Sarah replied yesterday to my earlier post in response to her first
one, and I didn't see the reply until just now.

First, my apologies, Sarah, for being unclear.  I was addressing the
list and not you personally when I encouraged people to read the full
article because from experience I know there can quickly be a long
thread here about something that is absent in the original work,
because of how mass media present it.  No, the authors don't go into
detail about the specifics you mention in their discusion of
confounders, but they also do not purport to have evidence that one
way of feeding is always vastly superior.  I got a clear message that
their findings are not generalizable because of the selection bias in
their respondents, which was only acceptable at all because this is
not an experimental study.  They didn't set out to test one way of
feeding with a randomized study, assigning people to use one approach
or another.  They noticed things that were associated with the two
feeding styles.

So, I completely agree with your concluding comments:  "I'm concerned
that this kind of research might just lead to a flip-over to the
reverse rigid attitude - that BLW is the only way to go because
spoonfeeding and purées have been 'proved' to increase obesity rates.
Much as I'm in favour of BLW on practical grounds, I really don't want
to see that or anything else pushed on grounds of being better for the
children unless we have considerably better evidence than
we currently have.  This sort of study can chip away at the confidence
of parents - oh, no, yet another thing I did wrong, is my child doomed
to be fat because I spoonfed him? - and I don't like to see that
happen on poor evidence."

And I will add that I don't like to see parents' confidence undermined
by new information even when the evidence for it is good :-)
Especially when they are raking themselves over the coals for
following advice they had no reason to distrust.

Rachel Myr
Kristiansand, Norway

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