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.  I do think that the idea of completely replacing breastmilk with an alternative when mother's milk is readily available is a new one and obviously fraught with danger.  As Magda pointed out, it may be difficult to find a population of truly exclusive breastfeeders if that means that absolutely nothing but breastmilk has ever passed the baby's lips.  The saddest thing is that now we do have the knowledge, yet so many educated parents and their physicians do not take it to heart.




Warmly,
Sharon Knorr, BSMT, ASCP, IBCLC
Newark, NY (near Rochester on Lake Ontario)
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