Demonisation of formula!!!

[Summertimehaze]

Don’t know if anyone watched the Dispatches programme last night on breastfeeding? The more I think about that programme the more annoyed I’m getting!!! The demonisation of formula really doesn’t help mothers who struggle to breastfeed and have to start using formula or even as a top up!! Most mothers want to do what’s right for their babies and know that breast is best. But some mums just can’t do it and so formula literally becomes a lifesaver. I’m sick of seeing mums feel so guilty about it and letting their children bloody starve because they surely can’t give them the evil formula!!!!!! The programme basically tells a new mum that it’s really tough to breastfeed, there is no support, they will be judged BUT formula is not an option!!! Grrrrrrrrr 😡. AIBU

I received a lot of breast feeding support with my son and strongly think that any mother who wants to breast feed should be entitled to support to do so but honestly, this thread. Anyone who thinks being breast fed vs being formula fed even registers on the scale of issues which genuinely matter when it comes to child welfare has led a very sheltered life. There are some things a parent can do which will have a significant effect on their child’s welfare one way or another - breast feeding or not is not one of them.

Some of the preaching on this thread about how “breast is best” is a bit sickening. More realistic would be “breast is slightly better all other things being equal (which they rarely are), but it doesn’t actually make that big a difference in the scheme of things”.

They were quite clear that the program was about the lack of support that those mums who wanted to breastfeed received. It wasn't about breast is best.

They were clear in CLAIMING this, but then instantly backtracked with a twee, overwrought illustration about all of the 'good stuff' in breast milk that you don't get in formula milk. How in any way would going on about the constituents of the two options support women who have already decided that they want to BF (and presumably physically can) but struggle to do so for 'social' reasons?

All this serves to do (and it very much appears that this was indeed their intention all along) is to guilt-trip mums who, for whatever reason, have decided that BFing is not right for them and/or their babies and also the estimated 5% of mums who physically CANNOT produce breast milk, whether as a result of PCOS or any other health condition/circumstances (not to mention the widowed dads out there).

Don't miss next week's programme, where they try to 'support' type-1 diabetics by endlessly going on to them about the multitudinous terrible potential health complications that they could easily avoid if they would only make the choice to use the natural insulin that their bodies simply cannot produce instead of ignorantly preferring to inject the second-best 'fake' stuff.

*I was lucky enough to have a lifestyle that allowed for a baby-centric existence. This, I think, is the missing part now. We simply aren't geared up for the kind of lives that babies actually require. We don't know what they are, and we don't want them, they are only tolerable if we have a group of supportive friends and other mothers to hang out with while it goes on, otherwise it's unbearably dull and depressing.

Having said all that, I did go all over England and Europe with my new born and bf everywhere with no probs at all. Maybe it's got worse with the emphasis on tits as men joy rather than baby food*

This illustrates my point well. If breast feeding choices were nothing more than a nutritional decision, rates would be much higher.

‘Baby-centric existence’ is exactly what our culture lacks. The dislike for children, their noise and women’s breasts in public is palpable in the UK.

Bold fail!!!

Well yes, Grandma, I intended to bf all my DC, I managed it with 3 of them. What I'm saying is, formula saved DD2's life. She would have starved otherwise. So for her, fed is best.

My late aunt was a midwife and later manager of midwives, I can remember her saying policy had changed and they were no longer allowed to support formula as an option, weren’t allowed to give samples of milk anymore to new mums, and she didn’t think it was wise. She’d been a midwife all her adult life.
Certainly when I had children there were no tins of formula samples that she and her team would have given out.
No guidance given to mothers using formula ever since is ridiculous, and I noticed how the guidance given by manufacturers changed over the years from being able to batch prepare lots of bottles ready in the fridge, to only making one bottle freshly at a time, all designed to make you think formula feed was difficult really.

@Mousefunky I don't see how you can think the presenter showed just how difficult BFing can be. She mentioned sore nipples and pumped to relieve them. And also talked about being tired.

But that's absolutely nothing compared to the sheer hell that many BFing women (me included) ended up putting themselves through in order to bf.

If more women had a BFing experience like the presenter, then maybe rates would be higher. But many of us start bfing and find that it's not like that at all. And it's not just down to access to support (which she seemed to have easy access to).

