What are you good people at MN doing getting involved in a tie in with *Aptamil*???????

[moondog]

Wonder how many feel as disappointed as me????

I've often wondered this,Caligula. Never really found out,just heard loads of vague references to those great Scandinavians.

I guess it comes down to making bf a priority for healthcare spending.

I found this abstract which summarises the issues that one Swedish study found were significant - mainly adequate training for professionals and proper postnatal follow-up.

Thanks for that CM.

The Scandinavians are much better at investing money in families- 2 years paid maternity leave for example....

Feffi - your midwife has been influenced by advertising She actually is not allowed to tell you Aptamil is closer to breast milk because that just isn't true. Standard formulas are basically the same with minor differences incomposition. Some babies are better on different formulas. The actual nutritional content has to match in them all.

Exactly,feffi!
It's crushing to realise that people you trusted (in an official capacity) didn't really have a clue.

Well, being a great Scandinavian I'd say that Scandinavians are highly educated and I think education is part of this. I also think we are much more relaxed about our bodies and noone bats an eyelid if you bf in public. And of course it is just a much more family oriented society. On the minus side I would say it is very difficult indeed if you want to bottle feed. I have friends who are ashamed to have given up bf at 6 months whilst in the UK that would be considered fantastic.

FM..do people feel bullied into b/feeding d'you reckon?

Not sure about bullied, but I do have a friend in Sweden who couldn't bf due to being on anti-depressants and I know she had a really hard time.
A funny story from Sweden. One of my friend's DH's was shopping in Stockholm with his baby when baby suddenly became hungry. He obviously could not feed baby, so approached a woman with a small baby sitting outside a restaurant and asked her to feed his baby. She did. I can just see the headlines if that happened in the UK (not that it is the norm in Sweden either).

FM...that's lovely!
A b/feeding friend of mine did the same with a (bottle fed) baby when their plane was delayed and the other mother had run out of formula.

Blimey they'd probably both get arrested in the UK and the child would be taken into care.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF about 1.5 million babies die every year because they were not breastfed. Many more millions suffer from infectious diseases and malnutrition, never reaching their full potential because they were bottlefed. This global decline in breastfeeding and subsequent "commerciogenic malnutrition" has been attributed in part to the aggressive marketing of breastmilk substitutes by the babymilk and babyfood industry. Subsequently the World Health Assembly ratified a marketing code designed to protect breastfeeding and ensure the proper use of artificial feeding when necessary.

Despite the companies paying lip service to "agreeing" to abide by this code they frequently ignore it. The Aptamil/Milupa advert on the front page is nothing compared the advertising going on in other countries where babyie are at greater risk from bottlefeeding.

I'm sad to see an Aptamil ad on the home page of MN.

As a voluntary breastfeeding peer counsellor, it really irks me to see conglomerates gaining the upperhand......just because they can afford to.

As an unpaid volunteer, in a barely funded voluntary group which works hard, daily, to counter illegal advertising, subliminal or otherwise of formula milks or brands, amongst many other things (providing 24 hour support, etc) TBH, it's stuff like this that make me wonder why I along with all the other people, and groups involved in supporting breastfeeding mums and breastfeeding, bother.

Some people seem to think that this kind of advertising wont affect peoples choice of whether to breastfeed or not. I'm afraid it does. I live in a particularly run down area, feeding goes by trend, labelled baby milk is just as significant as clothes labels for many people around here.

While synthetic milk is advertised like this, people in the area I volunteer in will be just as likely to use and promote it as they would a new pair of top brand trainers. (Very likely)

Whereas they will be just as unlikely to breastfeed as they would (wear) a hand knitted jumper. (Not likely at all)

.....and don't even get me started on misleading rubbish about LCP's!!!

Justine, FWIW I don't suppose many MNers will be persuaded by the Aptamil campain either, but I would have thought that the home page is the first page visited by non regulars, more so than regulars? I tend to go straight to talk.

I have just caught up with this, and posted on it on the breastfeeding and bottle feeding board.

I have read this whole thread.

I too am disappointed that Mumsnet feels compelled to allow Milupa to flout the law like this. I have posted on the other board my understanding of Milupa's campaign. Advertising on Mumsnet fits in very nicely with their strategy, I would think.

Scandinavian countries, btw, never had a bottle feeding culture like ours. They never did go over wholesale to formula. So the protective measures in place now have maintained its status as the normal way to feed, and kept women feeding longer, too.

Of course advertising works. And what on earth makes people think they get information from it? Information? From advertising? Do me a favour.

Do the ads for LCPs tell you there are no long term studies into the safety of these additives? How can there be? They haven't been around for long enough, and no one is following up the babies who have taken them. They are not human LCPs but artifically-sourced versions of them. They may well be safe, but not everyone in infant nutrition is happy about them now being added to every brand of formula, purely because of 'me too' marketing (nothing to do with health benefits for babies).

There is no independent source of information about formula. No independent source of information about plastic and other materials used in bottles and teats. I wish there was. I want mothers to know exactly what they might choose to give their babies. They won't get it from advertising, FFS....I can't believe the naivety of some of the posters on here.

Milupa is creating a brand image - a long-term, expensive and highly sophisticated strategy that goes way, way beyond persuading someone to use their product after seeing their poxy little ad.

It stinks.

"No independent source of information about plastic and other materials used in bottles and teats."

So therefore BF mums shouldn't express milk and feed it from a bottle then??? Is that what your'e saying??? Or what about nipple shields - found them a lifeline when first feeding DS1....

What Tiktok is saying is that there is no independant information - all information is provided by those people (ie the manufacturers) with a vested interest in the product. They're not going to say "OK, we admit it, it can affect your baby like this, this and this"

The Aptamil link is very clever marketing. How can a formula manufacturer promote breastfeeding? A sneaky way of promoting their site by not 'advertising' formula (which is illegal).

It stinks.

Mumsnet HQ, there must be plenty of other advertisers who would pay good money for a pitch here. Please rethink on this link.

I understand that soupy - but my BF adviser when I was BF DS1 (which I did for 14 months) recommended me using shields as my left nipple was in a very bad way.........at no point did she express any concern that the materials used to make them could do any harm in the long run.

Likewise I don't see any BF advisers panicking about Breastpumps - which many women use to enable them to continue BFing when they go back to work...

Hence I'm not sure of the relevance of questioning hte safety of bottles and teats in the long run.

The relevance QoQ, is that no-one has ever done any research on it, because no-one in a commercial environment, has any interest in finding out what the long term effects are. So therefore, there is no funding for any research, because most research is funded by commercial enterprises whose primary function is to make profits, rather than a neutral organisation whose primary function is to find out what happens.