Interesting link for anybody interested in formula company practices

[hunkermunker]

I know there are some of you on here

(Thank you for all emails, btw, you lovely lot - will reply later hopefully. Am fine, don't worry )

Was just stalking you to nudge you to read my email... then read the OP

pmsl at link, stripeymama

oh god

i am judging so very much

the typos

the referring to poopoos

make it stooooooooooop!!!

Chardonnay, i think the best answer (not right or wrong as such) is that none of the formula companies are particularly ethical.

However, some are definitely more unethical than others. Nestle are definitely one of those.

When choosing formula, the only real things you can take into consideration is price and availability (ie if you can get it late at night in the Tesco Express/petrol station in emergencies).

HTH

at Aptamil forum!

There is soooo much appalling advice going on - another thread has several of them agreeing that "small nipples" can make bf impossible.

lulu - and yes, suppositories would be way too big 'in your eye'

Oh crikey.....

oh no, been lured onto aptamil site, v depressing

More guilt

blisscake, here is my post from earlier

lulumama on Thu 10-Jan-08 17:36:54
I find it hard to read them as i did not breast feed either DC, and the more i know about breastfeeding, and the more i learn about FF, well ,more specifically , the issues around the manafacture and promotion, it makes me more sad that i didn;t have MN and didn;t get the right info

that is not me saying anyone is being smug/.rubbing my face in it.. this is absolutely my issue and i know it.

and it means i do my utmost to encourage clients to BF

but more power to you hunker!

I formula fed and in hindsight it is hard to reconcile what i know now with what i did, but hindsight is a marvellous thing

formula is an alternative to breast milk, and the vast majority of babies, especially in the developed world thrive on it, but that does not mean that we should not acknowledge the wrong that formula companies do

i have tried redirecting my guilt, into feeling angry about the lack of support for breastfeeding, and to educating myself and trying to change things for other mums

this is not about making formula feeders feel like sh*t, but to show that the formula companies might not always have infant health at the forefront of their agenda

the fact is , if there was only one brand of formula, a lot of this would be irrelevant, but there are many brands, and they all need promoting somehow

there is Cow & Gate, SMA, Aptamil, Farleys, and within those brands, and there are more, but it is early.. there are first milks, second milks, follow on milks and toddler milks ! and i saw an ad for a product called nighttime milk, that is supposedly going to make your baby sleep longer as it is heavier

WTF????

just my thoughts anyway

How do you manage to be so eloquent so early in the morning, Lulumama!

in my earlier post, I meant to say, "...for the benefit of people, rather than the creation of profits..."

I have become far more interested in the issues around formula/b'feeding, because of my experiences. But in the early days, when I failed to b'feed and turned to formula, I would feel sick with guilt when I read some of the threads on here.

People who ff understandably resist the notion that formula feeding does not meet the emotional and psychological needs of the baby (point 8, I think, on that list). Perhaps it would be better to say 'does not support the emotional and psychological needs of the baby'...I do think the idea that formula feeding babies automatically miss out on having their emotional and psychological needs met is almost certainly not true, because there are many ways, not just feeding, of meeting these needs.

Breastfeeding, when it's going well, makes it easier to cuddle a baby close and to respond quickly to his need for comfort and food (all of which is important to psychological and emotional health).

Points one and 9 which people are quibbling with on this thread are uncontroversial, really - we have bags of evidence to back them up.

The idea that it's good for formula manufacturers to make profits so they can make better formula is utterly naive, sorry - we cannot insist on that, we cannot expect it, and we have no way of knowing independently if it ever happens. The agenda of the formula manufacturers is to make profits for their shareholders, and if it wasn't, they would be rightly criticised, their CEOs and boards sacked, and maybe even prosecuted. Any research and development will be done with marketing and ultimately, sales, in mind.

For example, if an independently-assessed ingredient that protected babies from gastric illness was developed, and added to formula, but it would inevitably mean packs would cost £30 each and it coloured the powder sludge green - do you really think they would go ahead with it?

very strong coffee, hazyjane! nice to know i am making sense

tiktok, when i had dd, and got no advice about getting her from bottle to breast at 4 days old , i could not get her on the breast , so i carried on formula feeding with us both naked, usually in the morning or night, so we got skin to skin, and DH did this too..it was not the same, but it made it nice for me, and hopefully for her too...
i also made a concious effort to try to make eye contact with her and concentrate on giving her milk rather than just give her the bottle and switch off.

lulu - I would really like to see formula feeding encouraged in this way, with as much closeness and skin to skin as poss. I would like the mum to be the person who does the vast majority of feeds, at least while the baby is young, and for this to be seen as a positive thing. It's stuff like this that can make ff 'closer to breastfeeding', not novel ingredients in the mixture....ff can be part of the relationship the baby has with its mother, if it's done in the close way you describe

it did help a bit, tiktok, but no-one advised me or told me to do this, i just did it because i wanted to try and replicate what i felt we were missing with the breastfeeding.

it makes me grrrrrrrrr that the sum total of the advice i got from the MW was

'well, you can try to get her on the breast, but after 4 days , she will be settled on the bottle and it will be hard'

end of advice!

no numbers for NCT, LLL, ABM etc.. no books or websites recommended nada

I think that list of 10 points is badly written, it seems a shame that they had to include it.

We were the same Lulumama, I was determined when I ended up turning to formula, I would make each bottlefeed as lovely as I could, I didn't want to pass on all my sadness at not managing to b'feed. I used to love feeding dd's in the middle of the night all cuddled up in bed, gazing into their eyes. I also remember people thinking I was odd because I wanted it to be just me and occasionally dh who fed them, it just felt too special to miss.

I wasn't trying to quibble with point 1, I just don't understand it

could someone please explain?

Franny, I just take it to mean formula hasn't got all the good stuff breast milk has got in it.

Doesn't it??

Hi, sorry couldn't access the link so can't get involved in the conversation but I just wanted to share my thoughts regarding ffeeding not meeting the psychological/emotional needs of the baby.

I believe this can be got around by co-sleeping and mimicking bfeeding when ffeeding as lulumama and hazeyjane have said.

I really believe co-sleeping has been the single most important parenting decision we have made (as the decision not to bfeed was taken by ds!) and that this should be suggested to women who can't bfeed as this really encourages the physical closeness you get with bfeeding.

ok, 'formula does not provide all the nutrition and vitamins baby needs for the first six months after birth'

please don't think I am saying that formula and breastmilk are the same, or that bm is not better than formula

but what 'nutrition and vitamins' does formula lack, that babies need? To me that is saying that babies who have formula, are going to be undernourished, or even malnourished? Can someone explain in more detail, please?

Off the top of my head, no antibodies (which support immunity), no lactoferrin (which allows absorption of iron), several vitamins (some are artificially added to formula), 'wrong' sugars (bovine lactose, not human....in fact bovine protein and bovine everything else), and there are more 'missing ingredients' in the textbooks and it's too late for me to consult them!

Thank you tiktok - I guess it is partly terminology - "needs" is open to different interpretation? I mean the ff babies obviously get what they need to support life, but there are many substances found in bm which a baby should IDEALLY have, which are not in formula? I must admit I took 'need' to mean something more urgent. Am I making sense?

Franny, you are making sense

I think one might say a baby 'needs' to be in optimal health, and not just, um, stay alive, though