Still being subjected to the cow and gate ad.

[LookingForwardToSummer]

Grrrrr. It's so annoying! Is there nothing we can do?

Again, I think one of the reasons neither side will see the other's viewpoint is that the thread starter & co genuinely believe that the ads stop women breastfeeding, and the people arguing genuinely believe that the ads are not the reason women start breastfeeding, but control the brand the consumers choose, among other brands - and believe that breastfeeding is undermined overwhelmingly by other means.

For that reason, I think it's misleading to sarcastically say 'the stupid advertisers are throwing their money away, of course', when the people who don't mind the ads aren't saying that the ads aren't selling to anyone. Those people are saying the ads are selling to formula users. And that formula users exist for reasons separate from the ads.

"not the reason women start breastfeeding"

STOP, I mean, sorry.

I see Sabire - you read widely 'around this subject'

You are a pseudo expert - I rest my case. End of.

Sorry - I've never said I'm an 'expert' in anything. It's YOU who've used that word. I haven't described myself as such. And how does saying that you 'read widely' around a subject automatically qualify you as an 'pseudo expert'?

By the way, saying things like 'I rest my case' and 'end of'..... it makes you sound really childish. I suspect it's your way of trying to bring the 'conversation' to an abrupt end because you've been caught out bullshitting and put on the spot.

You've made some emphatic statements about the quality and usefulness of the research into this issue and I asked you to back up what you said with reference to the facts. Why don't you do that?

hf, if you're drawing a distinction between 'findings' and 'definite science' you really do, I'm afraid, have very little grip of how science works. No scientist would ever make a case for 'definite science' and you are showing your ignorance by making such a statement.

As you say, there is no such thing. But what that means is the best research there is must be a proxy for 'definite', because it is as definitive as we can be. And it is assessing the standards of the best research there is that scientists and lay people alike can do equally well, if they know how.

"Again, I think one of the reasons neither side will see the other's viewpoint is that the thread starter & co genuinely believe that the ads stop women breastfeeding, and the people arguing genuinely believe that the ads are not the reason women start breastfeeding, but control the brand the consumers choose, among other brands - and believe that breastfeeding is undermined overwhelmingly by other means"

There is not one person on this thread who has argued against the current formula marketing campaigns who would not also agree that reasons for breastfeeding failure and the choice to artificially feed are incredibly complex and multifaceted. No one has said women choose to ff ONLY because of marketing campaigns by formula companies. What they have been saying is that they affect the climate of opinion around this subject and distort women's understanding of the health issues, and in that way contribute to fewer babies being breastfed. People on this thread who are arguing FOR the status quo (ie the continuation of aggressive formula marketing) as far as I can see have completely ignored this - they have oversimplified the issues in an attempt to make their point.

Gosh doesn't this subject always result in really long threads?
I don't have time to read it all so sorry if I am repeating but I have a couple of genuine questions that I would like the answer to.
When it is stated that being breastfed increases IQ how do they know? How would they have known what that particular individual's IQ would have been if they had been formula fed? How do they know that other factors haven't influenced IQ?
Same with childhood illnesses. How can you 100% know that an individual person's health would have been any different if they had been fed differently?
I had always been sure I would bf my dcs but because my ds1 was born with a disability and I suffered pnd, I switched from expressed bm to formula after 3/4 weeks. When it came to choosing which formula he was fed I just continued with the brand given in scbu. I can't ever remember making a concious choice on brand. I don't recollect seeing any advertising for follow on milks that would have influenced me. I suppose the choice was made for me by the scbu nurses who supplemented my dwindling bm supply with formula. (Please now don't anyone start saying I should have perservered and my milk supply would have returned. I was in no state to continue...My pnd was so severe I was on the point of being sectioned and wanted to give up my ds for adoption)

Of course advertising on its own, let alone one single advert, is highly unlikely to sway anyone to do something or not do something.

But marketing, of which advertising is a part, creates a relationship between the consumer and the potential consumer, which the marketeer/producer of the goods and services hopes will at some point translate into increased sales.

Many consumer products' advertising is actually selling itself as a representative for a whole category of consumer goods and services, as well as selling itself as a brand (or a range).

