Hear hear. What folks don't want to do is use breastfeeding as a surrogate for good parenting. Sure it's not a one-to-one relationship, but it's difficult to cite an aloof long-term breastfeeding (not breastmilk-feeding) cohort of mothers to study. Why do we find it so difficult to categorize and assume we are being judgmental? Why is there such a strong effort to disprove any benefit to breastfeeding? I say follow the money!
-----Original Message-----
From: Lactation Information and Discussion [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Maureen MINCHIN
Sent: Friday, September 25, 2015 11:31 AM
Subject: UK paper on BF and IQ
I do wish people would read all the info in my new book, Milk matters: infant feeding and immune disorder, about cognition, intelligence and modes of feeding.I’m not going to recite lots of stuff here, I wrote the book to make it available to anyone serious about knowing what infant formula is and is doing, has been and has done. You’ll be shocked by what you read.
But for starters, research needs to consider the (separate) effects of being breastfed, of not being breastfed, of being breastmilk-fed, and of being fed very different formulas -they are NOT all the same - in very different ways.
There is the historical evidence of studies through the 20th century which consistently show advantage to the breastfed even though it was not until the 1970s that advantaged women were the breastfeeders. Poor women continued to breastfed while the advantaged took up formula feeding.
There are MRIs showing differences in brain white matter development in not-breastfed children. There are the unquestionable facts of excess protein (wrong balance of amino acids/neurotransmitters) and deficient fatty acids composition of infant formulas, the excessive manganese, the selenium deficiency, the lead exposure, umpteen other factors all of which affect neurological development and function in animals (humans aren’t animals????) More DNA damage and chromosomal breaks in the not-breastfed might also be relevant to how brains function.
But any study of UK twins (more likely to be preterm, fed antibiotics, fed formula early, weaned early in any society that makes breastfeeding hard for singletons, much less multiples) that divides them into ever versus never breastfed is simply not a credible basis for population-based generalisations about inteliigence and infant feeding. We know now that microbiomes affect all aspects of development, and I doubt there were many normal microbiomes to be found in those twins. Come on, people, whether it’s 11 families or 11,000, bad research is bad research. And data mining can usually give you whatever you want to say. And the media really wants to say that breastfeeding makes no difference, because women need to be in the paid workforce and babies are needed in childcare services. “We have to reassure parents that infant formula is safe because American society depends on bottle feeding.” If you don’t recognise that quote from a FDA official you haven’t read my book!
Maureen MINCHIN
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