More anti breast feeding in the press

[LAF77]

This makes my blood boil as it is filled with lies!

m.mirror.co.uk/article?id=1259599/

The worst thing is my inlaws read the mirror, and we're seeing them next week. They are so at me still BF 2yo DD2 they'll probably laminate it for me.

What the fucking fuck?! I can't actually believe people are allowed to publish shit like this

Apparently formula companies are extra keen to get mums who start Breastfeeding and then switch to ff later as we are likely to keep on buying the formula milk until the baby is much older, whereas if you start off ff you are more likely to switch to cows milk at younger age. It is a worthy investment for them to pay experts to convince us to switch to ff... Nestlé obviously getting their pound of flesh

The Institute of Child Health reference is about an article about 18 mths ago in the BMJ where some members of the ICH raised questions about the rightness of '6 mths for all' - there was n actual official advocacy of solids at 4 mths.

Ahh, tiktok, I took her reference to 'mixed feeding' to mean breastmilk and formula (as it usually does) but yes, it probably does refer to solids.

Unclear as well as ill-informed and irresponsible

This article has made me really sad.

I know of someone who introduced solids to their baby at 12 weeks because apparently their baby was so hungry all the time and grabbed at food.

It is a minefield out there.

I suspect she didn't write it all. It was probably written by some poor, uninformed PR Officer and then signed off by her or her publicist - who clearly didn't read it properly or check the facts. There's probably a whole PR team now trying to work out how to fix the mess.

LAF, don't even get me started on early weaning! Someone I know recently started their 9 week old baby on 'half a jar of food' per meal due to his apparent insatiable hunger. Sadly, she is giving him jars and they mostly seem to contain things that babies shouldn't have before 6 months, pasta, meat, dairy etc...

As for the article, well, it's laughable if you know what you're talking about, but sadly, plenty will believe it, although maybe people will read the comments too and then research a bit more? (hopeful!)

I've complained about her to pcc.

Shame so many parents believe this tripe and it would appear some of them are my friends :-(

Do you think that Miriam Stoppard understands that babies who are breastfed past 6 months are still given solid food? I seriously do wonder because it is the only way to explain her comments. Of course having teeth helps babies chew (although some manage quite well without) but they still need milk alongside whether breastmilk, formula or cows milk past 12 months. So, the only reason for equating teeth with giving up breastfeeding must be if you are under the ridiculous illusion that is 'extreme' parents never let anything else pass our child's lips!

She is breaking the hippocratic oath if she is a doctor of any sort, to first do no harm.

As tiktok has pointed out, some members of the ICH may have questioned the 6 months for all, that is very different than the ICH recommending mixed feeding ( weaning) from 4 months. It leads to craziness of people giving solids to babies far too early. This is doing harm and breaking the hippocratic oath. midori 9 weeks! That is horrifying!

If the government wants to improve public health, we need to start from the beginning of life, supporting women in establishing breast feeding, no early weaning, and make sure people know the facts about it all, not a bunch of rubbish information like Miriam has come out with.

I may be wrong and I have not checked, but I think Miriam Stoppard's doctorate is in chemistry, and she is not a medical doctor.

So she has a science background, anyway, and should know how to research and evaluate evidence.

The thing about teeth: there is no evidence that bf should cease because of teeth. Teeth are indeed useful to chew and bite and chomp and the usual age of getting them - about the middle of the first year - is a clue that speaking generally, babies can manage other foods than milk at that time but they don't need to stop breastmilk. Babies get teeth across a wide range of ages anyway - some are born with a tooth, some don't get any until a year. So it's too variable to use as a guide in every baby.

Presumably, MS knows that babies with teeth do benefit from milk and they don't go suddenly to needing all solids and no milk - so she would prob agree to keep on the milk. Why on earth would that not be human milk? Why would it have to be milk from another species?

Scrap that - I have just read on Wikipedia she trained as a medical doctor, sorry. Not sure if her registration is up to date.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miriam_Stoppard

I'm confused by that too, tiktok.

My health visitor told me that DS should be getting most of his nutrition from milk until he's at least a year old. We're using formula, but she made that comment before asking me whether DS was still breastfed.

We intend giving DS formula alongside the solid food until he's old enough to be getting all his nutrition from the solid food, and I really can't understand why it would be wrong for a breastfeeding mother to do the same with breastmilk.

In a bizarre way, DS getting his first teeth meant that I fed for longer than planned.

I always planned to BF for about 6 months and then see what happened with how we were both finding it, teeth, weaning progress, etc. I was shocked when away visiting friends when DS was 14wks old, he got his first tooth and his second followed 10 days later. I couldn't just suddenly stop there and then and discovered that the tooth made no difference to BFing, so I continued. In the end DS weaned himself at 21months. I'm so pleased I didn't just stop at 6 months thinking his teeth would be along soon!

As an aside, MS is spouting rubbish and I have complained to the PCC.

This kind of nonsense needs to be reported - www.babyfeedinglawgroup.org.uk/monitoring/reportviolations