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Infant feeding

Get advice and support with infant feeding from other users here.

Original poster

Annabel Karmel, not content with making weaning sound complicated, has turned her hand to breastfeeding

353 replies

hunkermunker · 19/05/2009 15:51

Words fail me

And yes, there are snippets in there that are true/useful - but HOW you dredge through the stuff that's unnecessary/nice to have but not essential - who knows?!

OP posts:
mrspooh · 22/05/2009 19:57

well i'm going to be brave and say i love AK!!!!!!!!!!!!
im about to start cooking her recipes to wean ds having followed her puree guides which have been fab. having lost a 6th of my blood following an emergency c-sec, i had to have iron tablets daily for a month and was advised to eat food to build up my iron supplies. following the link i read her recipes for breast feeding etc, lasagne one is to help boost iron stores, whats so wrong with that??? yes the infusion stuff looks a little mad but the citrus one is just a posh friut juice, buy a smoothie for something similar if you want. like all advice you can take it or leave it and you all have left it. nothing wrong with that at all. am somewhat surprised at how vicious the comments have been though, oh well.

AitchTwoOh · 22/05/2009 20:21

have you actually started weaning yet?

elkiedee · 22/05/2009 20:38

AK has put another interesting post on her forum, referring to CBC's expert advice as just one point of view.

www.annabelkarmel.com/community/breastfeeding-bottlefeeding/12680-so-has-anyone-else-looked-cbc-advi ce-ak-site-5.html

elkiedee · 22/05/2009 20:38

AK has put another interesting post on her forum, referring to CBC's expert advice as just one point of view.

www.annabelkarmel.com/community/breastfeeding-bottlefeeding/12680-so-has-anyone-else-looked-cbc-advi ce-ak-site-5.html

FairMidden · 22/05/2009 20:39

Following an email exchange with one of AK's lackeys, where I complained about the totally potty advice and suggested they get the section reviewed by one of the BFing organisations, the woman herself sent me this today:

Many thanks for your email and comments that you sent to Laura.

In tracking and monitoring feedback on our breastfeeding content, it is clear that there has been a wide mix of responses, some positive and expressing gratitude and others raising questions about certain aspects of the information provided or adding further points.

Our aim is to provide a wide resource for our members and breastfeeding advice is the start of an exciting new launch on our site ? The Expert Panel. We had initially hoped to be able to engage a panel of experts from different disciplines to provide as wide a range of views as possible but in the event time was against us and we decided that, in keeping with the timing of Breastfeeding Awareness week. We made a judgement to go ahead with Clare's content to mark this important week.

We value your feedback and acknowledge the need to cover as wide a range of views on each topic and will incorporate this in our future content planning. The content is currently being reviewed in the light of feedback, but just to ensure members are aware that Clare?s content is just one point of view - we are posting a note to this effect.

Have a fabulous bank holiday weekend

Best wishes

Annabel Karmel

I get the impression I may not have been the only one to complain to her website

FairMidden · 22/05/2009 20:42

You mean she didn't personally pen this little spiel, just for moi? [wails and wrings hands]

Not much of a come down but at least the woman has the grace to realise she's published nonsense on her website.

FairMidden · 22/05/2009 20:44

Also, the BFing section on her website is down now. Not sure of the significance of this.

fruitstick · 22/05/2009 20:51

I ate 6 hot cross buns yesterday, and have begun to drink full fat coke for the first time in my life.

These things make me so angry. I could rant on for days about the number of friends I have who say they couldn't breastfeed because they didn't have enough milk. This is based on various books saying babies should feed every 3 hours and settle to sleep on their own.

no they shouldn't!

blueshoes · 22/05/2009 21:58

I only clicked into one link.

UTTER TOSH - myths and facts about expressing

Maybe her next plan is to bring out a cookbook using breastmilk as an ingredient. Hence this unnatural obsession with expressing.

elkiedee · 22/05/2009 22:06

Well done FairMidden - the wording of her email to you has also been posted on the thread I was referring to.

DitaVonCheese · 22/05/2009 22:21

"Tracking and monitoring feedback" = furiously self-Googling

chipmonkey · 22/05/2009 22:44

I have a recipe using breastmilk!
I used to make Breastmilk rice pudding with Strawberry puree for ds3 as he wouldn't drink from a bottle and I was expressing in work and I was damned if I wasn't going to get him to take it one way or another!

littleladybug · 22/05/2009 23:39

Have you seen the edited advice? I posted it on the AK thread. Still pish, but a little better. If that area is down it means it is being reviewed or edited. Thank fcuk for that...

