U.S. policy toward baby formula- making our babies sick, fat, and stupid?

Great Debates
61

My wife and I had our first in October. All through pre-natal classes, doctor’s visits and hospital visits, we were taught to breatfeed. We were 100% positive that we would breastfeed our child.

Our baby was born 3 weeks early and did not breath upon delivery. She was kept in the intensive care unit for 1 week. The nurses would not let my wife try to breastfeed and instead gave our daughter a bottle of formula. On the third day it was deemed “okay” for my wife to try breastfeeding. In the mean time, she was pumping and we were feeding our daughter via bottle.

On the third day it was deemed “okay” for my wife to try breastfeeding. Our baby latched successfully only one time the first week. We thought that it was only a matter of time before she would get it. During this time, we had numerous nurses and a couple of lactation consultants try to help. Our baby just wouldn’t latch.

After we all went home, my wife continued to pump and we continued to feed our girl with breastmilk from a bottle. Each time, my wife would try breastfeeding first. She was determined that our baby would only have breastmilk and would not give our girl any formula, even if she was still hungry after drinking the milk. Eventually, our baby started eating more and my wife could simply not produce enough milk. Our girl would not latch.

I finally talked my wife in to using formula as a supplement. Since then, our baby has gained weight rapidly and looks much healthier than before.

She’s almost three months old now and mainly has formula as my wife’s supply has depleted. My wife is still having a hard time resigning to the fact that our girl will not be breastfed. Meanwhile, my wife is happier, I’m happier and our baby girl is healthy and much happier.

The moral of the story is that my wife went through numerous crying fits and put enormous pressure on herself. She caused stress on our baby and on me as well as our relationship. All because women are now taught that if they do not breastfeed, their kids will be “sick, fat and stupid”.

It is because of people like you that my wife does not want to feed our baby in public. God forbid that she feeds our baby from a bottle. Is that formula she is using? What a horrible mother! Forget that she agonized for weeks about her lack of choice, or that she spends countless hours each day playing with our daughter and stimulating her as much as possible. Trying to create a happy household so that our daughter can learn and grow. Forget all that because she doesn’t breastfeed, our daughter is doomed.

People like you should get off your high horses and realize that life isn’t always perfect. It is YOUR children that I feel pity for. I would rather have my baby grow up in a formula fed household of tolerance than a breastfed house of fanaticism.

One more thing… that “dreck” is what kept my daughter alive.

62

Cessandra- you must not have read the same CDC web site I did. The site is strongly- very strongly in favor of child vaccination. Now note- they do have lots and lots of info, and some cautions, especially with children with special needs, such as those with AIDS, etc.

Or maybe you didn’t read the title right- it is Six Common MISconceptions about Vaccines. You know the article where it says “The fact is that a child is far more likely to be seriously injured by one of these diseases than by any vaccine. While any serious injury or death caused by vaccines is too many, it is also clear that the benefits of vaccination greatly exceed the slight risk, and that many, maay more injuries and deaths would occur without vaccinations.”

Let’s put it another way- chance of dying from Diptheria= 1 in 20. From Tetanus= 3 in 100. From Pertussis= 1 in 200 (with a 1 in 20 chance of Encephalitus, also). Chance of a child dying from the DTP vaccine= 0. However, there is a chance AS HIGH AS 1 in 100,000 for having acute encephalopathy.

Then for Measles: Death 1 in 3000. Enceph= 1 in 2000
Mumps: Enceph= 1 in 300. Danger of the MMR vaccine: Encephalitus or severe allergic reaction= 1 in a million.

According to the site- these diseases are not wiped out. “A few years ago, in California a child who had just entered school caught Diphtheria and died. He was the only unvaccinated pupil in his class”. But you know what’s worse? Vaccines only work about 99% of the time. Thus, a caring, concerned, and educated parent may give their child the proper preventative care- yet still have their child die becuase of ignorance & half-baked alarmist tactics on the part of another parent who didn’t innoculate their “precious darling”. In CA, for instance, although vaccinations are required- parents can get a “religous” exemption. Parents- fight this all you can. Insist that if a child is not vaccinated due to ignorance or religous reasons- they can’t get an exemption. Either they get the shots- or they don’t come to your child’s school.

Read the CDC site. Call the National Immunization Hotline at 1-800-232-2522. Get your kids vaccinated. Fight ignorance- after all, that’s what we are here for.

63

“What is your opinion of the generations that were raised on the bottle? Were you raised on the bottle? If so, do you consider yourself fat, sick or stupid?”

Sua

Well…

Both my brother and myself were bottlefed and were chubby throughout our childhood, becoming obese later on.

We had annual, serious ear infections requiring bpth of us to have tubes installed. My brother is partly deaf due to the infections. I cintinued to have more frequent than normal ear infections until high school.

As for the stupid part…I’ll leave that to others:D

I asked my mom why she didn’t breast feed us. She said that nobody she knew did. In 1973, formula was what babies ate. (Unless you were a hippy:D) Breastfeeding just wasn’t part of our Yankee White Trash culture.

Am I mad at mom for choosing formula? No. I do wish she had made a different choice, as statistics lead me to think that parts of my childhood might have been different.

That’s my anecdote. Dig it or don’t.

Martin

64

DrDeth, your insistent assumption that I have only read anti-vaccine propaganda is insulting and it is getting old. Why do you refuse to accept that I HAVE read the CDC’s information, and many other pro-vaccination sites, and books, and articles, and statistics, as well as many that were against vaccinations. I got ALL of the information and decided for myself. Your determination to “educate” me on a subject that I happen to understand quite well is RUDE.

I did not come here to debate vaccinations, because frankly, I have no interest in that. My only interest is in fighting the presumption that anyone who chooses not to vaccinate must be ignorant. Many of us are far from it.

65

This flies right in the face of religious freedom. Bad enough that the government tries to force parents to vaccinate despite their medical objections, now you want them to throw out their religious beliefs just to get into school?

66

These are some excellent examples of good parents who chose to feed their babies formula for non-medical reasons. HennaDancer do these examples do anything to help you realize sometimes a parent can be a good parent and still choose not to breast feed?

A note on WIC: WIC is very, very, very pro breastfeeding. When I was a member in So Cal in 2001/2002, you had to attend a class about it in order to get your food checks. They gave you pamphlets on it. They talked to you personally about it. They offered free breast pumps. Once your baby was born, you got a little “reward” every couple months for breasfeeding your child (like a little magnetic fridge photo frame doohickey), and you got more food checks (not a promotional thing, but because breastfeeding mothers need extra nutrition just as if they were still pregnant).

An extra note on breastfeeding: one of the main benefits of breastfeeding is the bond/personal time/physical contact involved. However this becomes null if parent and child don’t have one of the lovey-dovey-blissfuly-happy-magical experiences breastfeeding is advertised to be. My son had trouble latching on in the begining and once we sorted that out I started making less and less milk (and I did everything possible to try to make more-- all the lactations I saw agree-- and nothing worked) but even for the few times it worked okay, it certainly wasn’t the bonding experience it had been advertised to me to be. Of course, many women have a different experience.

67

That’s really odd, as the value of colostrum and mother’s milk is even more pronounced on preemies. My kid was in the NICU for a week, also not breathing on his own, so I understand what a nightmare that can be. I’m so glad that both of our kids are better now.

I already apologized for that phrase. I was wrong to state it like that. I had the same feelings with my second child when it looked for a few weeks like I was going to have to stop trying to breastfeed him. I got through it. Not everyone will.

