My question would be, how many people/societies ever did practice what we would call "exclusive breastfeeding" for the 6 months that we hold up to be the gold standard these days? From all the reading I have done over the years, it seems that many societies offered their babies food other than breastmilk from birth on - not as a main source of nutrition, but as a matter of custom or religion or necessity, at times. We don't know how the earliest humans fed their babies - when they began offering them bits of berries, roots and meat. We now know that exclusive breastfeeding for at least several months seems to be very beneficial for babies - but this is not something that was "known" until very recently. Sometimes I think that we are trying to impose a very rigid idea of what should be done in the face of a long history of many different ways that women have fed their babies through the ages. When I heard Michel Odent speak two years ago, one of the many things he discussed was this introduction of other foods/drinks early in a baby's life. His theory is that these ritual foods were introduced with the purpose of separating the baby from the mother, even briefly, as a way of decreasing the mother-baby bond and creating more loyalty to the tribe. He felt that the deliberate interference with the mother-baby bonding was also a way of increasing aggression and creating better warriors & fighters. He stressed that not doing this is critically important at this time in human history, because if our babies grow up to be too aggressive they can literally destroy the entire world. And he pointed out that aggression can show up in many ways, not just actual fighting - for example, he believes our currently society treats the environment in an aggressive way. Teresa Pitman Guelph, Ontario *********************************************** The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(TM) mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html