Were you formula fed as a baby?

[Janni]

Do you believe you would be healthier or more intelligent had you been breastfed?

Do you believe you were disadvantaged in any other way by being formula fed?

I was not breastfed.

I breastfed my own children for 20 months.

I realise though that I do not feel in any way disadvantaged for not having been breastfed myself.

I just wondered how others felt.

Potpourri, Sabire does not Just refer to smoking.

Sabire: ""correlation between a baby's health and BF is not as evident as one might be lead to believe."

No - exactly.

Oddly enough the health benefits or risks of a lot of behaviours and lifestyle choices are not 'evident' to the individual.

Which is how for years formula manufacturers got away with telling women that formula was as good or better than breastmilk for babies.

And why for years women were told smoking during pregnancy wasn't a problem

And why putting babies to sleep on their fronts was recommended to mothers as a way of helping babies sleep more deeply

And why cigarette companies were able to sell their products as not just harmless to health but positively beneficial

And why eating liver was recommended to women in pregancy as a way of boosting their iron levels

And why mothers were told that feeding their babies on homemade formula consisting of watered down condensed or evaporated milk wouldn't do them any harm at all

Sigh........ If the harm done by any of these practices had been obvious to the individual people wouldn't have carried on doing them for decades, until scientific research showed them to be risky.

This thread is a fascinating demonstration of 'flat earth' mentality."

You chose to focus on smoking so that you could tar her with emotional irrational brush. Not that I think Sabire was out of order on smoking in any case.

tiktok, you are also correct that animal milk was used when people couldn't get on with breastfeeding. I distinctly remember my gran talking about going every morning to get the milk from one certain cow for the baby. I never asked her at the time if it was boiled or anything. It is interesting to note that not all babies were breastfed for various reasons. And as with everyone these days, the main thing is that your baby doesn't starve and thrives - which can mean looking at other options.

I wonder if all the chemicals we are exposed to in our soap powders, vile air freshners, deodorants, carpets, furniture, cars etc have had a bigger effect on allergies etc than anything else.

Yes, bf is proven scientifically to have an impact on the allergies, ear infections etc etc. But there is so much more at play in raising a healthy, intelligent child. Nature nurture arguement

vlc I fear you are not taking this thread seriously enough

lol at dozy buggers

"And a quick question to those of you who mention how intelligent you and your children are.... are are not.....

Just wondering why do you mention it? What do you understand about the relevance of how you were fed as a baby to the issue of how intelligent you are as an adult?"

Er because it was the OP's question. "Do you believe you would be healthier or more intelligent had you been breastfed?"

I (like most other posters) answered that question. And if you note I said 'academic intelligence is over rated'. Stop calling us thick for answering a straw poll type question in a few lines without producing a thesis about breastfeeding.

My friend was fed on carnation as well CD.

yes, and all of my sisters were too!

I would like to think we are all on the healthy scale. (1 lot of excema) sp!!! But we certainly never grew horns or tails because of it!

All my children but 1 were ff. And they are all fine and dandy too!

My only bf baby whom i bf for a little over a year is the one with the problems. Aspergers, bowel probs, migraines.

They only difference i'd say is that bf child has never ever had a cold/ sore throat/ ear infections in his 9 years! Where as the others all have.

yes but vlc did they go to Girton??
those extra 6 points and they could have gone to a proper college

Yep PP I don't for one minute think I have eczema because I was ff. There are too many factors to isolate one or other as the cause.

Bf might have given me some protection though - I'll never know

Doggysayswoof, how very dare you!

One theory about allergies/autoimmune conditions (rocketing rates of both) is that it's related to gut permeability. Breast feeding will affect that (healthier gut flora so gut less likely to be permeable).

But there are other environmental factors that could have a huge effect. Antibiotics being one example (never could work out whether ds3 was better off having my breastmilk whilst I had iv antibs- he did btw- or whether he would have been better with formula given that avoiding a leaky gut was important to me - we didn't manage it - he has one). Other examples will be post weaning diet, perhaps some vaccinations, some naturally acquired infections, some toxins etc etc etc.

Breastfeeding is one part of that. Worth looking at it as part of a whole.

My mum didn't cope well with childbirth and passed out and needed blood transfusions both times. It was not considered an option for her to breastfeed, so both my brother and I were formula fed as babies. He has mental problems, I do not.

We were both weaned onto rusks mixed in with our night feeds by the midwives before we were discharged (at one wk for my brother and 2wks for me) from the hospital as my mum was told her sleep at night was very important. This was 1972 and 1976.

I'm generally quite healthy, but do suffer IBS and eczema, both could be attributed to be weaned so early.

One of them did, Harpsi.

The good-looking one.
The one with meaty Girton legs that can kick the cheeky derriere of any spoddy undernourished little Queens' girl any time you care to mention.

Countess, you're right, and it tells you in big letters too!

It will differ, slightly, from some of today's formulas, in respect of the protein. Because it's basically just very concentrated milk, with much of the water removed, the protein in it is close to ordinary milk.

It's not modified, unlike the protein in brands like SMA Gold and other so-called 'first milks'. 'Modified' milks like this are an attempt to make formula 'closer' to breastmilk, but there has never been any research to show they are better/healthier in real terms than less-modified milks (SMA White, and the so-called 'hungry' baby milks). These 'hungry' milks are considered to be nutritionally-adequate for babies from birth, in any case, and can be sold for this purpose.

Even so, the heat treatment of evaporated milk does break down the protein and make it more digestible for a baby.

