Dear all:

The taste tests that Teresa asked about in other cultures, are for the most part, grains 
like rice, roots like casava or sweet potatoes or local mild fruits like bananas.  These are 
not the foods that are likely to interfere with iron absorption.  I know some cultures that 
will give ground peanuts or lentils, but not usually as first foods.  And then it is tradition 
for wine to be given to boys at the bris which probably never gets counted in the 
"exclusivity" stats.  

Remember, most of the world doesn't drink milk from other species than our own.  Most 
of those cultures that don't drink the milk of other species than our own also have much 
lower rates of osteoporosis.  In the US, my son's pediatrician worked in very poor rural 
communities before WIC and I would definitely say that Teresa's speculations are 
exceedingly well documented in terms of cow's milk introduced early and he actually did 
a little bit of research on this at the time.  It's a given that nonspecies specific milk is not 
good for iron absorption.

As for Teresa and her friends --- they are the outliers that may or may not tell us what 
will happen once we finally get closer to having a wider array of the population getting to 
six months of exclusive breastfeeding.  I liken it to the years when La Leche League 
maintained that minority of breastfeeding that remained in the US.  Those women were 
mostly the die hards and the lucky.  Now we are scrambling for strategies to use with 
those who are not about ready to be "die hards" and those who are not so lucky and have 
conditions that have been neglected for several generations that we should have been 
working on to solve.

The problem is the in the immediacy of no "ideal" fix for a population that adopted highly 
artificial feeding modes and is in transition back to more normal feeding.  Until the 
problem of making it exclusive breastfeeding to six months is solved, we have the 
ongoing problem of iron deficiency in a large proportion of infants in the 6-9 month range 
and an even larger proportion of infants in the 9-12 month range.  As is typical, 
recommendations on the public health level don't always distinguish between feeding 
modes which play a huge role in how to respond to the problem.  

The reason why I am concerned about the risk of iron deficiency before anemia comes 
from the research on cognitive delays.  Since the AJCN supplement was done quite a 
while ago --- before a huge change in research funds --- before the concept of "public-
private partnerships", before huge deregulation and big drops in funding basic research, 
I'd say most of this supplement is far less prone to "conflicts of interest" than newer 
research. Anyone who is annoyed with the "conflicts of interest" that has permeated all 
aspects of health care in the United States (my dentist complains about this mightily) 
should write consistently and frequently for more governmental funds for basic research.  
Public funding for research has really dried up.

Anyway, the supplement makes for interesting reading beyond just iron deficiency 
because it deals with very complex issues about how we evaluate cognitive delays that 
would apply to any nutritional impact including iodine deficiency, breastmilk deficiency or 
protein-energy malnutrition.

The reference is:

American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. 1993; 57(2S).

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