why do tesco not give you clubcard points when buying sma formula

[pud1]

i have noticed that formula is not eligable for club card points. is this to incourage breastfeeding. i have emailed them to ask but have no reply.

Using one's own experience, with numbers of one, two or three kids over a couple of years, to contrast with research which uses 1000s and 1000s of kids over a long time is naive (to put it kindly), and I will be sarcastic at times in drawing attention to the naivety.

No one says that bf your kids means they will never be ill. Naive, again, to set this up as something to disagree with. Did you think I was saying this, when I said (clearly, I thought) that the rate of illness among ff babies was higher?

I think I am gonna have to spell it out. The rate of illness among ff babies being higher does not mean any individual ff baby will get more illness. It means you can see, on a larger 'canvas' with 1000s of kids (like the UK Millennium Cohort study, which tracked 15,000 kids), that there are more incidences of illness in the ff children (this is a good study as it takes into account social and economic factors to rule them out in the number-crunching).

TPHW, you say: "personally i think that research is questionable.. some kids get sick some dont... you cant stand there and say that a kid is sick or not sick simply because one was BF and one Wasnt."

No one is saying this. You are trying to demolish arguments no one has put.

"personally i think that research is questionable.. some kids get sick some dont... you cant stand there and say that a kid is sick or not sick simply because one was BF and one Wasnt."

Surely all adults need to be aware that human health and immunity is very complex, and as an individual you can almost never perceive a clear cause and effect relationship between lifestyle behaviours and health outcomes? This is true of almost everything which we know to be harmful: failure to exercise, eating diets deficient in fruit and vegetables, smoking, drinking in pregnancy etc. That's why we need medical research to flag up the damage they cause! I'm amazed that so many adult women apply this reasoning to breastfeeding when it wouldn't occur to them to judge the value of other things behaviours in this way.

"Sure, we KNOW that bf improves a babies immune system, but it doesn't make it fool proof, its not a fail safe... its not the cure to all ills... just like FF doesnt mean a child can't be 100% healthy just because they were never BF'd."

Breastfeeding doesn't 'improve' a baby's immune system. Artificial feeding deprives a baby of the immunological protection that physiologically normal feeding confers.

Not even the most ardent advocate of bf argues that it's a 'cure to all ills'so arguments about bf not being a 'golden bullet' are irrelevant. Where is the value in challenging an opinion that we all hold to be false anyway?

"Every child is an individual, as is their immune system and how its built up by the environment they live in"

Yes - very true. And as breastmilk adapts according to the immunological challenges the individual child faces it helps to protect that child from illness. Children who are not breastfed have one less tool in their health armoury.

Tiktok and chillibang bang - thanks for explaining it so well!

Pud1 - have Tsco responded to your e-mail yet?

Tink has chronic brittle asthma, her last attack took 3 days of almost constant nebulising to bring her out of it, we thought we would lose her when her heart rate went over 200, no one saying till later that we were expecting her to have a heart attack.

She is still breastfed at 2 1/2.

If I don't breastfeed Fifi and she never has asthma (Tink had had her first attack by now) I could use them as examples of how the numbers are wrong.

I wouldn't be taking into consideration though that Tink was born at 31 weeks without steroids and Fifi at 35 weeks having had steroids at 24 weeks. I wouldn't be looking at the fact that Tink has been intubated and Fifi didn't need to be. I wouldn't be looking at the severe scarring to Tink's lungs from intubation and infection.

A simple example but the point is that there is more to it than how they were fed. I've been told many times that had Tink not been breastfed she would have been put on an NG or drip because she wouldn't have been able to have formula and when she was older and too sick to eat but would breastfeed instead. I've been told she would have been a lot sicker if she hadn't been breastfed. I wonder what could have been worse without losing her and I have to stop thinking, I don't think she would have not had a heart attack, I can't say for sure we would still have her if things had been worse than they are.