breast is best

[Haitch27]

Is anyone else who is pregnant sick to the back bloody teeth of the 'breast is best' campaign being shoved down your throat everywhere you turn and being badgered by health carers to attend breastfeeding 'workshops'?? Maybe its just where I live but it seems to be everywhere yet the one thing no one says is "are you planning to breastfeed"? Assumption that all Mums will!!
Curious to know as I said if it is just my area or is it everywhere?

i think you are calling me an insulting zealot?

Well, my DD is a little beauty I was very careful with all the sterilising and so no tummy infections whatsoever. She is 14 months now and her favourite food is blueberries and I will obviously be ensuring she has a healthy diet for as long as I am in control of it (more significant than bf, as has been pointed out above).

Ah, but runnybottom, they are: 'very selfish', 'a drain on society's resources' etc.

So are my 3 FF (by choice) children who are 6, 2.5 and 5 months. The older two eat shedloads of fruit and are rarely ill (and get over it quickly when they are). None of them (as yet) has inherited the asthma or excema that runs in my family (although the oldest has inherited the left handedness that seems to run with it).

It doesn't change the fact that statistically they are more at risk of certain illnesses and conditions.

Well, perhaps I and other people I know have been fortunate then...but I have no regrets about ff and as I said higher up in the thread, will have no qualms about doing so again with DC2 is who due later in the year.

I do, however, think it is a little rich for people to come on and complain that ff is a crime against society

The trouble is, once you start asserting how much ff costs society I want to pay devil's advocate and suggest it's not quite so simplistic.

The only time that any babies in my family - not my own but a relation's - have troubled the NHS and been readmitted to hospital have been for worrying weight loss by an exclusively bf mother. Both of them. (Two years apart.) Which presumably wouldn't have happened if they'd been ff. Does that feature in the 'financial cost' stats? Out of interest?

LadyT, I have no regrets either, but I can accept I took a risk by choosing to FF. I also have been lucky and have healthy children, perhaps they would have been even healthier had they been BF, but I will never know and tbh I don't think my children would have been.

Good point coffeeaddict.

My DS2 was FF (after a failed BF attempt and after BF DS1 quite happily) and he costs the NHS a fortune.

He is in and out of hospital, has had numerous operations and will always have a close relationship with the medical profession. He also has a genetic condition which has dictated all of this, including his difficulty with feeding at all including BF. I certainly hope that children like him wouldn't be classed as costing the NHS due to how I fed him, it was decided for him at conception.

As for the posters promoting BF, well I am pregnant again with DC3 and I actually don't find them irritating as on the whole I take no notice of them. I can seperate the message that breast is best against the real life reality that for some babies formula saved their lives. I shall hopefully be BF this baby.

Comments about how much FF babies cost the NHS only serve to cause upset.

What if babies who were bf and then fed junk food in their childhood or when they are older, and did not do any exercise, than they will be costing the NHS money with their health problems despite being bf. Obesity and type 2 diabetes which bf helps to reduce are only so good if the person chooses the right way of life. Its not going to help if the persn gorges on junk and does little exercise despite them being breastfed, I agree its the optimum milk but its not supermilk

completely agree piglet. bfing is only part of the bigger picture. i'm bowing out for now - am totally sleep deprived and must get some zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

No one mentioned bf to me once. In either pregnancy. Not AN or PN. Not a word. Just goes to show how different it in in areas, compared to OP.

'Healthy' and 'saves NHS money' do not always equate btw. Governments benefit from people who die young and don't need endless pensions/old age health support. I read somewhere that smoking saves the government STACKS in this way but obviously they never mention this...

I would rather aim for healthy children than get into whether they're saving the NHS money or not. I think this is a VERY grey area.

night night Ruby good idea dd is requesting nursery rhymes so MN will have to wait

Thanks, MillyR, it's very interesting to see the correlation between fats in the mother's diet and those passed on to the baby. I know that, as in pregnancy, we are told that generally it will be the mother who suffers as the baby will take what it needs but it's something that has always niggled at me (despite being a pro-bf who ff her own).

As an aside a friend came over earlier with her 3 month old and said she was glad she was here as she didn't feel she had to justify herself to me when she got her bottle out to feed her son. It seems a pity that both bf and ff mothers feel "got at" by others and need support. Would men be so bothered? I suspect not.

Artificial baby milk does not only cost society financially. It also has a huge impact environmentally.

Packaging wastes resources such as tin, paper and plastic. Thousands of tons worth. Feeding bottles, teats and related equipment require plastic, glass, rubber and silicon, not to mention the energy that is used to produce these things. Millions and millions of them. Waste products from the production of baby milks are rarely recycled. Landfill and incineration are the two main disposal methods. Baby milks are the end product of industrial processes. Vast amounts of energy and fuel are made to produce them. Transportation of baby milk/packaging materials cosumes petrol. It all has to be sterilized at home. Think of all those kettles that are boiled. Energy and paper and manpower is used to run these massive coorporations and to market their products. Finally, the cost of maintaining the cows that produce this milk. The dairy industry - the amount of land and resources they use is a major contributor to world pollution.