Before anyone else jumps down my throat (however justified), please read this:
It’s been pretty well documented that breastfeeding versus formula has lots of short and long-term benfits for both mom and baby. Breastfed babies as a set tend to be healthier, a little smarter, and leaner as adults. Is having fewer ear infections worth Mom resenting her kid for causing her pain when things go wrong? No. Is it better to trade a couple IQ points for two loving adpotive parents? Of course. Is a mom who’s prone to depression better off formula feeding with an increased chance of breast or ovarian cancer than with staying off her meds and not being able to deal with the child at all? In most cases, yes. Everything is a trade-off. Sometimes it is worth the trade (as in your case) and sometimes not. I want to see people educated about their choices, being fully supported to try breastfeeding, as a whole lot of women I’ve seen have not been.

It really got me angry when you wrote about “People like me”. Do you want me to just shut off listening to what you have to say? I think if you read the rest of this thread that I really do intend to hear what viewpoints others have. On the other hand, I can understand your anger if people are giving your homorable wife grief about something that already hurts her. I’ve realized over this thread that there are more reasons for using formula than I was aware of, and in some cases formula is the only choice. I think I may have been guilty of giving unkind looks to bottle-feeding mothers in the past. I hope not, but it’s possible. In the future, I will remind myself that I don’t know that person’s story and I may be looking at what saved that baby’s life. I thank you for the reminder.

68

Every WIC program is different. In New Hampshire, you show up to the basement of whatever church they were in that week and they talked to you for a bit about nutrition while your kid had a healthy snack. Then they weighed and measured the kid, weighed you, printed checks, and off you went. We also had certificates good at local Farmer’s Markets for fresh fruit and veggies in summer. You could get an electric breast pump for free for so long as you were working and needed it. They also gave me a baby sling. They were pleasantly surprised that I was breastfeeding.
Here in Conencticut, you make an appointment months in advance and go sit in a large office until they call your name. Woe betide the mom who shows up without a physical form with bloodwork signed by the kid’s pediatrician, plus yours if you’re pregnant still, signed by your OB. They did not ask me if I was breastfeeding, they asked how much formula was my son drinking. I said none. It confused them. Every time I go, they ask if my son is finishing all his formula. I say he isn’t getting any and they ask if he’s running out. I tell them I’m breastfeeding and they stare at me. Kinda like if said I was an astronaut- you know theoretically that there are such people out there but never expected to actually meet one. They told me to come back to pick up checks for the baby, which I did, waiting in the office for a couple hours to be told that since I was breastfeeding, he didn’t need any. They do have pumps but they’re manual and no instruction is given. I asked for some assistance and nobody there had a clue how to use it. I have spent dozens of hours at that building and never once have I seen a woman breastfeed, and from the reactions of the workers, neither have they. Then I went to the grocery store and when I went to get my carrots and tuna, the clerk (who had been there several years) called over two people and eventually the manager because she’d never seen a WIC check with that on it. Neither had they. Something like 20 years of checkout experience between them and NONE ever having seen a breastfeeding mom’s checks is a pretty good indicator to me that very few women, if any, are in WIC locally and not formula feeding.

69

God, how did this thread get to two pages without me seeing it?

HennaDancer, I need to correct another assumption. Women are not barraged with TV advertising for formula. Only Carnation’s Good Start does that. If you are seeing numerous ads for other formulas, I’d like to know about this because I didn’t know that Abbot et al had changed their advertising standard. I’m not as up on BF and formula as I used to be. I will concede, however, that pergnant and newly-delivered women are inundated with coupons and samples, and it is true that many ads for other products for babies inadvertantly reinforce the idea that bottle feeding is the most “normal” choice.

A couple of things that puzzle me in this thread: anecdotes aren’t helpful. Every poster on the board could come in here and report that they were or weren’t breastfeed and point to some characteristic of themselves that they credit or blame with the feeding method. Does that negate the findings of sound research? Does it reinforce the findings of sloppy studies? Well, not where I come from. Furthermore, it is wrong to use correlational findings and apply it to a single infant. Will YOUR baby have 8 more or fewer IQ points? Will YOUR baby have fewer ear infections, or more gastrointestinal problems? Who knows? Because the reasearch tells us that in a POPULATION, there will be differences–it doesn’t say a damn thing about how many more problems or benefits any individual baby will have based on feeding method.

