Stop baby milk promotion

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Juuuule: "if the health differences are so great then surely the NHS should be shouting these from the rooftops. Once the implications were accepted by the general public then surely no amount of advertising would matter. If the differences are negligible then isn't it down to personal choice?"

1. The NHS and department of health is pretty consistent in its message that breastfeeding makes a difference to public health. People like ink object to this, for some reason, calling it propaganda. But the choice to breastfeed or not is complex, and as we have seen here, some people don't accept that it makes a significant difference.

2. I think advertising can still be powerful and can still undermine choice, even when people know the facts. You can see this if you look at just about any behaviour or product that is promoted.

The reason I gave you my 'impression' was because for most people I would say that's as far as they get. Most of the people I know are not interested in trawling research.
I have had a look at the links. The problem I have with the articles are statements such as "one should not infer causality based on these findings." in the 2nd link and "Breast feeding may offer protection against the development of CD" (my highlighting) in the 3rd. In the quote you gave from the first link it is only suggested that those cases could have been avoided. There doesn't seem to be any conclusive evidence.
I'm still trying to understand the last link.
While I erred on the side of caution and hope for the health benefits that are being proposed come from bf-ing as opposed to ff-ing I do wonder where it leaves me as a ff baby. What health problems have I yet to come up against?

My 'impression' was from your post, by the way. Not from just looking at a URL

OK, understand about the impression stuff now I agree most people aren't interested in trawling research. I prefer to link to something which backs up anything I say, if I can, as those that do want to look at it then have a choice.

The statements you pick out are 'medical speak' and of course it is correct that it would be wrong to say 'formula feeding causes XYZ' - the papers show an association, but because we cannot do an RCT on breastfeeding and formula feeding (by telling parents what they have to feed their baby on) still less a blinded one (everyone will know if the baby is bf or ff!), all studies have to be observational (just as many behavioural studies are, for example, smoking and heart disease, or smoking and lung cancer ...all observational not RCTs). You then have to posit a biological explanation for your results, which many papers do (can't remember if the ones I linked to all do).

It is also the case that you have to say 'breastfeeding may offer protection' in medical-speak, as babies who have been breastfeed can, and do, develop CD. It's also true that in other epidemoiological work, you will find phrases like 'exercise and a healthy diet may protect against obesity' or 'heavy drinking may cause liver disease' and so on.

Long term, it's hard to even make suggestions for the effect of formula feeding (your question about what lies in store for you - or me, as it happens - as a ff baby) because the research that follows a cohort of people from infancy onwards is very hard to do. You'll just have to stick around for the Millenium Babies study and the ALSPAC study. So far, there are hypotheses, but without good research to test them, we can't tell.

We do know that mothers who do not breastfeed have an increased risk of breast and ovarian cancer, but that's not hard to show.

It may be medical speak but it implies that what is being said is somehow supposition. In which case it seems to give bf only a slight advantage of being 'maybe' better. I think this is more of a problem than formula advertising.
If someone is having bf problems for whatever reason (painful feeding, concerns about weight gain, overwhelming tiredness etc.)and there doesn't seem to be a great return for the effort put in surely you can see that they might choose formula regardless of advertising. It offers them a way out of their misery.

QoQ if there was this kind of info available for mums in the UK, would that have been helpful to you? Gives different compositions of different formulae.

Now that's more like it. Especially the quick reference comparison of breastmilk and formula.

actually I thought I was giving a link to the page which just compares formulas which is a few lines down. I think that is what is needed more than the blurb from individual formula companies which are naturally going to be partisan.
Having said that, what people say anecdotally here would suggest that it is very much trial and error for each individual baby. But at least it might give people a starting point.

tiktok - I know it's rare - but I'm afraid it did put me off having anything to do with the NCT for many years. An acquaintance of mine had the same response (different group though) when feeding her DS1 too. Like you say - again thankfully very rare but it is, unfortunately, these "one-off" incidents that tend to stick in mother's (sorry if that's a rogue apostrophe lol) minds when they think about other parents reaction to them FF'ing .

Interesting link there about the formula Umbridge.....although I had to smile at the FF contains "Harder to digest casein curds" (without wanting to start a debate on it - I'm jolly glad they such hungry baby formula's exist or I dread to think how many tins of the normal stuff we'd go through with DS3 LOL).

That is certainly very useful for giving parents a better idea of not only what is in the formula but how the different elements work/react and may react with your baby. The tables of "what" is used for the various nutrional elements could be useful especially if your baby doesn't get on well with one formula as it could help you avoid ones that are almost identical composition. (although I must admit some of the article did go over my head ).

