There’s an awful lot of grandstanding and airy dismissing of evidence on this thread by posters who aren’t actually engaging with the data itself, but at the most the odd newspaper article. When did people become so anti-science? There’s plenty here on this thread, too, of outdated mid-20th century propaganda about the benefits of formula as “nutritionally complete”, which is quite funny, since none of that has anything like the data to support breastfeeding, and was actually just originally marketing by formula companies.
It’s hilarious (though actually quite sad) that so many posters are happy to reproduce formula company marketing points from the 1960s and 1970s but are dismissing detailed large-scale independent scientific studies conducted between 2010 and today. Including blithely dismissing a large number of robust studies which do control for socioeconomic background and maternal factors.
Not all studies show increases in IQ; but many of the better-designed ones do, usually by a small number of points only, but a measurable effect. There are much bigger results for the correlation between formula and obesity and other health outcomes. Many studies make use of very detailed MRI and cognitive assessments, not just “asking people about their A-levels” as one poster scathingly put it. (Similarly, the data on SIDS risk factors is very detailed, and I spent a lot of time looking at the actual data, not either newspaper articles or old wives’ tales.) Don’t people want the best most up to date data? That doesn’t mean that things might not change in the future; but we’d be silly to dismiss decent evidence today, no? And a Guardian article by a journalist is not actual science: you need to look at the studies themselves, and understand a bit about statistics — many of the relevant studies are linked on this thread, but it’s really obvious that posters haven’t actually taken any time to look at them or even just read the synopses or conclusions.
All of that doesn’t mean that individual mothers shouldn’t choose formula. But dismissing all the evidence on this basis doesn’t really make sense.
I wonder how much this rejection of evidence and statistical method is down to a post-Brexit Trumpian Reform-style mood of “we’ve had enough of experts”. I certainly don’t remember MN being quite so dismissive of factual evidence when my DD was small. It’s really noticeable how ready posters are to dismiss evidence in favour of anecdote or slogans from formula marketing or just what they wish was true, rather than making an effort to look at the evidence.
There is a very entrenched uproar on MN about this topic which is excessive in relation to other comparable health issues. Do people also get quite so angry when they go to the doctor and the doctor says “you need to eat more healthily and lose weight”? Do they fulminate online about how the doctor is a Nazi and unprofessional and must be reported and it’s all nonsense anyway because Uncle Albert ate 4,000 calories a day of suet and lived to be 90 doing 40 press-ups a day so all medical advice on a healthy diet is complete unsubstantiated bollocks? Maybe they do, but I’ve never noticed this level of resistance to most other health advice, compared to the anger at the (by now pretty conventional) notion that breast milk might actually be on the whole a good thing, and possibly also have a few extra benefits at a population level. Which is in general not exactly that controversial as an idea, not for the past sixty years or so at least.
Maybe the closest thing to it on MN is rear facing car seats. Now that’s a bunfight.