As for by-prescription-only, this was contemplated in Pakistan but thwarted by lobbying from the formula industry. Papua New Guinea, to my knowledge, is the only country which restricts access to formula by making it available only by prescription.

As for WIC, in a recent year 28% of the program’s funding went for buying formula–over $500 million. WIC provides free formula to 37% of all babies born in the U.S. WIC does promote breastfeeding and state offices are given a specific yearly budget earmarked for that. Of course, their success (or the adequacy of funding?) isn’t great. WIC mothers are less likely to breastfeed than their more affluent counterparts.

See how much fun this is when we actually bring facts into this?

Perhaps this would be less of a hot-button issue if we looked at it as less of a personal choice issue (in that, no one should judge you for what YOU chose to do, whether your reasons were personal or medical) than a public health one. Women who breastfeed do so in a cultural vacuum. It makes it even harder to stick with. If we know that as a whole it is better for babies (and for society) if more of them are breastfed, then it certainly makes sense to promote this. Make more women consider BF, and make it a more comfortable choice for those who decide to do it. But find a way to promote it without making women feel defensive.

70

Let’s abstract this a little.

Breast feeding is good. In Third World countries its advantages can spell life or death. In America they are fairly mild: a few less ear infections; less severe diarhrea; maybe an IQ point or two. Oh and the practical : a lot cheaper; always ready - no need to prepare; allows Mom to eat a little more and still lose post-partum weight. Good idea. In America though the advantages are not life saving. And if someone does not breastfeed they are not putting anyone else’s child at risk. Given that, the American ethos let’s the indivdual decide for herself.

Routine vaccines are good. Most reduce the risk of serious morbidity and death. A large part of their effectiveness is that almost all participate and create “herd immunity.” A decision to not vaccinate places a child at risk of death. A decision to not vaccinate puts others at risk as well. Here the American ethos is that the individual only has the right to not comply for overwhelmingly good reasons - true religious objection or true medical contraindication.

BTW, while lower SES and membership in the sociocultural grouping called “Black” are correlated with lesser rates of breastfeeding, those rates are increasing significantly. Something is working.

71

I thnk the point that you’re ALL missing here, is that

BREASTFEEDING MUST BE OUTLAWED PAST EXACTLY 7-9 MONTHS!

Of course kids that are breastfed will be the only infants to go on to be the beautiful, smart, attractive people. If you don’t want your kid to pay for the second seat on Southwest, buy the extended warranty at Best Buy, or not die of an acute ear infection at the age of three, you better jam a nipple into your kid’s mouth this instant.

But, at the same time, since correlation obviously means causation, and the statistical and analytical methods of the research supporting breast-feeding must be flawless, that little drop in IQ after 9 months of breastfeeding must be real and significant. No, other factors like how much time and stimulation you give a kid are irrelevant, the only thing that matters in raising a child is what you stick in their mouth.

And really, why isn’t this something the government, or God-forsakenly annoying individuals like HennaDancer shouldn’t be involved in? After all, they do know best, about everyone and everything, and when have you ever known smart-asses like that to be wrong?

72

Odd.
The WIC office I went to (and this was in Hemet, CA, a scary place in general and with one of the highest rates of teen pregnancy [I feel the need to interject here that just because a teen is pregnant does not mean that a. they are uneducated about it or b. their pregnancy is an accident] was in a permanent building. You’d call to make your first appointment and at the end of everyone you’d make the next one. I don’t remember which type of breast pump they offered, although I think they did offer help on using it, because at the time I was thinking that I wouldn’t need one. All the workers there (plus all the flyers on the wall, all the pamphlets they gave out, etc) extolled the benefits of breastfeeding and made it known they as an institution supported it above breastfeeding. I don’t remember them assuming either way that I was breastfeeding or bottle feeding, but I think it leaned toward breasftfeeding.
And I do remember seeing women breastfeeding in the office many times.
I thought that since WIC is government-run there would be a more common thread running through each office. Sadly, I guess this is not the case.

