On 10/1/02 9:50 AM, "Automatic digest processor"
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Which is one of the reasons that ac/pc weights don't tell us
> everything.  And if it is a thin woman with a small breast capacity who is
> trying to breastfeed on a schedule a la Ezzo -- then you end up with a
baby
> who is not gaining well -- where as her Reubenesque friend who has a large
> storage capacity with higher fat milk does a lovely job nursing her baby
> every three to 3.5 hours, and wonders why there's a problem doing that.
>
> Lots of really really neat stuff -- a lot of which we don't know yet.

And just to really throw the cat amongst the pigeons - energy intake (in
breastmilk) has not been shown to be correlated to infant growth.
"growth is not related to either concentration or amount of fat, protein or
energy":  Mitoulas et al (in press) British Journal of Nutrition. