There's been much discussion from various posts on this thread that "virtually all women can breastfeed". that's a statement (or claim) of a scientific generality. As far as I know there is NO study from a developed-world country population sample (ie comparable to the UK) which shows this - ie, that if you take a sample of women well motivated to breastfeed and given, in a research study plenty of access to well qualified lactation support and then showing that upwards of 95% can be successfully exclusively BF at a few weeks postnatal. I know of no such published scientific study. If it exists, please post it here.
Unfortunately the need to make this claim seems to underly quite a lot of BF advocacy messaging for reasons I don't fully understand.
As far as I know, it's just not true and there are lots of reasons why a UK like postnatal population might actually have plenty of difficulties successfully EBFing (even with motivation and good support) at eg 4-6 weeks or 3-4 months or whatever postnatal. There are research studies which show that UK like population samples actually have a pretty high prevalence of delayed onset of lactation and low milk production even well when supported. This isn't even taking into account pain related difficulties or risk factors that would be "risked out" prior to generating the sample eg extensive breast surgery or things like HIV infection which in the UK those women would generally be advised not to BF.
Anyway, I have no idea what the messaging should be but it does need to change. There seems to be a focus from some folks at the moment to change the "breast is best" to "breast is natural, normal and perfect" (or some variation on this) which to me is just as bad or even worse.
From what I know of the evidence for BF support, although there is good evidence that BF support in general helps women BF longer, none of the rigorously done UK trials (of which there are plenty) have shown this, for some bizarre reason these have all been null or inconclusive. And if you actually do careful pubmed searches for most of the things that BF support people suggest for eg, low milk supply, there is actually very little evidence to show these individual interventions/approaches actually fix womens' problems. IMHO BF support is at the moment in something of a prescientific ear of understanding the aetiology and management of common breastfeeding problems and this needs to change if we are to support women better. - and to solve the problem of women being browbeaten by being told "virtually all women can BF all you need is better support and breastfeeding is far better than formula XYZ".
On the issue of BF versus FF and health benefits, from my POV I think the evidence is clear that there is good scientific evidence that BFing causes reduction in risk for upper respiratory tract infections and diarrhoea but most of the other outcomes (mainly the more serious chronic health problems) the evidence is more inconclusive and unclear that the effects are causal. As a public health priority it looks good on paper - URTIs and diarrhoea cause lots of GP appointments and A and E admissions for otherwise healthy babies that "shouldn't be there" but these things can be pretty easily fixed and don't tend to massively worry parents (are not on the level of a long term, chronic diagnosis needing months or years of management and specialist medical appointments) -- hence the disconnect between the public health messaging and what parents see as the day to day reality.
All this would be changed though if there was good evidence from randomized studies (which there isn't yet) that things like obesity, asthma, etc were genuinely prevented thru BF. But at the mo, those outcomes are just linked in some observational studies (and contradicted in other observational studies) where there is lots of confounding going on, particularly by socioeconomic status and other things linked to it, like smoking and other infant/child feeding or care behaviours.