To add to my earlier comments, and those of others, on acceptable weight gain, like Pat Young, I found LLL's figures reassuring when I had my babies in the second half of the 1960s.
When I was doing research for an undergraduate research topic back in 1976, one of the 19th-century British texts I found was W.B. Cheadle's lecture series for paediatric students on artificial feeding, which was very common. The lectures, from 1887, were published in 1894. Artificially-fed babies in lower middle-class families and among the poor were commonly being fed copious amounts of calorie-deficient and nutrient deficinet mixtures that lookd "milky", and being admitted to hospital with wasting and rickets. He wanted the gains for these artificially-fed babies to rise to "2 to 4 ounces per week, or even more", i.e. (60 - 120g) per week. Proprietary infant foods, and other foods marketed for "infants, invalids and the aged" were advertised and were criticised, and diluted cow's milk was also used, but poorer parents were still giving homemade farinaceous mixtures, the worst being cornflour and water or arrowroot powder and water. (Arrowroot isn't a cereal, but a rhyzome.)
Anyway, the desirable weight gain for an artificially-fed baby, recommended by a leading children's doctor in the late-19th century, was 2-4 ounces or more per week. Interesting, especially when one recalls that a later problem attributed to artificial feeding has been excessive weight.
Finally, I'm not advocating that breastfed babies should follow a guideline set for artificially-fed babies; I'm just presenting this as an interesting historical fact in the discussion on changing growth recommendations.
Best regards,
Virginia
Dr Virginia Thorley, OAM, PhD, IBCLC, FILCA
Private practice IBCLC
Cultural Historian of the History of Medicine
From: Pat Young <>
LLLI always said 1/2 - 1 oz per day. 1/2 oz a day would be 105g. I think (we still do lb/oz in US :-( If a baby is gaining 1/2 oz per day (low side) but is acting like a happy baby, I wouldn't worry. If baby is gaining1/2 oz a day, wants to eat all the time and is fussy then I'd look for a reason, but not necessarily mom's problem. If mom had unusual breast structure, then that could be a reason. But how is milk transfer? Need to not always assume it is low milk supply.
Saw one last week - 5 wks, poor wt gain, trying to nurse ALL the time with a nice posterior TT. Gained a bit more with laid back BF and got ENT to help with tongue tie. Pat in SNJ
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