To ask what people did before formula?

[Annabelleinapickle]

There's always a BF/FF debate but genuinely what did we do before formula existed? It worked fine then, people produced milk? Personally I think it's all the devices, unhealthy crap invented that has made our bodies less able.

HV weight charts were definitely more of a hindrance and psychologically damaging than they were a help.

Its not just practicalities breastfeeding you are up again these days but also the monitoring of it...

I don't know if the OP is around or if she got put off but some of the snotty responses at the start but I would like to say thank you for starting such an interesting thread. I have learnt a lot. For those who said to go & read a history book I think this is exactly the type of thing that isn't in standard history books. On the list of reasons for this is that the history we are taught in schools etc generally is not the history of ordinary working people or women which is a shame as this thread has shown just how interesting that can be.

Of course it's not racist to suggest that red headed people might find it harder. Why would the the folk wisdom of generations of midwives and mothers be so dismissed. As for the Nordic breastfeeding rates, well most Nordic people I have met are fair with easily tanned skin, not white skin you can see their veins through.

I didn't have problems with pain from the mechanism of breastfeeding, I had problems from my nipples being shredded. Not "a bit sore", absolutely shredded. Nothing wrong with my latch or supply, just thin skin and flattish nipples. Nipple shields sorted me out, but, looking back, I think my mental health and my bond with my son suffered from my absolute insistence on breastfeeding. If it was my daughter in the same position I'd tell her to stop being a martyr and give him a bottle.

@If it was my daughter in the same position I'd tell her to stop being a martyr and give him a bottle."

Oh really - don't.

It's just as bad to tell people to bottlefeed as it is to tell them to breastfeed.

Just pay for her to see the best lactation consultant you can find, and tell her that whatever she does she's a great mum.

And I'm saying that with the memory of someone telling me I should stop breastfeeding 'don't beat yourself up' etc. when my nipples were bleeding and covered in black scabs. She told me this because she had found breastfeeding hard and been happy to stop. I wouldn't have been.

You can never know what's most important to people in the long term.

My mother is red haired with very white skin. She breastfed three babies.
I'm not sure nurses' impressions can be taken as evidence. Humans are funny with patterns and our brain can easily mislead us.
It seems to me that in the UK probably more women start by not wanting to breastfeed than in other countries. Others seem so keen that upsets them that they can't. I haven't seen such opposing attitudes where I live. But then there are no national news about breastfeeding women being asked to go to the toilets or anything. It's just more natural to everyone.

While doing a bit of family research a few years ago I found the death certificate of an infant a few weeks old. The baby was born in about 1920 and the cause of death was given as "inanition". That is a fancy word for starvation. Had he lived, that baby would have been my father's elder brother. My father contracted tuberculosis of the hip as an infant, probably from being fed raw cow's milk. It seems pretty plain that my poor grandmother couldn't feed her babies herself.
Fast forward to the mid '70s when my own child was born. I tried to BF and didn't find it particularly difficult or painful, but was told by the HV that baby was gaining too much and that I should feed every four hours for five minutes a side. Like a fool I did so and effectively weaned on to formula at three months because my supply dried up.
Put together a couple of generations of young women who knew that their own mothers and grandmothers has lost babies because feeding had gone horribly wrong with another generation or two who were given all the wrong advice by HCPs who should have known better, and the easy availability of safe, well-advertised formula milks and the result is inevitable. The situation is probably irretrievable now. And haranguing new mothers while not providing the proper support isn't going to change a thing.

I'm a redhead. Saying it's racist to suggest we might struggle more than average with breastfeeding trivialises the absolute evil of racism. Stop doing that. And while for all I know the theory is total bollocks, the fact that Nordic people, who are mostly not redheads, have high breastfeeding rates certainly isn't a refutation to it.

Different skin types have different physical properties, that's a fact. Having a theory based on that is certainly not racist. It might be incorrect but it's not racist.

I just want to thank every one that has given truly interesting and informative histories of formula. I am thankful that we are in a country where babies don't have to die of starvation because of inability to bf.

I tried to BF and produced a high volume of milk from the get go. I also leaked during pg. However, DS would not latch, and the breastfeeding consultants actually did more harm than good.

When I said, "it's been three days in hospital, you won't let me leave and I have had no little sleep I am hallucinating, let's talk about formula." I just wanted to get away to try bf in the comfort of my own home without someone holding DS by the back of the neck and holding him to my nipple as he screamed, red in the face and coughing.

In the end I formula fed to get out of there. I pumped for three weeks with formula top ups and then weaned. Baby never lost weight and is happy and healthy. I wish that I was left to do what came naturally, instead I felt watched all of the time.