This bit is meant to be bold...
Some of the preaching on this thread about how “breast is best” is a bit sickening. More realistic would be “breast is slightly better all other things being equal (which they rarely are), but it doesn’t actually make that big a difference in the scheme of things”.*
E*nd bold!

This is what I eventually realised after my years of BFing - was it worth the hassle, inconvenience and sheer joylessness of BFing for that result? I've seen women really put themselves through the mill to bf because they believe it is so much better. Their choice to do that, but many of the ones I came across seemed to think it guaranteed their baby wouldn't be obese, diabetic, have allergies.

From my perspective the benefits don't add up to enough to outweigh the downsides to doing it - the PND it caused, the problems with bonding, the awful first months of DD's life, the expense.

Yes, obviously women in the past had no choice about BFing, but it wasn't 'marketed' at all, so they weren't led to believe they'd have this amazing bonding experience giving their baby the liquid gold elixir. Women really need to be told the truth - there are some benefits but trivial (unless for a very prem baby) and BFing can be difficult. Setting them up to fail is cruel.

I agree with @RidingMyBike

I would have enjoyed the first few months of ds’s life so much better if I hadn’t have been so pressured to breastfeed and pump milk. I exclusively breastfed for months while my health took a downward spiral. The pressure wasn’t helped my some HCP at ds’s birth. The whole experience made me very ill and I can say without a shadow of a doubt I won’t be breastfeeding another. If that makes me a bad mother than so be it.

I also felt like it was ‘liquid gold elixir’ and that ‘evil formula’ wouldn’t do. I stopped breastfeeding cold turkey one day when I found myself crying my eyes out and didn’t recognise my own reflection coupled with the fact I had developed a sleep disorder and was utterly exhausted from feeding 12-14 times a day for months (despite being told this regulates your supply and is normal) this was relentless and went on far too long.

Why do people take so much offence over this? It was a programme about breastfeeding, not formula 🙄 how can showing what is in breast milk compared to formula upset people? That’s nothing to do with the demonisation or formula, it’s people’s own guilt and insecurities.

Fact is, the majority formula feed, for whatever reason. Stop getting your knickers in a twist over a programme trying to raise awareness of the lack of support for breast feeders.

Would there be so much outrage around a program on formula? Very unlikely, considering how small the breastfeeding population is.

Can I ask the women who from their review of the evidence are unconvinced by the purported health benefits of breastfeeding over formula, and who think breastfeeding is inherently painful, exhausting, and harmful to mothers' emotional well-being and mental health, think that in spite of this (allowing for the moment that all that is true) there are any legitimate reasons for a woman to still want to breastfeed her child instead of formula feed?

They were clear in CLAIMING this, but then instantly backtracked with a twee, overwrought illustration about all of the 'good stuff' in breast milk that you don't get in formula milk

To be fair this was in reaction the the survey that showed 68% (or whatever the figure was) thought b/milk and formula were the same. I don’t know what sort of people they asked but there is clearly serious miseducation about it. We are so used to formula feeding now that people don’t even seem to know what breastmilk is. I found this segment very interesting. I didn’t know for example that BM contained cannabinoids. No parent that formula feeds can go around pretending to themselves it’s the same. I agree it might be painful to hear all the great properties of BM if you can’t b/feed yourself but we don’t all have to engage in some conspicy so as not to offend those people. That would be completely anti science. If that segment educated a few people and maybe made people think about making negative comments to friends/relatives/strangers then that’s great. It certainly educated me as someone who has actually b/fed for over a year.

So many new mothers seem to end up thinking they don’t have enough milk and so they turn to formula. At least half of my NCT group. Can this really be the case among well-nourished healthy women? It seems to me that ‘some/a lot women can’t breastfeed’ has become a bit of a myth and we’re too quick to grab formula when babies start cluster feeding, which is alarming as you do wonder if you have enough. If more women stuck with it through the cluster feeding they might find that after a few worrying days/weeks their supply became more. It happened to me and I was grateful I’d been warned off turning to formula too quickly. We need more education around this specific point.

And to a PP who said breastfeeding was ‘inconvenient’, I have no words! What could be more inconvenient than feeding my baby from my own body, no sterilising, supply right there, right temperature, when we need it, no need to carry a thing except a muslin. It’s only society that makes us feel it’s inconvenient and even that is dying out. Hardly anyone gives a damn. Make sure you’ve got a few button down tops or vests you can slip down and a scarf or muslin to pop around you. No inconvenience.

Sorry should say what could be more convenient than breastfeeding. Fair enough support formula if you want to but don’t demonise breastfeeding and make new mums to be think it’s going to be inconvenient when it’s not. It’s great.

“What could be more inconvenient than feeding my baby from my own body, no sterilising, supply right there, right temperature, when we need it, no need to carry a thing except a muslin“

And better for the environment: no plastic, no bottles, no packaging, no giant feed lots, no trucks, no boiling kettles, no industrial processing.

‘If more women stuck with it through the cluster feeding they might find that after a few worrying days/weeks their supply became more.’

I stuck through what I was told was cluster feeding. Ds fed 12-14 times a day and this went on for months on end everyday. I have no idea to this day why this was and I was left utterly exhausted. I wasn’t grateful that I had such a negative view of formula to the detriment of my own health.

But my babies didn't thrive on breast milk,far from it. Pushing aside the dehydration and malnourishment that was treated in ScBU for one the misery created for all of us did not create 3 happy thriving babies. It created 3 cranky,miserable,stressed,hungry and thirsty babies and a mother in a similar position. A few weeks on formula ended in a total transformation for all of us.Woo hoo I got to 6 weeks mixed feeding. So bloody not worth it and now as the mother of 3 healthy,high achieving teens I will say again carrying on for 6 months would not not have made them any different under their skin now. Nobody,no doctors or consultants or anybody could find and point out anything with direct evidence saying ""you know what if you'd bf for longer things would be different." In contrast I can think of a shed load of other parenting choices where they could.

ferntwist yes you hear not enough milk time and time again. Of course it’s not true for most well nourished women, if it were humans would have died out long ago. It’s quite alarming that baby has nothing but colostrum for 3/4 days as you envisage the sort of quantities coming out that would be in bottles because that is the norm. I was surrounded by breastfeeding growing up and thought I was fairly educated about it but still I couldn’t believe that my baby could survive on that tiny amount of liquid and had I been at home I would have worried (was in hospital so I was lucky to be guided through by great LC). I Aslo agree with other posters that the U.K. is not a baby friendly culture. You’re expected to pop them out and get on with normal life. Get them sleeping through at 6 weeks and get back to a ‘routine’. The fourth trimester is a really interesting idea, really for the 1st month you just need to stay close /feed/sleep. If people expected this the cluster feeding maybe wouldn’t be so alarming, it would just be viewed as a necessary, tiresome but short lived time. It’s such a shame that people give up at this stage as once you break through b/feeding is generally is much easier and more enjoyable. (Of course some people do actually have low supply but not most). Coupled with comments from others about formula making babies sleep it’s not surprising people turn to it. What also needs to change is supporting women so that it’s not a painful experience. I loved b/feeding but would I have carried on through excruciating pain/constant bouts of mastitis? No probably not. Usually there’s something behind it and often it’s tounge tie which seems to be very poorly diagnosed early on. A great LC locally to us specialises is snipping them and she’s helped literally thousands of babies to feed. It’s a shame that often the women she sees are at breaking point. She used to be employed by the NHS but they cut funding for her job!

Oh and if anything in many ways breastfeeding can be more convenient because no need to faff on with bottles in middle of the night or sterilise. What I don’t agree with is others judging woman’s choices. Woman should stick together and agree Fed is best. Everybody has their own reason for which method they choose.

Oh for goodness sake now we're supposed to feel shit about the environment too.

Funny how no other modern day improvement gets so much guilt mongering.We bought one set of bottles and recycled the tins. If you really care about the environment don't have kids in the first place,definitely not more than one.

‘If people expected this the cluster feeding maybe wouldn’t be so alarming, it would just be viewed as a necessary, tiresome but short lived time. It’s such a shame that people give up at this stage as once you break through b/feeding is generally is much easier and more enjoyable’

In your experience you meant to say. I breastfeed exclusively for months on end and it wasn’t for me. The cluster feeding also continued everyday for months, I would get told ds was a hungry baby or a snacker. This did little to held my exhaustion.