Breastmilk: organic, no waste, no packaging, ready to use, many women do not have periods so don't need to use sanitary products either!

(Taken from Ina May's Guide to Breastfeeding - largely paraphrased - great book by the way!).

Again, if women know this but are failed by society, it is shame on that society. If a woman knows these facts, but rather doggedly insists they FF in the name of choice, well, call me fanatical if you like, but...

But again Ruby, isn't it more beneficial to focus the support on those women who do want to BF? That would reduce the environmental impact of formula more than trying to force 100% initiation rates, which would mean nothing if half those women couldn't establish BF due to lack of post natal support.

As for "rather doggedly insists they FF in the name of choice, well, call me fanatical if you like, but...", are you trying to provoke a reaction?

AIBU to be irritated by the campaigns for healthy eating to reduce heart disease?

If you don't want to breastfeed, don't breastfeed. Just don't get in a tizz about it being promoted, because the fact is that it is better for baby and mother.

In itself the campaign is not aggressive, though I have heard of some healthcare workers promoting it in an insensitive way, which is so unnecessary and downright damaging. I do feel for women who have trouble bfing and give up. Though, with this in mind I find it interesting that some countries achieve a bfing percentage in the high 90's, whereas ours is extremely low.

Flipping heck, Ruby, are you suggesting that women should consider the enviromental impact of FF at the point of making the choice to abandon BF? Are you living in a world of make believe??

Why not? Lots of people think the environmental impact of anything they do should be considered. I wouldn't personally but its not an outlandish suggestion these days.

OP - I picked up a pregnancy magazine the other day. It had, oh, about 15 full page ads in it for bottles, follow on formula and 'baby clubs' run by Hipp, SMA, Aptamil etc.

Any pictures of breastfeeding mums in the magazine? Not a nipple to be seen, no breastfeeding promotion and not a single full page article about breastfeeding.

And when was the last time you saw a TV ad for breastfeeding?

The money that's spent on bf promotion by the NHS is hugely dwarfed by formula advertising in all its forms.

And that bothers me far more because it's all about profit, and not about the health of babies.

I agree that it's more common to consider the environmental impact of our actions, and that that is a Good Thing, no matter what the issue. For example, we've recently stopped buying cartons of juice because they're not recyclable, and so we spend more (ouch!) on bottles of juice instead. Not a perfect solution, but better than not considering it at all.

Also there are other issues such as warming milk in plastic bottles being bad for the baby's health. IMO it's perfectly sensible to take all these issues into consideration.

Maybe so. It still seems such a personal decision though: when I gave up feeding my first child, the last thing on my mind was whether I was buggering up the planet. I just wanted my baby fed, my nipples to stop bleeding, to stop resenting my baby for wanting to feed because it hurt me so much.

Ohh, bleeding nipples! Yowch! You poor thing. Bfing pain is like nothing else on earth, I totally sympathise.

On a separate note, don't you think your effect on the environment is personal, because it's directly related to your child's future? Of course no individual can save the planet, but if none of us makes changes as individuals it's definitely doomed, isn't it!

Oh, of course. But thats because I am in a rational(ish!) frame of mind now. My point is just that I suspect the wider issues are the last thing many think of when its all going tits up, so to speak. I meean, if you can overlook the health benefits yada yada then its pretty easy to ignore the environmental stuff.

For what its worth, I BF my second for months and I often reflect on whether I could have managed longer with my first: but actually, I can live with my choice without much issue as it was definitely the right thing for me at that point in time. And right by my son too - I bonded with him once he stopped making me cry every hour, and managed to salvage my sanity so that I could care for him properly too. So many things make the decision for women...we should really be kinder to each other about this.

Yes I agree - I don't think the enviro impact will swing it for a woman who's in agony (as I was after a week of bfing) or wants to stop for some other reason. Actually, I very nearly gave up after a week but was lucky enough to have an awesome bfing counsellor who pinpointed the problem right away and showed me how I could bf pain-free on my most sensitive breast. This shouldn't be a matter of luck - as I said earlier, other countries achieve a bfing rate above 90%, and yet surely breasts are breasts wherever in the world you go? So clearly, as someone said earlier, something is wrong in our society that women like you give up because you're 'unlucky' enough to not have good, well-informed support (I am assuming that that's what happened with your first).

I also agree that women should not pressurise or judge each other about how we choose to feed our babies. I knew one bf counsellor who did this and I avoided her like the plague, even when I had fully established bfing. But she was quite a harsh person full-stop, and I suspect that the women that are openly judgemental about bfing are probably openly judgemental personalities. In which case they should all be banished to a desert island until they can learn to behave themselves.