They told me I had to do three 20 minute feeds before I could leave. DS was only feeding 10 mins at a time, but very frequently. Because it didn't fit the "guidelines" I couldn't leave. I was told if I left saying I was going to formula feed, I wasn't "allowed" to bf as my baby would starve.

freezing winter exactly! I know so many people who thought constant nursing = starving baby so topped up with formula and then supply reduced. Vicious circle until eventually they are purely on formula. Why are we not told that cluster feeding is normal... And will stop after the first few weeks. As for op... Yes more babies died (for a huge variety of reasons) but most successfully bf and until the industrial revolution most work was from home where babies could be nursed on demand. The Industrial revolution took women away from their babies and created the demand for alternative feeds, coinciding with the industrialisation of the dairy industry and therefore a need to sell excess milk. The boon "The Politics of Breastfeeding" gives an excellent history (though some may find it biased)

"book" not "boon"

cranberry - I also found maternity ward very unhelpful. All the midwives were useless but got good support from a volunteer bf support worker. Discharged myself against their wishes, got home, relaxed and started feeding successfully. Still going 10nonths on and never used the back up formula we got on the way home from hospital!

My Mum told me I was fed with condensed milk, (advocated by the midwives in the maternity hospital)when I was born, as she was unable to feed me herself!
This was 1964.
I didn't have quite the same problem with my children...I breastfed exclusively for 3 months, but it was such hard work that in the end I mixed fed - breastfed morning and night then formula during the day. This worked well for all 3.

I'm red haired and never tan. I usually have to go for the palest foundation on the colour chart. I breastfed without a single problem until the baby self-weaned. I'm very lucky though that I had family members who breastfed 7 babies on hand to ask any questions of. And since one was in a different time zone, I was able to text at 3am and get an instant reply.

I gave birth in a pro-breastfeeding maternity unit. But even those midwives who'd done the courses and read the literature still were drawing on theoretical rather than hand-on experience, apart from one or two. Getting breastfeeding advice from someone who's never breastfed themselves, is a bit like getting swimming lessons without dipping a toe into water.

"
Different skin types have different physical properties, that's a fact. Having a theory based on that is certainly not racist. It might be incorrect but it's not racist."

What evidence is there to back up that assertion? Without evidence it's racist. Midwives spout crap about breastfeeding all the time. How us getting sun burnt easily related to the ablity to breastfeed? The idea that having red hair makes someone to delicate to breastfeed is daft. A black person's skin may have more melanin but there is no evidence that black people have less nerve endings than red heads or less sensitive to pain. Biologically we are all similar.

Painful breastfeeding is caused by poor positioning or possibly tongue tie or thrush or other medical issues. It is a sign that something is wrong.

Really I think the point is that if you are very thin skinned with very soft and delicate nipple tissue they will shred more easily than if they are tougher and more leathery by nature. I'm not sure it has anything to do with the number of nerve endings beneath the skin.

Really, are to trying to claim that different skin types don't have different physical properties? What nonsense.

My dark skin won't burn in the sun and my mother's fair skin will. Dark skin scars more heavily after trauma than fair skin. Of course they have different properties!

As for breastfeeding, I have no idea whether it makes any difference or not, nor have I claimed to.

Your claim that it's a racist theory is offensive. The poster was simply theorising based on fact.

The poster was simply theorising based on fact.
Not sure I'd call if fact...
You can theorise based on nothing, though. But then you have to test your theory, preferably with more than what midwives think.
And there's no such things as facts in science. Only observations.
So, at best the poster was transmitting impressions that were given to her. Those impressions may well be based on prejudice because very white skin looks so fragile. It doesn't mean that it actually is.
I have no idea, but nobody has actually presented any evidence to support it.

Something more like this
www.theguardian.com/science/2005/sep/12/uknews

Still, looking to see if it has been replicated.

It seems some are determined to see racism here. The facts I was referring to were that different skins have different properties.

I'm not going to argue the toss about it however, call the poster racist if that's what you want.

Fairer skinned people do have some differences. For example the further away from the equator you are, particularly further north, you are more likely to get certain diseases. Multiple sclerosis being one. This probably has something to do with vitamin D. Partly because of the current weather but also because of the way weather in the past has caused us to evolve re the processing of vitamin D. And these are things which affect fair skinned people much more. I personally have never heard about the fair skin/breastfeeding theory. But it's not beyond the bounds of possibility.

Yes, it's true that topless sun bathing is a bad idea if you are a red head and s black woman is less likely to suffer dire consequences from topless unbathing. However I don't see how it's relevant to breastfeeding. Why is the production of vitamin D relevant? Pale skin is surely an advantage in northern europe. Vitamin d deficiency surely would hinder breastfeeding and make cracked nipples more likely.

In the uk the majority of women give up breastfeeding every early. I think this is true of all skin colours. I suspect that the most common reason is a lack of support or poor quality advice.

Such wild speculation and based on nothing more than skin colour.
Apart from melanin production, which is inversely proportional to vit D production from sunlight, are there any other aspects that skin colour relates to? With any evidence?
I don't know, but then I'm not making the claims.

I do think such assumptions can be very damaging to breastfeeding. Having preconceived ideas that fair skinned women are more sensitive to pain may mean that midwives are less sympathetic to black women struggling to breastfeed, because of the assumption that their skin is tougher and they should find it easier.