to think baby formula should come in plain packaging?

[Yoyoyozo]

Fancy packaging is used to inflate prices and extract more money from parents with phrases like 'premium' plastered on the tin. Parents shouldn't be made to feel guilty for not buying the most expensive, well-marketed brand.

Yes, parents can make their own informed decisions, but clever marketing is proven to undermine this.

A report published in The Lancet (2016) unveiled that aggressive marketing of breastmilk substitutes is undermining efforts to improve breastfeeding rates

https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(15)01044-2.pdf

No, this is not equating infant formula to tobacco! The aim is to prevent exploitative marketing practices that undermine access to impartial information on infant feeding.

I don’t necessarily agree with you OP but it does annoy me that these threads all go this way. You can’t have an actual discussion about such an important topic without loads of people assuming you are personally attacking them because they couldn’t or wouldn’t breastfeed. It’s not about you!! It’s a society thing!

In terms of the low BF rates, I know there is data on how few babies are still BF by 6 weeks old but do they gather data on why most women stop or don’t start in the first place?

@FuckOffTom yes they do, let me see if I can find it.

Well, tackling our obesogenic society would be very expensive. It likely would require significant structural change. That's really hard. Pissing about with formula boxes is much less effort.

"All formula brands are equal, lets stop permitting them to be percieved otherwise"

They're not so the same.

Cow & Gate gave our son really bad reflux. It foamed when shaken in the bottle.

We switched to Aldi own brand which is made in the same factory. That brand didn't foam when mixed/shaken and it fixed the reflux problem.

Exactly. But when when I was on the ward, the pressure from the midwives was ever present to breastfeed.

They had one super duper expressing machine. But the ward was on the other side of the hospital from NICU. I’d get on it, then I would be called down for an emergency.

Then I would trek back up, only to find the midwives had locked the room and were too busy to open it up.

But still, the comment about how I should BF even though he would be in longer persisted from them.

People are discussing just not agreeing.

@FuckOffTom i have actually made a post disputing the OP's comment that "all (FF) recipes are the same" as i disagree and would like to discuss this but I haven't had the op respond to this as yet; other people have also made comments why they disagree with the suggestion of plain packaging, so people are engaging with the topic. However when you have other people on the thread framing people as stupid then its not a surprise when threads expand to more emotional aspects.

Yes, that was exactly my experience. all the midwives seemed to care about was breastfeeding, even though it would have kept him in longer.

The staff in NICU were far more realistic and balanced and gave no pressure at all, they just wanted us discharged and healthy asap.

As per the peer reviewed research paper that i previously shared, the actual human norm was wet nurses / community breast feeding, but that was abandoned in the west around 120 years ago. It was replaced with formula - especially in the first few weeks after birth, until the mother's milk arrived.

We've now ditched that and moved to 'breast is best' starvation for newborn children.

Unless we're going to return to a system of wet nurses, then i think this whole breast is best obsession needs a serious rethink, with formula given to all children until their mother's milk arrives in sufficient quantities to move exclusively to breast milk.

I agree with you OP. Sadly, forumla feeders always get straight on the defensive with threads like this. It's very emotive and rarely generates rational and balanced discusssion.

with formula given to all children until their mother's milk arrives in sufficient quantities to move exclusively to breast milk.

What?!

A totally waste of time and energy. Perhaps we should concentrate on the myriad of other problems we have, than on what colour the formula tins are. Quite frankly, I tried more expensive ones, cheaper ones and the one that suited my daughter better, that´s the one i kept to. Nothing to do with pretty packages. pfff
Now she´s 5 on to 6 and who cares what she ate as a baby. We´re on to other things.

I chose SMA because that’s what I was raised on and was the more popular formula around me. I didn’t pick it for its tin.

I think the NHS does a lot of harm by preaching that breast is best but then they don't always act like they really believe it if that makes sense.

Obviously in NICU the priority is the babies and the medical team need to be able to access the incubators quicky without too much clutter nearby but I think there should be more provision for the mother's to stay close by.

Yes, those emotional formula feeders...

Lord knows breast feeding mums are always calm and rational about breast feeding.

I was once approached by one such lovely mum who lectured me on breast feeding my adopted baby. She was the personification of tranquility. So much wisdom she freely gave a stranger who in no way asked for it. Sigh ... A real saint.

There’s nothing wrong with accepting that the marketing of formula is pernicious and impossible to ignore. Even medical professionals who KNOW that all brands are equal will not buy Cow & Gate for their baby because the image and target market of that brand is that it’s for young, lower socio-economic parents. How do we ALL know that when marketing of formula is apparently not allowed?

There is no need for wetnurses unless a mother cannot produce milk. Colostrum is all babies need in the first few days, in fact we are really luckily as a species that we ca use artifical milk straight away. Many manuals die without it and cows and sheep they have had to create artifical Colostrum or they don't thrive either.

@ThisOldThang babies feeding is what encourages mothers milk to come in. Some women wouldn't lactate effectively at all if a baby is not put to the breast. It's interventions like this which prevent longterm feeding not help it.

Please provide evidence for this statement.

It's an interesting point about community breastfeeding.

We know that milk sharing is an ancient tradition, one still practiced in many societies outside the West. We also know that there are hunter gatherer groups who do it even today, not necessarily because the mother is unable to breastfeed either. Most mothers in human history will have lived in small groups of hunter gatherers, where there would often be other lactating women around.

Lots of cultures also have prelacteal feeding customs, and usually they have much higher breastfeeding rates than we in the modern UK.

The peer reviewed research paper that i linked to states that 15% of women still don't have sufficient milk after 3 weeks.

"In one study of “unusually compliant and well educated” first-time mother volunteers, 15% had persistent insufficient milk after three weeks despite intensive professional lactation support [36]."

Please stop spreading inaccurate information that's designed to blame mothers for not breast feeding.

Read the research paper i linked to on page 3.

I had no idea there were different perceived statuses of formula milk?! Our NCT and midwife said they were all the same formula. Who on earth is going to see what formula you’re using?

To me, it seems a bit patronising to mums to think they will have their heads turned by fancy packaging for something as fundamental as what they're feeding their baby.

@Denou please can you show me anything that says that all baby formula
are equal? There are regulations that set a minimum nutritional requirement but there are differences in how those nutrients are derived and some formulas have other products added that are not in others.