to point out that formula feeding doesn't necessarily require you to be sterilising bottles and scooping out powder in the middle of the night...

[itsakindarabbit]

Keep seeing this on threads which mention ff...how people couldnt be doing with getting up in the night andstsrilising bottles/making up feeds.

I bf and ff but found ff no problem at night - i would take up a carton of ready made formula and a pre sterilised bottle and i could feed without getting out of bed.

And yes, i know ready made formula is expensive and not everyone uses it. But some of us do/did.

Ah MMR now,say no more.

Shag you refuse to listen so I refuse to engage.

Oh and there is a food militancy thread you could post on,this thread was re ff convenience.

Okay, I'll admit it. I FFed my son because I basically don't really give a fuck about him. I read all those studies and thought diabetes, yeah we'll have a bit of that. And obesity. I mean fat kids are cute, right? Also pain when being immunised, and teenage mental health problems - what a larf!!

I mean, I'd love to be one of those saintly, halo-polishing perfect mums but when it comes down to it I just don't care about my kids enough.

Best call social services. The poor little darlings don't stand a chance with a beeyach like me for a mum.

Oh my god, you think I'm being serious don't you.

Weeelllll..... if you chose to ff (don't know if you did) then I should imagine it's because you didn't think it could possibly make any difference to your children how they were fed.

God knows before I started reading around this subject I thought the same. I certainly didn't choose to bf because of what I knew about the health issues. I did it because I thought it would be a nice experience for my baby and for me. And it was most of the time.

If I'd chosen to ff I would probably have my fingers in my ears and be going 'la la la' as loudly as I could, in between frantically googling 'breastfeeding benefits overstated' in search of 'evidence' that I hadn't been mistaken in my thinking.

This whole thread derailment makes me think of this XKCD comic

"Shag you refuse to listen so I refuse to engage."

Plonka, I think what you actually mean is "Shag - you're refusing to agree with me, and I have no answer to the very valid points you make, therefore I refuse to engage".

Though really - if you're going to engage in a debate about the evidence, you have to ENGAGE with the evidence, which means, errrr, reading the research. Properly. The whole paper. And maybe even some of the responses to it from the scientific community. Maybe even setting it in context of other research into the same issue. And until you do this you really don't have a right to have a firm opinion about whether it's valid or not. Because you simply don't know what you're talking about, and it discredits your motives that you don't seem to have a problem with rubbishing things you don't understand.

Zara .

God it's so hard to type and keep my fingers in my ears at the same time.

I type with my feet, I'z like Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot, innit

Shag

Even taking the most benign and favourable view of the totality of the evidence showing bf benefits - it is still very unlikely to have any effect on an individual child , even in the short term and certainly in the medium term. Tha evidence for long term benefits is shakey to say the least.. Now we could play top trumps with observational studies all night if you like but I CBA. One point is unarguable however; the only illness whereby bm has been pRoven to protect is gastro enteritis. The mechanism by which bm provides this protection is well understood. Seems a little odd to me that the mechanism by which all of these other supposed benefits are delivered as yet has not been demonstrated.

I've just remembered that I slept with carton of milk nestled into my body so it was just the right temperature when DD woke up. There was a sterilised bottle under my pillow and she was in a sidecar cot so I never had to get out of bed.

I've found this thread useful as I didn't know that readymade formula came in 1 litre bottles - if that is cheaper than cartons then we will consider them for any future DC. It seems like the tiny bottles are more widely available too. I think we would probably look to start with them for the first week or so and then move onto cartons.

I tried that Zara but it's a bastard on the iPhone.

Well myrubberduck which large multinational would fund that?

breatheslowly yeah the range is really good - especially at a big Boots or big Tesco. I think yes it is marginally cheaper than cartons. Aptamil, Cow&Gate, SMA & Hipp Organic all do the big bottles.

I've found this thread really helpful. Im completely pro breast feeding but recently gave up breast feeding after 8 months because dd got teeth and found it funny to bite, the result of this was my nipple almost hanging off and not healing so I went cold turkey. I loved breast feeding and would do it again but it was the right time to stop. Breast feeding was difficult from the word go and was never the easy option but i was very determined to do it. The guilt of stopping was immense which is just ridiculous, why?! I'm still feeding my child, I still care about her and love her just as much! I had so many 'stupid' questions about ff and making it up during the night etc and this has spelled it all out for me. Thank you.

Why do people keep saying ff is seen as the 'correct' way to feed your baby? From the second the sperm hits the egg mothers are pressured to bf.

The part that really grates my cheese is how there is no information officially given so parents can make an informed choice. It's the same with Caesareans. When there was a strong possibility I would need a section I made an appointment with the midwife to talk through my options and asked for a leaflet about c sections to take with me (you know, those little blue ones they have for EVERYTHING.) They don't have them for that because they don't 'encourage' it. FFS.

Give people proper information, respect their choices, support those who want to breastfeed and stop demonising those who don't or can't. There are so many things to stress new parents (particularly mothers) in those first few weeks and they just don't need it.

"it is still very unlikely to have any effect on an individual child"

From the The Millennium Cohort Study (a nationally representative longitudinal study of 18,819 infants who were born in the United Kingdom in 2000-2002):

"The data showed that exclusive breastfeeding, compared with not breastfeeding, protects against hospitalisation for diarrhoea and lower respiratory tract infection. The effect of partial breastfeeding is weaker. Analysis of the data, allowing for confounding variables, suggests that an estimated 53% of diarrhoea hospitalisations could have been prevented each month by exclusive breastfeeding and 31% by partial breastfeeding. Similarly, 27% of hospitalisations for lower respiratory tract infection could have been prevented each month by exclusive breastfeeding and 25% by partial breastfeeding."

This means that REAL, ACTUAL babies in the UK end up in hospital with a range of common diseases like gastric illness and respitory illness, because they're not being breastfed.

OK? The children this research is done on aren't imaginary. They're real. And some will get real diseases because they're not breastfed. The fact that we can't pinpoint exactly WHICH children are in hospital because of a lack of breastfeeding (some breastfed babies will get ill too) doesn't mean that a lack of breastfeeding doesn't cause illness in some children.

Honestly - this argument is bonkers. So childish. It's like insisting that smoking doesn't actually cause heart disease because non smokers get heart disease as well, and we can almost never categorically point the finger at any one lifestyle choice and say it's definitely the cause of someone's ill health.

Aaaaaand the actual amount is tiny.Less than the amount of bottles just 1 of my dc consumed in a year none of whom ended up in hospital because I followed guidelines and wasn't slack with hygiene when preparing bottles or weaning food.

Shag, babies, Icbin et al- as I asked earlier (but was ignored as no doubt it doesnt suit your agenda) WHERE has the OP of this thread asked about advice/opinions about breastfeeding at all?