You also need to add sugar and water to the evaporated milk and I suppose the 'home made' aspect of it all makes it less safe and predictable than ordinary formula (which of course you have to add water too, as well).

I am not sure what the heat treatment of evaporated milk does to the fat content , either, and maybe this makes another difference (though you'd have to convince me it made a big one...).

I am not a nutritionist - all this stuff I pick up from reading and talking to people about it, 'cos I am interested!

Ahh, more bollocks. Ill health in childhood can be attributed to many things: genetics (ie a predisposition to allergies of some sort or other), exposure to infection, smoking in pregnancy or parenthood (BTW whenever there's a rant about smoking in PG it's always the women who get blamed when living with a DP/H who smokes isn;t great either, yet men are never blamed for not modifying their behaviour around their PG partners or their infants). Until someone can actually get the medical ethics people to licencse research along the lines of: take a pair of new born twins, BF one and FF the other and monitor them for 40 years, you will never be able to demonstrate conclusivley that a clutch of minor health problems in adulthood (that could also have something to do with, ooh, I dunno, recreational drug use in the teens, comfort eating due to being bullied at school, growing up near an incinerator or chemical plant...) are wholly down to Selfish Bitch Mothers.
So why not give women a break and stop worrying about why something happened. Because you will never actually know.

I think - just thinking here - that the connection to higher intelligence might be linked to the fact that if a child is breastfed, the parents are more likely to put more effort into other things too, such as education - identifying the child?s strengths and actively developing these strengths over a long period, rather that it all being the cause of a nutritional boost.

That is not saying that if you formula fed you don't care about your child as much, before anyone thinks it is. These things are measured on a scale of averages so there is enough room for people to buck the trend and not be represented in the stats.

Breast feeding is still predominantly a middle class thing - mostly because working class mothers need to get back to work for one huge reason, not because they don;t love their kids as much as the bourgeoisie

Intellegence can be improved too. I am defo cleverer now than I was!

madamez, there are other ways of being scientific other than twin studies, though?

I think the study supposedly took into account socio-economic factors MT. Although I don't know how, and when you're talking about something artificial such as IQ it's all a bit daft and probably open to criticism by statisticians anyway.

Good post blueshoes.

The "babies on their fronts" one is a good case in point.

Because back when I was a baby, I was put to sleep on my front, and I'm alive. But that doesn't lessen the risks, or make them any less real.

However, the attitude of some posters on here would be the equivalent of saying, "I was put to sleep on my front, and I'm fine, I know lots of other people who were put to sleep on their front as babies and they're fine, in fact, I know some people who were put to sleep on their back as babies and weren't fine. Therefore everything you're saying about the risks is wrong - and you're a member of the Back To Sleep mafia".

I do think it's interesting to hear of how people feel their mothers' feeding choices when they were a baby affected or did not affect them in later life.

But that's it. It's nothing more than "interesting". It doesn't prove anything.

However, as for guilt - see my post Wed 02-Apr-08 11:30:56 for why no one is trying to make anyone feel guilty.

well said RTP.

But that's diiiiiifferent.

Except that it's not, of course. It's just that some ideas are more palatable than others.

I wouldn't say IQ is artificial but it isn't definitive - or immutable. You don;t get an IQ score that you can'[t improve for instance.

Do people feel that there is a correleation between front sleeping and SIDS? - Generally, yes.

Do people feel that there's a correlation between ff and SIDS? Generally no.

Yet the science is there for both.

(and no twin studies were used in either)

There are other factors though that contribute to cot death aren't there- smoking and temperature for example, and breastfeeding/dummy as well. So it's not completely clear either.

I don't think anyone's saying breastfeeding is bad or makes no difference to just that other factors play a role as well.

This was just a straw poll, not presented as a scientific fact!

at vlc, harpsi and tiktok

yurt, that is quite right.

"However comparing smoking while pregnant to formula feeding is not what I would call non-emotional"

Agree that it's not non-emotional.

But it is a valid analogy.

The vast majority of babies born to smokers do not go on to develop health problems, and if they do it's usually impossible at an individual level to firmly connect these with their prenatal tobacco exposure.

That's why the connection between prenatal smoking and illhealth and developmental problems wasn't identified until the scientific research was done.

The vast majority of babies fed on formula are healthy. If they do develop health problems it's impossible at an individual level to connect these with their nutrition as infants.

That's why the connection between formula feeding and higher rates of ill health in babies at a population level wasn't firmly identified until the mid to late 1990's when most of the high quality, large scale research was done.

I'm sorry but I just think we need to be really cautious in relying too heavily on anecdotal evidence to guide us when it comes to the things that affect the long and short term health of our children, and the examples I give of smoking, prone sleeping etc give proof to that.

Yes, anecdotal evidence has an important place when it comes to the way we make decisions that might affect our children's health in the long or short term - but so does the medical evidence. You need BOTH. As far as I can see from the way this issue has been discussed on this thread and elsewhere on the internet, the majority of people seem to have very little awareness of what the medical research actually says on this subject.

I'm not pointing the finger at anyone for not knowing about the research - I didn't know anything about it when I had my first and still wouldn't if I hadn't got professionally involved in this area. But it does make me think that the government needs to think about the quality of the information on infant feeding that pregnant women are given by their care-givers, and the way it's presented to them. It's also made me think about the lack of research literacy among even well-educated adults as a whole, which is something that makes it impossible or very difficult for well-meaning parents to really make sense of the information that's out there.