So every car ad you see is selling 'owning a car' as well as Renault, Ford, whatever. The actual differences between cars are nothing like as great as their similarities. No car ad distinguishes itself from the competition with comparisons between transmission speeds, or even miles per gallon/litre. They create a 'feel' around the product to try to reach their target market which is certainly not solely car owners but also potential car owners including people who may be nowhere near having the money to have their own car. Most car ads make motoring with any car look fun, aspirational, comfortable, luxurious, liberating, fashionable. There will be some people who are very anti-car for some reason, who know they will never use one for whatever reason (fear of driving, a green conscience, serious disability such as blindness which rules them out, and other reasons I can't yet think of)and it's reasonable to assume the ads will not 'touch' them. Just about everyone else will be affected in some way, and the idea of car ownership becomes normalised with this heavy amount of marketing (as well as other social and economic factors playing a role, naturally enough).

It's the same with the marketing of formula milk.

Many people think a serious public health issue like the way babies are fed deserves some central control, in order to protect breastfeeding from unscrupulous marketing, and to protect formula fed babies (or their parents) from being under-informed or in some cases actively misled.

If people really don't think infant health matters, if they don't think it matters how babies are fed, if they don't think all babies deserve to have dietary decisions made on their behalf free of commercial influence, if they don't care that large amounts of public money go into treating the increase in morbidity among ff babies, if they think it doesn't matter that ads about infant feeding mislead and misinform, then of course they will look at giggly babies and think 'ahhhhhh!'

Head too fuzzy to think of more supporting arguments, sorry.

Tiktok - could you pop over to my mastitis thread pls?

kiddiz: "When it is stated that being breastfed increases IQ how do they know? How would they have known what that particular individual's IQ would have been if they had been formula fed? How do they know that other factors haven't influenced IQ?"

They don't know in terms of any one single individual's experience. This goes for many conditions. It's epidemiology - the study of patterns of illness - that's used here. The research takes a whole bunch of people and matches their babies and tries to isolate the one different factor under discussion in this case infant feeding. They isolate it by 'controlling' for aspects such as socio-economic status which we know can influence IQ. In simple terms, you might take 100 sets of parents each with identical educational background and performance and each with identical economic status. 50 of them have breastfed their babies, and 50 of them have not. You then compare the IQ of these babies, and number-crunching lets you work out the average difference, if there is one, knowing that the difference can only be accounted for by the feeding method. But you cannot isolate this to one single individual and say 'this baby is x points more intelligent than that baby' because there may be many aspects of the baby's upbringing that you have not accounted for. All you can show is the bigger picture, not how every individual fits into it.

"Same with childhood illnesses. How can you 100% know that an individual person's health would have been any different if they had been fed differently?"

This is a bit easier, as illness can be measured more effectively, especially if you express it as 'admission to hospital' which is easily tracked. Babies who are formula fed are much more likely to be admitted to hospital in the first year of life than breastfed babies. If you're interested in the figures there are recent papers on this. But take my word for it for the moment! Specifically, the illnesses in one recent paper were chest infections, ear infections and gastro-enteritis (IIRC). Because our primary care is quite good in the UK, and because babies are usually only admitted to hospital when they are pretty poorly, we are definitely talking about sick babies, and not babies with a slight fever or sniffle, and we are also getting a medical diagnosis, which helps make the figures trustworthy.

These figures are also controlled for socio-economic factors, which lessens the possibility that what you are measuring is not feeding method, but poverty or bad housing.

Even so, you cannot point to one individual sick baby and say 'if he had not been formula fed, he would not be here in hospital'. You can only assess the overall picture, and know that his risk of being in hospital increased because he was formula fed.

In your own case, serious pnd was clearly a major factor in what happened with your feeding, and no one is going to say anything about what you ought to have done/could have done.....dear me! The SCBU will have been marketed to, as well - and their choice of formula on your baby's behalf will have been influenced not solely by how they assessed your baby's health needs but on what they had seen in ads and on what sales people had told them.

Hope this clarifies what the issues are

smallwhitecat - good example of the bank account. Every ad for Halifax, HSBC whatever is also an ad for 'having a bank account'.

