Someone wrote, continuing the discussion of bf frequency and milk production
and malnutrition in developing country mothers:
>Additionally exclusive breastfeeding rates in Asia and Africa are
> >generally poorer than many folk imagine.I would hazzard a guess that if
> >women are not exclusively breastfeeding, their babies are not suckling
> >frequently.
I have to strongly disagree with this. I don't think we should make any
assumptions about how exclusivity of breastfeeding and suckling frequency
are related.
The anthropological research on infant feeding cross-culturally supports the
fact that most babies are not exclusively breastfed in the early months.
They may get water, tea, formula, carbohydrate-based gruels, honey, cows'
milk, small pieces of fruits, vegetables, and meats, as well as a number of
traditional medicines. HOWEVER, just because the child occasionally gets
something other than breast milk, they still are most often nursing several
times an hour around the clock for months or even years.
When people in the US think of 'starting solids' or 'supplementing
breastfeeding' it usually quickly becomes a substantial amount of
non-breast-milk food and quickly becomes routine, as in at least every day,
if not several times a day. The reality in other cultures can be very
different.
For example, a baby may get some sort of traditional brew and maybe some
honey or cow's milk in the first few days after birth. They are no longer
'exclusively' breastfed from birth. Then maybe he gets nothing more til age
4 months, when one day he gets a bite of mango. Two weeks later he gets
some porridge. A month later he has a couple of mouthfuls of rice. Three
days later he has a bit of banana. Two months go by of 'exclusive
breastfeeding' and then he starts eating meals with the rest of the family
on a regular basis. The addition of solids to children's diets in many
cultures is not the rapid, steadily increasing, consistent dietary change
that it usually is in the US.
References include:
 Breastfeeding, Child Health and Child Spacing: Cross-cultural
Perspectives, edited by Valerie Hull and Mayling Simpson (1985), Infant
Care and Feeding in the South Pacific, edited by Leslie Marshall (1985),
Only Mothers Know: Patterns of Infant Feeding in Traditional Cultures, by
Dana Raphael and Flora Davis (1985), and The Infant-
Feeding Triad: Infant, Mother, and Household, by Barry M. Popkin, Tamar
Lasky, Judith Litvin, Deborah Spicer, and Monica E. Yamamoto (1986), Medical
Anthropology Quarterly, 2(3):303-306.
Kathy Dettwyler
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