>If it is not normal for adults to have bm's less
>than every day, how is it normal for babies?

Who says it is not normal for adults to have bm's less than every day????

I am willing to admit that we know very little about how diet affects
stooling patterns in general -- both in terms of how much variation among
individuals on the same diet is normal, and how much variation do you see
between groups with different diets.  This goes for both children and adults.

I absolutely do not think we can say, at this stage of our knowledge, how
often it is normal for adults to poop.  I absolutely do not think we can
say, at this stage of our knowledge, how often it is normal for babies and
toddlers to poop.

I know many adults in the US who poop once a day -- usually at the same time
every day, like clock-work.

I know many adults in the US who poop every other day -- usually at the same
time, just every other day, like clock-work.  They are not constipated,
their stools are not hard or difficult to pass.

I know other adults in the US who poop several times a day, often without
any pattern at all from day to day.  I find this highly bizarre (being,
personally, the kind of gal who poops every morning between 6:30 and 6:45
am, and not at other times of the day), but they seem to think this normal,
and find it bizarre that someone should be as regular as I am.

I have known many infants in the US, both bottle-fed and breast-fed, who
pooped many times a day, usually every time they fed -- every diaper was a
dirty diaper.

I have known many infants in the US, all exclusively breast-fed, who pooped
only once a week or so from about 2 months of age until whatever age they
were when lots of solids were added to their diets.  Most diapers were just
wet diapers, and then occasionally there would be a big "blow-out" of
paste-like stool (not what I would call constipation by any stretch of the
imagination).  If adult stools are mostly undigested food and intestinal
bacteria, and a breastfed baby is digesting most everything and doesn't yet
have adult bacterial flora, what exactly are they supposed to be pooping out
several times a day?

Pooping patterns of babies, children, and adults, are among the last great
"terrains of ignorance" in terms of what we know cross-culturally and
historically.

I would certainly *never* recommend that a breastfed baby be given any
treatment for "constipation" unless they were passing rock-hard stools with
a lot of obvious pain.  And I think it is perfectly within the realm of what
we currently know to tell mothers of exclusively breastfed babies that some
babies don't poop very often, and it is not a problem.

It may very well be the case that Chinese babies, breastfeeding from
mother's with a very different diet than US mothers, poop more often than US
babies.  That doesn't make the Chinese babies "normal" and the US babies
"deviant."  There is no proto-typical childhood or adult diet for humans --
we are opportunistic omnivores, eating an amazingly wide variety of
different diets containing different amounts of animal nutrients, plant
nutrients, etc.  There is nothing more "normal" about soy than there is
about "wheat" or "sugar" or "potatoes" in the diet of a modern human.

Kathy Dettwyler, Queen of Poop

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