who *isn't* ashamed to admit using formula?

[LookingForwardToSummer]

feeling crap after reading the 'exclusive breastfeeding' thread! i find bf really hard and have set myself the target of 5 months, i intend to feel very proud that i went that long and then use formula happily! i can't be the only one! all the stats show low bf rates - so where is everyone?

riven, 'foreign' protein is a technical term, just means not of the human species. Young babies are , unsurprisingly, 'designed' to digest human milk best.

Cows milk protein, unchanged, can be harmful to young babies. Even in the days before formula, no one would give a new baby cows milk straight off - it would be diluted and then boiled, and then have sugar added to it. All these processes affected the protein content and made it less indigestible.

Formula milk is based (as we know) on cows milk. Soya formula has no cows milk protein in it, but it still has 'foreign' protein, because, again, the protein is not human.

By the time a baby gets beyond infancy, his digestion has matured and most are able to drink cows milk straight without a problem.

Tiktok I am still crap and can't do links thats why I haven't, however, I also put it badly, there have been studies on the effects of PND on infants and the failure to bond. If someone is so miserable that it is causing severe PND then they may fail to have a close bond with the baby. The exact opposite of what is meant to happen with breast feeding i.e. bring a mother and baby closer. I obviously do not intend to hurt anyone who doesn't enjoy breast feeding as I am one of those. However, there is a huge difference between not liking it and getting so stressed and upset about it that you resent your own baby.

And just to cheer some of you up even more.DS2 had soya,then hydrolysed ff.

"By TheHedgeWitch on Fri 02-May-08 09:34:23
2002 Harpsichord? Isn't there anything more recent than studies done 6 years ago?

As its been pointed out, Formula has changed these days.

Riven, please, please dont let yourself worry, if Formula was that bad we wouldn't be allowed to give it to our children at all, it would have been banned.

THere are risks involved with everything, posting stuff like that up is just scaremongering."

you really weren't implying that it was better? really? and why don't you give the insults a rest, eh?

tori, you just copy the bar at the top of the page you want to show people and then put two square brackets round it. it will then look like this and be a working link, hopefully. (i've not done a link, so don't bother pressing it.)

Thanks, I will try! need to pick dd1 up from creche but will be back later.

if you can do a you can do a link, it's just one more square bracket on each side.

the whole post implies it, hedgewitch, you know it does. what's the point of it otherwise?

and lol at 'resorted to swearing'.

Tori, thanks for getting back to me. It's something that's close to my heart - I don't want anyone thinking they are damaging their baby psychologically with no reason!

"there have been studies on the effects of PND on infants and the failure to bond. If someone is so miserable that it is causing severe PND then they may fail to have a close bond with the baby. The exact opposite of what is meant to happen with breast feeding i.e. bring a mother and baby closer."

As I said to you, I know that the mother's psychological state affects her baby. That's a really serious thing, and can have long-term effects.

But it's difficult to quantify - I have supported many women who have not enjoyed breastfeeding, and are being made utterly miserable by it - but they do not want to stop! It may even be a factor in their PND, but stopping bf may make their PND even worse. It's a question of individuals working out what is best for them - they do not have to feel that hating breastfeeding and resenting their babies will damage their babies, as we have no evidence for that at all. Mothers can love and resent their babies at the same time, or resent them and still feel a huge sense of responsibility for them.

In some cases, the decision to stop bf for the sake of mental health could be the right one, but we can't make any generalisations...and that's what I was calling you on, especially as you implied it was a fact that resentment of bf causes PND, and there really isn't any research on this (as far as I know).

You have to be careful when you post here, sorry - don't say something as fact with no evidence to back it up

oh, and this too... which was my actual response to the OP, not that anyone is actually talking about the topic any more.

By AitchTwoCiao on Wed 30-Apr-08 12:23:44
"i'm not ashamed of having used formula, but i was, actually. but you get over it, when you give yourself a break and realise that you were just doing the best you could.

i'll fight like fuck for better support if there's a next time, and if that support doesn't help me then i'll give up without feeling guilty. it's when you're swimming around not knowing if you could have done things differently, that's what kills... "

then can you explain your post to me then hedgewitch? because i don't know why you would have rubbished harpsi's link as not being relevant because it was 6 years old had you not been implying that the changes had improved matters?

or is it your position that the risks of ff can be denied simply because the ingredients have changed and we have no recent research on them? that makes no sense.

and as for 'it would be banned', as tiktok and i have pointed out, some countries have banned some of the new ingredients precisely because of the lack of information.

but tiktok's dealt with this, the studies take a while, 6 years isn't out of date and the frilly little additives don't get round the intractable issue that cow's milk is for cows and has no live antibodies. the rest is frippery.

I was talking to myself, clearly, Aitch - no one listens or reads it (apart from you!)

I think THW is making the same point that I was trying to last night. Mine was really in reply to TrolleyDolly's assertion that BF gives a 7 point increase in IQ. She tried to increase the impact of this by saying that it was 'evidence-based research' which I think kind of bigs it up a bit and makes it sound even more intimidating to non-scientific readers.

When I read the articles online it became obvious that even the scientists drew attention to why the study was dated in terms of the composition of the formula.

I brought this up as a counterweight to the 'evidence-based research' comment, as I think that if you are using science to make a point, you really ought to use it properly.

Scientifically speaking, the evidence that ff babies are 7 IQ points behind bf babies can ONLY be said to apply if you are using the formula in the experiment.

That is my point, and I think that is what THW is saying too.

I was actually gobsmacked when Aitch said I'd said formula was better. I would not be surprised if thhere were data to say that babies on supplemented formula were 20 points behind bf babies in 10 years time. (I suspect not, but it wouldn't surprise me either - science, and biology in particular, is full of these unexpected results.)

Hope I've made myself clear this time in spite of my allegedly lower IQ .

it does look that way.

anyhoo, wrt the OP i did feel ashamed at the time and now don't and would urge anyone who does feel ashamed to redirect their perfectly valid feelings towards demanding better bfing support so that in future other women won't feel bad, because if still didn't work out with support then they'll be comforted by knowing that they did their best for their child. (i'll never know on that score, because i got support too late, but the next time it ain't happening that way, let me tell you).

to the op, as many others have said, id put money on it by the time you get to 5 months, you won't want to stop.

its good to set yourself targets, and i think 5 months is a fab one

well done, your doing a fab job, keep up the good work.

but the fact that some frilly new ingredients have been added doesn't change the risks of formula, which is what we were discussing. wrt the IQ thing, i find it a red herring (perhaps because i ff dd so i'm not particularly interested in that area), other than to say that it's a bit rich from a 140 IQ perspective to dismiss seven points as a whoop-de-doo when if you were 90 then it might make quite a difference indeed to your life chances.

That looks like an olive branch .

My second attempt at bf went better if that's any help, though I think the stress of it all was a factor in my PND second time around.

I still do feel let down by my BFCs first time around - not in the sense that they didn't support breastfeeding, but they rather over-supported it, even though with hindsight DD1 should have been supplemented much earlier. (Hence my concerns re slow growth and catch-up growth in infants.)

I think an average of 7 points is probably an average: it's probably a percentage rather than a flat 7 taken from all of them. If indeed it is taken from all of them. I'd be interested in seeing how controlling is done in this kind of experiment - to me, the only useful way of measuring would be taking ff and bf children from the same family and comparing them, and adjusting even within that, for whether they were first, middle or last children. It's obviously the scariest statistic of all, so it is a constant cause of concern for me (I ff) and I really would like to hear more from families who fed different children different ways about the differences between their children.