise breastmilk substitutes and to protect infant health that way.

"It's simple economics - nothing says "comfortably off" more than being able to take many months off work, and natural nurturing of baby plays better than coffee mornings and book clubs. In the rich West working class women have always had to work, and they don't typically work in naive offices where there are fridges they can store expressed milk in."

Yes, but the UK's breastfeeding rate are significantly lower than other Western countries, some (many?) of which don't have as good maternity rights as the UK.

And significantly lower than developing countries where there is a huge mix of women working and not working.

You haven't explained at all why the UK is such an aberration.

Although women should up their calorie intake during pg, it's probably the reason so many people claim to feel hungrier.

If your body is storing fat then it's commen sense that you would need to eat a bit more during this time.

Lemon curd maths: I know cal (often used as a synonym for kcal, as it happens, something I have done on this thread, too) is 1000th of a kcal. entropy's maths used kcals - and you rubbished her calculations which were, nevertheless, correct. 17 p per calorie is the same as 0.017 p per kcal - which is what entropy said. I rubbished your maths, assuming you were using kcal as a synonym for cal.

Crap. We have been talking food calories for the whole goddamn thread and you two suddenly jump to energy calories to have a pop at me - yet you are still oddly right.

There is nothing wrong with my calculations, why not try and refute those rather than try and justify your sudden usage of a diffent unit. Truth is you 2 got confused (or deliberately tried to conflate the two, hoping no one else would notice)

I don't know where this is all going now but can we just summarise this cost issues by agreeing that breastfeeding is cheaper than using formula which varies by how the mother changes her diet, work issues, and if she is able to get financial help to obtain formula?

Anyone want to send whatmeworry a copy of The Politics of Breastfeeding'? Then again, it's probably just full of woo .

Bunkum! Woo! Biowatsits!

And you know what? Evolutionarily speaking, 150 years is the tiniest of blips.

While we all know FF babies who've grown into adults and all is well, we can't know what the long-term impact is going to be on us as a species, feeding our infants - as their exclusive food in the first months of their life - a manufactured product from another species.

I don't say this as a way to make people feel bad, just as an add-on to this debate.

Of course - formula is not poison and is a saviour for many Mums and babies. And whatme can argue until the cows come home that BF and FF are much of a muchness. But only up until a point. Aside from all the facts and figures we already know to be true (well, except for whatme who is dog-with-a-bone like in her ability to deny ) we have no way of knowing yet the long-term impact on ourselves as a species.

moomins, I don't think anyone is disputing that women need to eat more in pregnancy, are they? Though even if they continue eating as before, as long as they are eating adequately, they'll still produce a baby, a placenta, increased fat stores and so on.

Where food is plentiful this happens without the mother needing to make a conscious effort to do so.....she just feels a tad hungrier and ends up eating a bit more.

As helly points out, chronic under-nutrition affects fertility anyway, and she is less likely to become pregnant - and seriously underfed women don't get pregnant at all.

There is a grey area, where inadequately-nourished women do manage to get pregnant but don't grow very healthy babies - we know that can have a lifelong effect on these babies, and nutrition pre-birth and in fact pre-conception is important for the next generation ( data from the studies done on women who got pregnant during the Dutch 'hunger winter' in WW2 shows that the babies of women who were poorly fed before pregnancy are affected in adulthood, even though the Dutch diet was OK by the mid to late 1940s).

I agree with that Sodoff. but I would also like to add that you could say the same for mobile phone usage, being around electricity and radiowaves, additives in the modern diet, pesticides and other things floating around in our environment, things that we do/eat that affect our fertility, etc etc ad infinitum. But whilst any of those things may or may not turn out to have very long term unpleasant side effects on the human race, in the short to medium term (relatively speaking) life is better/easier for having them around.

Next time I have a baby, (assuming breastfeeding eventually works) I'm going to record the price and cost of everything I eat, accompanied by a weekly weigh-in.

'Cos I swear extra rice/pasta each day didn't break the bank, and I didn't become supersized!