Worried about weaning your breastfed baby and fast-depleting IRON stores? HV talking in doom-laden tones about anaemia?

[HunkerTheInternetPhenomenon]

Read this link and make yourself feel far better

very good hunker

Interesting read but her references are a little dated!!! Interesting all the same.

Whats wrong with references being old. So long as the research is sound surely thats all that matters.

It's just some of the references just aren't very current. I'm not saying what she says is wrong it's just a shame the references are so old, it would have been much more powerful if some more up to date research was used in these days of evidence based medicine and all that!!

I just dont see the point of trying to repeat a medical study, simply so it will have a modern date on it. Surely funds would be better spent doing research into areas we dont understand.

The point I was trying to make is that the web site, as good as it might seem, is not peer reviewed therefore how do you know how credible it is. That doesn't mean that the information provided is inaccurate it's just not evident that it is reliable. To me, at first glance, I was a little taken a back at how out of date some of her references are.

And surely there is every point in repeating medical research, medicine has changed an enormous amount since the 1970's and for that I am thankful.

you must have read my mind i have been fretting about this for 2 weeks

Had a brief scan and her references don't look that dated to me?

If you look at the bottom of the page you will see that it was last modified in May this year. Id say thats pretty up to date! TBH I am quite pleased that the older studies are given - gives the reader more of an opportunity to make their own mind up with more available evidence about a particular subject. Yes medical science has changed and new technologies are coming out all the time....but the human body & how it works wont have changed that much in the last 30 years & that is basically what all these studies look at.

Also means that the people who say "yeah, but they'll come out with something else in ten minutes" are very nicely shut up too

Marvellous.

The date it was modified makes no difference whatsoever - doesn't make it the evidence up to date at all just means the author has updated her own site.

Surely the evidence she requires to authenticate her information doesn't need to date back from the seventies. There must be something more recent making her article more reliable.

Anyway I'm going to lay this one to rest now and agree to disagree.

Funding for research is always tight. There is no way a study would get funding if the only reason for doing it was to repeat a perfectly good study from some time ago.

Iron metabolism has been reasonably well-understood for a long time, so I would imagine researchers feel they have far better uses for their time and money.

Hi, to get back to your original question try not to worry to much, iron stores do deplete after 4-6 months but as long as you are including green leafy veg, sweet potato and then after 6 months meats (especially red such as lamb and beef) and chicken, etc, then you will be doing fine.

Hope this helps.

Have you started weaning yet?

Thankuyou for the link Hunker. It has always been a bit of a worry for me, but when I asked my HV she pointed out that your iron store doesn't disappear overnight at 6 months, but is likely to be gradually reducing.
Nice to have good advice from a HV

What a great article! Particularly welcome as have been getting myself (and DS) so stressed at his complete disinterest in purees in general and baby rice in particular. Horrid stuff anyway, don't blame him for not liking it.

Now if you can only find one showing that exclusively breast-fed babies sleep through the night sooner than early-weaned babies I will be on cloud nine!