To be shocked at the price of formula milk?

[Souredstones]

It's been 9 years since I was last pregnant and this time round I'm not going to attempt breast feeding because for my previous pregnancies I produced no milk and wasn't able to feed them. So I'm not stressing out I'm going straight in for the formula. I have medical reasons for doing so.

I get that they've put the price up to deter formula feeding. I know why. I agree breast is best. But from what I saw today it's now a sneeze under £10 a tin.

I'm lucky we can afford it, but what if you're on the threshold of not receiving help and find yourself, as I did, unable to bf even with the full intentions of bfing and being unable to afford this price.

Is there a reason it's doubled in price in the last decade? Have production techniques changed that much?

[TarkaTheOtter]

But chunderella you don't need to have much data on the outcomes of the poorest bf babies to isolate the effects of breastfeeding from social class more generally. Suppose researchers only looked at the outcomes for middle class babies. There would be no variation in social class so it could not be that which was explaining variation in outcomes. If within class, bf babies have better health outcomes (or whatever) then it would be reasonable to assume that for those social classes where there is sufficient data that social class is not what is driving the variation in outcomes.
I haven't read the literature on breastfeeding, but it does amaze me that they would be able to publish papers with such obvious flaws. Wouldn't happen in my discipline (social science).

[Minifingers]

I said 'the majority of women fed without problems. In the padst babies were primarily bottle fed because their mother was dead or too ill to breastfeed. And in most instances bottle fed babies died in droves. Rich women who didn't want to breastfeed employed wet nurses. In other word - breastfeeding was the norm for all young babies because those that weren't breastfeed died fairly swiftly.

[Wbdn28]

I don't want a GP deciding who has a geniune reason for using formula

Totally agree. It's the woman's body, so it's her decision, not the GP's, the government's or anyone else's.

[TarkaTheOtter]

Completely agree that you couldn't extrapolate to the poorest (or for that matter the richest).

But it is often implied that all these studies are picking up is the social class of the mother (social class being the confounder) and it should be able to prove/disprove that.