Original poster
hunkermunker · 23/05/2009 00:17

LOL at this thread making the round-up - and GOOD that AK's been doing a bit of vanity googling

OP posts:
elkiedee · 23/05/2009 08:45

Well done Ladybug for pointing out the shortcomings of the advice on AK's own site forum. That probably makes a lot more difference to people who find AK's site a comfy place to hang out than us bitching here.

foxytocin · 23/05/2009 08:55

i was given a hand me down and a new AK weaning book when dd1 was born.

this was a child that at no solids till she was 13 months old. I

is it norty to admit that i was quietly pleased by the turn of events on one hand because AK made weaning sound like hard work!

DD2 currently doing BLW and I just hand her bit of stuff off my plate, well what she doesn't rob, and I only worry about whether the stain will come out in the wash.

PinkTulips · 23/05/2009 11:42

foxy... they don't

i'm having to buy all clothes for ds2 new from 6-9 months upwards as there isn't a single item that survived ds1's blw antics!

although i was dabbling in eco friendly detergents at the time which probably didn't help.... nuking the lot with ariel this time round

tiktok · 24/05/2009 17:55

It's good that AK appears to have listened and agreed to check the info over - she will not want her reputation affected by poor advice.

It makes me uncomfortable to see poor information represented as 'one person's opinion' though. There are some things which are unarguably correct about the way the body makes milk, and some things which are incorrect. You have to understand the biology of it all first before you can have an 'opinion' on anything, and the biology of breastfeeding is that the pump is not a good tool to assess breastfeeding effectiveness. A baby who is not feeding very well may remove less than the pump; a baby who is feeding well may remove more. In any case, babies may remove more, or less, milk at any one time, according to appetite. It just doesn't make sense to judge someone's breastfeeding with the use of a pump

I've said before on mumsnet that CBC probably does help some women breastfeed, and that some women may welcome an approach that tells them to use formula when bf is not going well, rather than a counselling approach which is less directive.

But whatever her approach, the very basic facts need to be correct, and in the original text anyway, they just weren't.

chipmonkey · 24/05/2009 22:05

I am glad that she has changed things on the site

TBH, I know a lot of people on MN don't like AK and prefer BLW but I do think she has helped people in general to see that baby food jars are not the best or only way to feed a baby. And some of her family oriented recipes are really very good and ds3 DID prefer his canneloni when it had heads and feet and looked like seven little people in bed and it took 5 minutes more to do, that's all!

But fgs why make bfing complicated? Mammals have managed to bf for millions of years without resorting to "infusions"

DitaVonCheese · 24/05/2009 23:07

Oh god the BLW stains - I'm washing at 60 degrees for the first time in my life and she's still filthy (but at least I know she's only going to wear anything until the next meal and then we change again)!

chipmonkey · 24/05/2009 23:15

Line-drying in the sun is great for stains.

AitchTwoOh · 25/05/2009 10:59

i agree chip, moving away from a reliance on jars can only be a good thing.

PinkTulips · 25/05/2009 15:01

lol... ds1 blw in the midst of winter... an irish winter at that so the sun was nowhere to be seen.

ds2 will be starting blw in sept so i'm hoping we have a bit of an indian summer and i can dump him half naked out in the garden to mess eat

i agree to a certain extent that moving away from jars being seen as a staple of child feeding is a good thing, however i feel AK has complicated things to the point of putting alot of people off making their own.... when i purree fed dd i purreed up our dinner alot of the time and fed it to her.... mothers of young babies have enugh on their plates without being made to feel they have to cook entire batches of food seperate from the family meals just for baby.
i think her methods often serve to intimidate those who aren't great cooks or who don't have alot of time into thinking 'proper' food for babies is complicated and difficult when i fact either by blw or by purreeing the family meal it can be remarkably simple to include a baby in the family's eating habits

chipmonkey · 25/05/2009 15:36

I do have some friends though, who never so much as boiled an egg in their lives before they had children, lived on eating out, takeaways or freezer food and AK was the first cookbook they had ever bought! I think it can be good for people who want to do better by their children than they have done for themselves. Not so much for people who were food purists to start with.

Debs75 · 25/05/2009 15:48

Not read all the thread but she is trying to make money from the one thing that is totally free. Breastfeeding doesn't require anything that you have to specifically buy so is a marketers/producers nightmare. How can they have millions of babies every year not drinking their products Cow and Gate must be loving it when they hear some misguided mw or hv has put a bf off so the mum is turning to ff.
AK is just trying to make money where there is really no way to. It is the same reason she doesn't like blw because it is relatively free and simple, no stocking up on her latest organic baby foods or buying a cookbook when you already know what you are doing