The banks would like more people to have a bank account; they are not only competing with each other, but competing with under the mattress, the old toffee tin and the big brown envelope...or wherever else people might keep their money

Clearly, formula manufacturers would like more people to use formula. Breastfeeding is the equivalent of the old toffee tin

kiddiz, your story of your baby is very touching and no one on this thread would tell you that you should have persevered, blah, blah. These things happen as as has already been said, there are a multitude of reasons why people formula feed so no one can pre-suppose the position anyone was in when they made the decision to drop breastfeeding.

to address some of your enquiries: Formula manufacturers advertise heavily in to health professionals in journals so many midwives, hv's, doctors and scbu nurses have grown to believe that one formula is 'better' than others and when a professional 'chooses' a formula for your baby it endorses that brand to the parent. Most parents, my self included, will naturally go away thinking that this person knows more about looking after poorly babies than I do, so she must have made the best choice for me. This is one reason why there is a constant voice to stop the advertising of formula to health professionals. Instead, health profs should be recieving unbiased information from independent sources with regard to the ingredients and their function.

Likewise, parents should also be receiving unbiased information rather than advertising.

By the time i post, someone may have responded anyway but:

We do not know how exactly the individual person's IQ would differ if they were bf or ff, or how many gastric or respiratory illnesses or teh severity or duration of those illness would be depending on ff or bf.

What we can analyse is things like hospital admissions for babies with these illnesses, the number of visits to the doctors or A&E, the number and type of prescriptions written and the diagnoses for these illnesses.

By the sheer number and quality of the surveys in many countries, developed and underdeveloped, it has been shown that ff babies are ill more often, are ill for longer periods of times, have more hospitalisations for these illnesses, etc.

I have have a friend who bf her son for 11 months. He has had numerous ear infections since he was 6 mo old. My dd, also bf had her first ear infection when she was 3 yrs old. So when people give their individual anecdotes saying, oh, my baby was ff and has never been ill, really isn't here or there. It is by sheer weight of numbers of a population of say 10,000 babies, that we get a clearer picture of what happens when we formula feed, mix feed or breast feed. This is why many times feeding choices is talked about as a public health issue, which like all public health issues, touch everyone either directly or indirectly.

tiktok on Mon 07-Jul-08 09:52:14 excellent post.

Thank you for taking the time to put these things into a simple easily understood format.

Same goes for your post
By tiktok on Mon 07-Jul-08 10:10:26

Thank you tiktok. Personally I believe there formula milk should be produced in generic way and on a non profit basis but I suppose I'm living in la-la land!!!!

Sorry kiskidee x posts thank you to you too

"When it is stated that being breastfed increases IQ how do they know? How would they have known what that particular individual's IQ would have been if they had been formula fed? How do they know that other factors haven't influenced IQ?"

They have arrived at this conclusion by doing studies comparing performance in IQ tests between fairly large groups of children ff as babies and children bf as babies. They 'control' for other factors that might affect IQ such as the social class and educational level of the parents - ie they take these things into account when looking at the results. This is really important when looking at IQ because in the west middle class and educated women are more likely to breastfeed, and actually even within educational and social bandings, women with higher IQ's are more likely to choose to breastfeed.

"Same with childhood illnesses. How can you 100% know that an individual person's health would have been any different if they had been fed differently?"

You can't know, not in relation to breastfeeding or anything else. Health research doesn't work in those sorts of certainties. For example, we know that drinking alcohol every day is linked to higher rates of breast cancer, but we can never say that a particular case of breast cancer could definitely have beem 'caused' by a woman's drinking habits, as there are many and complex factors involved in the development of disease. That's why we need epidemiological research.

"Please now don't anyone start saying I should have perservered and my milk supply would have returned. I was in no state to continue...My pnd was so severe I was on the point of being sectioned and wanted to give up my ds for adoption"

I don't think anyone would say this to you. Breastfeeding is hard enough for many new mums coming through our hospitals, even who don't have any complicating factors.

But I do wonder about the sort of care and support you got during that time in your life when you were under such severe strain - not just with breastfeeding, but as a new mum with a poorly baby. I have heard SO many complaints from local mums who've had babies in SCBU who've had real barriers put in the way of their breastfeeding: just a lack of compassionate support, a lack of expertise, mums unnecessarily separated from their babies because of lack of hospital accomodation - all these things contributing to the stress they were experiencing and making breastfeeding unbearable for them in what was already a very, very difficult situation.