73

HennaDancer, I think my sister-in-law might be the sort of person you had in mind when you started this thread. She’s comfortably middle class, reasonably well educated, very modern and very conventional. She’s worked in a gynecologist’s office for years, but she didn’t breastfeed my niece or my nephew. She’s also one of 11 kids so she’s seen plenty of ways to raise a child. I don’t think it occurred to her to breastfeed, to my mother’s and my surprise. I think breastfeeding might somehow be lower class or unconventional to her, just something that ordinary people just don’t do. For what it’s worth, she also didn’t put my niece (her first-born) in any of the hand-knit baby outfits Mum and I made for her.

Now me, I’m unconventional, cheap, and childless. It wouldn’t occur to me not to breastfeed. Why should I give corporations money for that which I can provide myself?

If you want to reduce the number of people who bottlefeed, you’re going to have to change the culture as a whole. Straight Dope alone won’t cut it. Despite our numbers, we’re only a tiny fraction of America or the world’s population. I’d be willing to be we also skew more literate, curious, and more likely to question what we’re told. In other words, there’s no way my sister-in-law would understand what I see in you people. She’s different from us. She raises my niece and nephew differently from the way I would, but I’m childless, so I don’t know reality, and I think I’d be a lot stricter than modern culture allows for. She’s also doing a fine job. Both kids are bright, healthy, and well on their way to becoming interesting, fun, decent people.

You mentioned that breastfed babies are likely to have higher IQ’s. I’ve gotten exposed to quite a bit of discussion about IQ’s since I was talked into joining Mensa a few years ago, and I spend a lot of time with people with above average IQ’s. First of all, any person’s IQ can vary depending on any number of variables including time of day, mood, not to mention what test is being used. Even an 8 point swing isn’t that great. Second, have you seen people with high IQ’s? :wink: Mensa supposedly contains the top 2%. A high IQ alone is not a measure of success either socially or financially. This is a topic for another GD, but I’d argue that a high IQ is more of a social handicap. I’ve met a lot of wonderful, highly capable people in Mensa; I’ve also met some with all the common sense of a paper clip but enough arrogance for 3 people.

Excuse me. I’ll get off that particular hobby horse. I’ve read enough about the formula industry to know that I’m also no fan of them or their tactics, but I don’t think making formula prescription only is the way to go. I’ve also noticed calling people’s choices foolish or stupid only tends to alienate them. Maybe a pro-breastfeeding publicity campaign would work better and perhaps get rid of the perception that this is something only hippies and people who can’t afford formula do? If a middle-of-the-road celebrity like Vanna White (don’t laugh!) or Julia Roberts were to talk about how she breastfed, it might help.

Anyway, that’s just my two cents.
CJ

74

I believe I’ve seen Enfamil commercials, but I may be confusing it with the huge amoutn of stuff they loaded me with before and at birth both times.

I completely agree with the rest of the post. Thanks for finding out the prescription stuff- I knew I’d seen it somewhere! Not that Papua New Guinea is especially comparable to USA…

Your last paragraph is what I should have said myself originally. I am sorry to have put people on the defensive.

75

Excuse me? I made a generalization based on my experience. It turned out that there were other things than I had considered before posting, and I have carefully read and considered evrything that’s been said. I’ve thanked people for adding to my experience. I’ve apologized for the tone of the title and the first post. I’ve realized, and posted that I’ve realized, that I was not seeing the whole picture. WHAT THE HELL DO YOU WANT FROM ME? WHAT DO YOU GET FROM BEATING UP ON ME??? WHAT ELSE CAN I DO?

