The Case Against Breastfeeding

m_and_m

Abrooks:

ali-1411:

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But if a baby is not gaining weight and the doctor is concerned, then how can anyone say that breastmilk is best in that situation? 

I am going to take offense to this statement.  My daughter had terrible weight gain issues.  She was exclusively breasted through 9 months, and then received bf and ff until 12.   You are not a doctor.  When DD had weight issues, my first question to the doctor was to ask if I should supplement with formula.  The pediatrician told me no - that was not the issue.  It turns out there were other reasons for the drop in percentiles and no matter what she was drinking, formula or breastmilk, the same issue would have occurred. 

To make a blanket statement about equating issues with weight gain to issues with breast milk is inaccurate and uninformed, and as nannan pointed out, just as much a bash to bfing mothers as saying bf makes you a better mother than ff.  

 

Ditto that.

My baby was quite fat as long as she was EBF; it was after she started eating solids that she started shrinking. My BM has higher levels of fat (and therefor calories) now than it did when she was little (as is normal when you BF a toddler), and significantly more than cow's milk or formula. How would FF be an improvement there?

In my babies case, I can only imagine how much worse off she would be if she were FF instead.

Which brings me to my annoyance with anecdotal evidence like "Well my FF/BF baby has never been sick, blah, blah, blah." The benefits of BF (and many, many other things) are not a comparison of one baby to another, they are a comparison of a baby to it's own baseline. Okay, so you have a FF baby who only got sick once in their first year- they may not have gotten sick at all if BF. Or you have a person like me, with allergies, eczema, jaw malocclusion, sinus troubles, and chronic ear infections through high school- reduction of all those things is a benefit of BF so I hate to think of how much worse those things could be if my mom had not BF me.

 

But really, I thin kthe article was ridiculous because she blames all her problems with being a mother on BF. A person who is so unhappy being a mother is going to have those same issues no matter how she feeds her baby and needs to confront her resentment and anger rather than find a scapegoat to blame it on.