So many cross posts!

Thanks for your thanks, kiddiz and juuuuule

I would like to see formula milk produced to the very highest standards of quality and cleanliness possible, and marketed ethically. Information about it should be detailed and easily understood. Price should be low.

Perhaps there could be a 'national' milk (there used to be) that the DH commissioned.

Sabire.. I was able to stay in hospital with my ds but he wasn't in scbu for any great length of time. As for support...pretty non existant to be honest. Ds's condition is pretty rare and in hind sight I'm sure that none of the staff had ever come across it before. It infuriates me that they couldn't admit this so instead I felt that they were withholding stuff from me. I can remember having a full on melt down in the middle of the scbu and flatly refusing to let them stick any more needles in my ds or go any where near him until they told me what they were testing for and what was going on.
The staff on the post natal ward were unsupportive in the extreme. As soon as ds was admitted to scbu they moved me into a side room away from the other mums and left me! To the extent that they used to forget about me at mealtimes and I regularly didn't get anything to eat.
I was given no help with expressing milk and had to work out how the breast pump worked by myself. All this combined with pnd and hormones and emotions all over the place possibly meant I was doomed to fail.

tiktok - i like your idea of a national milk - can't see the current Govt or anyone in our market-controlled economy going for it though as they all seem to be heading for commercial competition in EVERYTHING. We need a sea change of attitude in so many things before this is likely to become a reality.

I can't imagine how horrible it must have been for you kiddiz.

Sorry you were treated with such unkindness and neglect. You should have been better looked after - much better.

Gosh. I am really suprised that some people are annoyed by other people being annoyed by an ethically dodgy ad! Saying 'switch over' misses the point. Everyone has to have different interests in the world to keep things moving forward. Some people want to reduce carbon emissions, some people want to recycle, some people want to campaign against child poverty and some people want to help more women to bf. What's the problem with that??

Before I had dd i assumed I would have a go at bf and give up after a while - that's what everyone else I know has done and that's what's 'normal', and the hv assumed that too. but the more I read and learnt about the differences betweeb bf and ff (thanks to mn and heroes like hunker and tiktok) the more I realised that I really wanted to carry on. And luckily for me I have been able to. So now I just want bf to seem normal - and cgi laughing babies just don't help. If you need formula there's an aisle of it in the supermarket and everyone knows it exists!!

From my own dull middle class experience I've had to work pretty hard on my family to get them to see bf as not weird. my mother saying 'just give her a bottle' sooooo many times. My father having to leave the room every time I feed dd. Actually he's stopped now after I asked him why he didn't have a problem looking at topless women but couldn't look at me when there was nothing showing. MIL is coming to stay next week she says that after having dh a doctor told her it wasn't worth trying to bf as formula is just as good. She tells me this in a voice as if she thinks I am really silly / naive for bf. If she sees the cgi laughing babies....

So in summary I reckon that many things need to change to help more women bf (are we all agreed that that is a reasonable aim?)

*better support from hcps
*a massive change in culture so boobs are not seen as purely sexual
*parents and ILs to be more supportive
*ban on formula ads
*loads of 'normalising' - pics of celebs feeding, women feeding in public, good tv ads etc
*my best friend not to 'mooo' at me when i'm feeding dd.

That's long and I really don't see what is wrong with having these thoughts and wishes.

and all I can really do is complain to ASA about the adverts, feed in public and get p**d off with my family!

Oh, I got sidetracked. What I also meant to say was that formula should be much more stringently regulated and tested - to the standards of a drug so that if we are using it we know that is of the highest possible standard. The ingredients should be clearly visible and I like the idea of independent reviews being avaliable. If I had to buy some I'd be absolutely at sea and wouldn't know how to make a choice.

Going back to a post earlier:

Is FF convenient?

1. Bottles and teats
2. Supply of washing up liquid, water and a bottle/teat cleaner
3. A Steriliser
4. A fridge
5. Good hygiene
6. Formula
7. A kettle/hob/bottle warmer

If you b/feed and choose to express (as I did when I went back to work) then it is the same effort, just substitue 6 with "expressing milk" and number 7 with "storage for milk whilst at work"