However, if there was a similar type leaflet produced (in plain simple English for us not quite so intellectual mothers) which was available for mother's who do opt for FF'ing I think it would help a lot.....and probably help them feel more "supported" IYKWIM.

juuule, I don't know how to respond to you....this is the language of medical research, and that's how it is. No one seriously doubts that not breastfeeding has many, many significant health effects on the baby and the mother.

You will find it's the same with the cot death research that led to the 'back to sleep' campaign which again, no one seriously doubts has saved lives. But you will find no paper that tells you that putting babies onto their fronts to sleep 'causes' them to die. It's a question of risk factors, repeated in many epidemiological studies, plus a plausible explanation that sleeping on the back allows the baby to regulate its own temperature control, but that's almost certainly not the whole story. No one can say that a baby who sleeps on his front is going to suffer a cot death - just that many well-controlled studies show that this is a risk factor for SIDS.

With breastfeeding, we know that breastfeeding is the physiologically normal way to nourish a baby. We know that doing so ensures the baby's immune system develops in a physiologically appropriate way, and biologically, this is almost certainly why there are more infections, more diabetes, more coeliac disease, more respiratory illness and so on, in babies who are not breastfed. But no one can say 'formula feeding causes these conditions' or that a baby who is not breastfed will definitely get any of them.

I can't imagine why you need to tell me that women have a miserable experience breastfeeding and that this might be a reason for switching to formula - I am a breastfeeding counsellor and I hear sad stories every day. The decision to switch to formula (as I keep saying) is complex and individual. Advertising has a role to play in undermining breastfeeding - probably not in the case of the most miserable experiences, no, but not every bf experience is miserable. Many bf experiences just need a bit more confidence and a bit more information....I don't think it is far-fetched to see advertising chipping away at that confidence, and actually making the information available rather worse.

QoQ - I know what you mean about negative comments staying in people's minds, and it's a real shame it happened to you

And yes, it is rare. You have to remember, too, that NCT groups are not necessarily reflective of the organisation. Anyone can go to an NCT group, and most group attenders are not actually members of NCT - to take remarks you hear at a group and linking them to the wider organisation is like going on holiday to Majorca, eating one dodgy paella, and then using that as a reason never to eat Spanish cuisine ever again!

The link about formulas is a good one, but we have nothing that compares UK formulas, and I wish we could. We need independent assessment, not advertising.

Would it be illegal to have that kind of comparison in the UK, tiktok?

No, not illegal - why illegal? Information is not illegal!

I think, speaking as a "done all 3", (ex bf, ex ff and mixed LOL) - and not really being in support of a ban on advertising (nor particularly against a ban either - just be be awkward ), that if that sort of information was EASILY available then a lot of the opposition towards a ban would cease to exist. But I could be completely wrong (as per usual)

Sorry, tiktok, I just wondered because you said you wished we could have such a comparison, and I thought perhaps that meant that we couldn't!
Also just wondered why there isn't such a comparitive list in the UK.

Oh the cot-death thing. With my first child I was advised to put him to sleep on his front. When advice keeps changing sometimes it's difficult to trust the advice of professionals, I suppose. But that's a different story altogether.
Well I think this could run and run in circles so I think I'm going to leave it now. I still think there is a lot more involved than advertising as to why so many are resistant to the idea of bf-ing but I have no idea what the answer is. You are working with it, I only have what I see with friends, relatives and others around me.
I do think there is a need for more people like you (bf-ing counsellors) for mothers who choose to bf to get good advice from. I also think that their should be more information and comparisons of various formula milks and breast milk such as linked to on the Sears site. Although it might not make much difference to some people, I think it would make a difference to others.

Think, I'll go too, juuule, my children are being neglected!

MMiDU -

It would be legal, and welcome, to have independent comparisons between infant formulas in the UK, and to have independent tests of health claims.

That goes further than the US link highlighted before, in fact.

Why don't we have these comparisons? I don't know. No one has done them, is the answer!

Parents, the public and healthcare professionals, know so very little about formula milk - the HVs and midwives who decline to discuss it are really not doing their job properly, but even they don't seem to know much. They get advertised to, and promoted to, and when they do recommend something, it's often based on something a salesperson has told them.

The prebiotics in formula milk are a case in point. The milk packaging and promotion make a great song and dance about these, but manufacturers are not keen to tell you where they come from, because it would not be a great selling point. Ditto 'stage 2' formulas - is there anything on the packaging which explains the real difference between these and 'stage 1'?