now this weill set he catamongst the pigeons - WHOS advice is wrong to breastfeed for 6 motnths

[Dogsby]

as is based on developing coutnires

har har har

but they have to feed themselves, of course. as i said, wallace's and pinktulip's babies swiped food and started b-l weaning at 5 months.

I didn't want a baby stuck to my norks for six months. WHO advice or no bloody advice

My dd did b/feed for 6 months but weaned herself off (gradually, being intelligent and all) as she preferred solid food from 4 months(must have been all the garlic and spices I put in it)

Perhaps you ought to allow her up for a breather then Desiderata

That, VVVQV, is probably where I went wrong!

why does everyone feel so strongly about this? and why has no-one responded to my point about the 6 month advice putting women off feeding for longer?

also as it goes: MI, of course there are well educated and well nourished women in developing countries, but the fact is that many women in those countries face issues that are simply not an issue in western countries - namely lack of access to reliable clean water. It is hugely significant in these studies because the main risk found by the studies was of hospital admission with diarrea.

tiktok: all of the studies I've read which used babies in western coutries were very small, retrospective or weren't really testing the difference between weaning at 4 months with weaning at 6 months. the evidence from those studies is very weak.

But anyway my point is not that you should wean a baby at 4 months, but that such strong advice based on such little evidence is not necessarily a good thing.

This point came up last month with the new advice on drinking in pregnancy. as I read in one of the papers then: there is quite a lot of evidence that drinking even 1 unit impairs your ability to drive - there is a lot more evidence for that than there is for drinking in pregnancy or weaning between 4 and 6 months, and yet they don't lower the drink driving limit. why is that?

I must say I'm with Piffle - I didn't find it hard at all to exclusively b/fed until 6 months.

I was a bit at the advice not to allow your child to feed himself soft stuff with a spoon...

"No you WILL NOT have yoghurt or soup, NO NO NO"

oh, you've got to be kidding emkana. those weren't blw guidelines, they were hack journo making-stuff-up guidelines. likewise the 'Don?t wait until your baby is six months old before introducing solids. Start at four months, when breast milk does not satiate him'... that's a bit of a stretch, to say the least.

Senora - check out the PROBIT study...not sure if it will meet your requirements but 17,000 mother-baby pairs is a pretty large sample!

Belarus - where the study took place - is not a developing country, and clean water is not a problem.

The study was powered enough to show less gastro-intestinal illness in babies excl bf to 6 mths, though it compares 6 mths with 3 mths, not four months.

In public health and individual terms, there is not going to be a huge difference in the UK between those babies excl bf to 4mths versus those excl bf to 6 mths.

I don't know what you mean by 'strong' advice: the guidance is clear - exclusive bf to 6 mths shows health benefits and no health or growth deficits. That's information, based on evidence.

How on earth you compare evidence for this with evidence for the impact of one drink on driving I don't know - you say there is 'more' evidence for the latter, but how do you judge this? Weigh the journals? Count the pages?

These reports should be taken with a pinch of salt. Agree with somewhere further down, there always seems to be hidden agenda somewhere

I do wish someone would do more research on fourmula fed babies though and give separate guidance. Having done both, my ff babies weren't easily satisfied on milk alone past 4 months but the bf ones were

Which reports, minorityreport?

I mean minorityrules, sorry!!

The ones that appear in the media, spoken by one person, not WHO, UNICEF etc

The non proven ones

tiktok: that's exactly the problem. I don't think any of the big western studies actually compared weaning at 4 months with weaning at 6 months. There is loads of evidence that shows weaning before 4 months is a bad idea.

I think the official advice should be something like "exclusive breastfeeding for at least 4 and up to 6 months", just because many people do see targets like that "exclusive breastfeeding for 6 months" and assume that if they can't meet them then they may as well not bother (though they may make thhose assumptions on a subconsious level). The advice to bf for 2 years plus does the same thing imo.

But it depends how you put it across, senora....I don't see any of this as 'advice', but as statements of where the best health outcomes are seen, and that includes the stuff about two years and beyond.

Given there is no evidence that excl bf to 6 mths is harmful, quite a lot of evidence that it is good (though PROBIT looked at 3 mths and not 6 mths and studies in developed settings are fewer) and that the whole world (literally) has adopted this as a public health measure, we can comfortably be the same....unless there is evidence that this policy stops people starting to bf at all, of course.

I don't know of any evidence that it does.

har!

you're right, I have nothing beyond anecdotal evidence to show that the 6 month guidelines might put people off even breastfeeding exclusively for 4 months. It should be investigated though.

But is there really a difference between a guideline and advice? I think they're bothe same thing to the average person on the street surely?

oh lol. what a crock of shit article. well done cod on the wind up. and thanks tiktok for the explanation into who this 'expert' is.

This is what the government currently says to women in the main leaflet handed out:

"Breastmilk is the best form of nutrition for infants.
Exclusive breastfeeding is recommended for the first
6 months (26 weeks) of an infant?s life, as it provides
all the nutrients a baby needs.
Six months is the recommended age for weaning babies."

I know what you mean, senora, about the difference between guideline and advice - is there much difference in practice? Possibly no! But the above statement seems to be sharing informatin - evidence-based, as we've seen - and I really don't know what the alternative is, unless we are somehow to 'protect' mothers by not sharing something with them in case it puts them off.

Think of some other health intervention that's a long way from being adopted/achieved by 100 per cent of women. Smoking in pregnancy, maybe? We will never get to a situation where no pregnant woman smokes. But we don't shy away from the information that zero smoking is the recommendation, in case women who can't get below one or two cigarettes a day decide not to bother cutting down. In fact, the research shows that support to cut down only means more smoking than support to give up.

In public health terms, if no pregnant woman smoked more than one or two cigarettes a day, there'd be very little difference between that and zero smoking. But the most effective intervention is to state what the health recommendation is and to enable women to achieve it.

While I am not making any comparison between smoking and solids/exclusive breastfeeding, I think stating what the recommendation is plainly and clearly is the right way to treat adults

Other analogies:

'five fruit and veg a day' - worth letting people know, I think yes? We don't stay quiet, or say 'four fruit and veg a day' in case people say' five??? I can't do five. In fact, I can't do five so I won;t do any....'

'exercise keeps you healthy and 30 mins a day on most days of the week is what has been found to have the most beneficial effects' - we don't say '20 minutes' in case people decide they can't manage 30 mins and therefore don't bother.

but tiktok, there is some evidence that actually more than 5 is really good for you. But they say 5 because it's easier to aim for.

also what I'm saying is that they should change the advice because it will put people off, but also because the evidence doesn't show that weaning at 6 moinths is particularly better than weaning at 4 months in developed couyntries(though there's lots of evidemnce that weaning at 4 months is better than 3, and that 6 is better than 3). So it's not really analogous to those things.

I can't see how the bf to 6 months would put people off. Have overall bf rates plummetted in the last 4 yrs?

I don't think it will put people of bfing all together, but it may make people introduce formula at 3 months instead of 4, for example, because no mention is made of the fact that actually it's 4 months that's the key age.

great name btw.