look into history of infant feeding. Probably goes back to times when exclusive breastfeeding was usual until baby grabbed food off of mom's plate or bowl. Then came the "science" of infant feeding, formula became the word of the day, reaching a peak in the 60's. "scientists" became fascinated with infant nutrition, number of calories needed and so on. Feeding babies "food" younger and younger became the style. I remember giving my daughters (1959 & 1960) cereal at 2 weeks. That was the norm then. I read a paper yesterday that measured breast milk intake in babies. The results were healthy breastfed babies were eating much less breastmilk than scientists thought a baby needed to grow and they were amazed. I was amazed that they didn't get that BF babies were the norm, not formula fed babies! They did say something about maybe formula fed babies were being overfed. The article was from early 1990's!  There has also been a lot of scientific research into infant growth. Formula fed babies skewed the results, making breastfed babies look inadequate.   One of the major problems with research in the 20th century was the wobbly definition of breastfeeding.

Went and grabbed the 40-50's hx of infant feeding files and went thru it briefly, it was appalling! from the AAP Annual meeting in 1955 "discussing the subject of when to initiate solid foods in the diet of infants is a difficult task and I suspect I will step on some toes in doing so.  As a person who has gone through a good many years of practice, it has been extremely interesting to observe the changes ......Thirty five years ago [1920's] we did not dare to give a baby solid food until 9 or 10 months of age for fear of killing the baby if it were done prior to this age.....Mariott's textbook in 1935 on infant feeding was a very good book. In his text he stated that the right time to give solid foods was at 6 months....the speaker  goes on to talk about the pendulum swinging, and he discusses competition between mothers and peds which accounts for the use of solids at 2-3 weeks.  Unfortunately the brief quote in Pediatrics doesn't give the name of the speaker :-(
Another quote that jumped out at me was by Emmett Holt.  His early works really stressed the importance of breastfeeding, by1955 he was saying "The loss of faith in breast milk as the ideal nutrient did not come suddenly, but gradually as information accumulated from various sources as to lack of constancy and the extent to which it reflected the dietary intake of the mother.  With the discovery of the vitamins came observations that deficiencies in the maternal intake were reflected in the milk which might then provide inadequately for the needs of the infant."
 
Forget the fact that breastfeeding had worked from the beginning of time until 1955, LOL.
 
Fascinating topic.  Pat in SNJ

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