A report on the nutritional status of Norwegian 6 month and 12 month olds
was just released on Friday.  Data were gathered by prospective
questionnaires to parents at regular intervals.
At 6 months, 80% of children are getting breastmilk, either exclusively or
in combination with other things.
By 12 months, 64% of mothers have stopped breastfeeding altogether, despite
the official recommendation to breastfeed throughout the first year of life.
And only about 40% of children are exclusively breastfed for the first 6
months as recommended.

It was found that fully 32% of one year olds were given sweetened beverages
daily, and 11% were regularly consuming carbonated soft drinks.  Breastfed
children were less likely to be getting sweetened beverages than children
who were weaned.  40% of children at one year were getting more than the
recommended amount of dietary sugar daily; again, the weaned children were
more likely to be in this group.

The study was carried out by the Directorate for Health and Social Services,
in collaboration with the bureau that oversees food safety, and the Dept of
Nutritional Science at the U of Oslo, and the Central Bureau of Statistics.
They tried to enroll 3000 children nationally (which would be about 5% of
all babies born in a given year) and had some attrition so that only 2383
responded at 6 months and 1932 at a year.

One of the better national dailies headlined the story 'We should be
breastfeeding even more', and quoted the author of the report as saying,
among other things 'There are alternatives, but they are just not as good as
breastmilk.'  The director of the National Breastfeeding Center was
interviewed, and said on questioning that 'pressure to breastfeed' was
largely a media-created myth, that research showed most women really wanted
to breastfeed but found it stressful when there was no help available for
their problems.  This certainly is in accordance with my own experience
working with mothers!

Saturday evening I got a call from a distressed mother of a five week old
baby who, after a seemingly normal start, has only gained 6 ounces over the
past two weeks, and is now just 5 ounces over birthweight.  She had been
told to come to the well-child clinic and weigh baby weekly to monitor
growth.  So far so good.  But the health visitor has never observed a feed,
nor given this mother any suggestions that she could recall, for how to
remedy the situation.  The plan, as mother understood it, was for her to
wait until the next weigh-in and then start supplementing with an evening
bottle if he still is not gaining as expected.  Sadly, this is not unusual.
On the one hand, the well-child care system 'supports' breastfeeding, but
when it comes down to really dealing with a problem, it is often woefully
deficient.  (Based on her description of the problem, it sounds like low
supply, and we devised a new plan which is being implemented now.)

Rachel Myr
Kristiansand, Norway

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