If asking for and considering others’ opinions and changing my mind based on what I’m hearing is being a know-it-all God-forsakenly annoying smart-ass, than fuck it, I am one. I wish there were more God-forsakenly annoying smart-asses that would do the same, because the world would be a lot better if we stopped hurling insults and started listening. After all, I know best, right?

76

No, he wants you to stop endangering other people with your irrational fears. You should be damned glad that other parents have their children vaccinated - it reduces the chances that your little darling will even encounter diseases incredibly. Your precious little unvaccinated darling is, however, a danger to those other children who were vaccinated but whose protection is nearing the limit (ie needs a booster) or for whom the vaccination didn’t provide enough protection. Your decision not to have your child vaccinated marks you as anti-social.
Despite all the reading you’ve done, you’ either haven’t comprehended it or else you made up your mind and then read up on the subject so that you could claim to have made an informed decision. I don’t know which.

77

Cranky,

Cultural vaccuum??? Not in my end of the woods. When I bottle fed my son, I was the only person I knew that bottle fed. Nearly every birth and baby book I bought spoke elequontly on breastfeeding (to the point that when I was adopting, I threw one across the room). Giving a baby a bottle here in public has resulted in strangers “enlightening” me about the benefits of the breast. Even on TV, babies get breastmilk…remember the “breast milk” episode from Friends. My grocery store kept formula under lock and key (I assume because its so darn expensive and they were having shoplifting issues) making formula feeding even more of a pain in the butt than normal. I can go to Target and buy a breast pump. And Noble Birth here in the Twin Cities shut down, because the stuff they sold (breastfeeding supplies) had become easily available and they couldn’t compete.

I always sense a persecution complex in breastfeeding advocates. “We get accosted in public. People tell us its dirty. We get formula pushed on us in the hospital.” Well, guess what guys, bottlefeeders get much of the same. We get accosted in public. People tell us we are bad mothers. And in the hospital, the lactation consultant stops by to make sure we’ve made an informed decision. I’ve been on bottlefeeding boards and breastfeeding boards. On breastfeeding boards I’ve never seen someone come on and attack people for breastfeeding. It used to happen weekly on the bottlefeeding board I was on that someone would show up and accuse bottlefeeders of being bad mothers.

Henna, sorry you are feeling attacked. You may want to ask a mod to close this thread, as you seem to have almost immediately changed your position.

78

You guys who had social problems breast feeding must live in a very different part of the USA than me - my wife breast fed our kids, so did most of my female relations.

The only socially odd moment was when I walked in on the CEO of our company - who was using a breast pump to save some up for later…

For her daughter. What did you think I meant?

79

Now we’re going into vaccinations, too, I see.

For the record, I’d like Dr. Deth and Mort Furd to know that my doctor’s entire practice doesn’t agree with the CDC recommendation and my state’s regulation for at least once vaccine: varicella. They aren’t quacks, either. They are board-certified family practitioners and they got their medical training at places like Case Western, University of Michigan, Creighton, and the Medical College of Virginia. Hardly the bastions of ignorance and irrationality.

My son has all his shots but that one. Herd immunity concerns (and state law) will require him to get it soon, but we all thought it was better to wait as long as possible, and if it weren’t for those factors we’d put it off indefinitely.

Let us not use such a wide brush when painting vaccine skeptics.

80

First, vaccination is not what this board is about.
Second, you’re right.
Third, So is she.

At least one of the common vaccines is preserved with something poisonous in larger doese. I think it’s mercury, I could be wrong here. A friend’s baby got a dose that had a larger than standard amount of this and now is developmentally behind by a year or so. It used to be much worse and only through extensive therapy and (I believe) drug assistance has he been able to progress this far. This is a known risk factor in taking the vaccine and happens to several children a year.
However, that’s a few out of several million children. IMHO a few children having eventually-correctable problems is better than increasing all children’s risk for the incurable, such as polio.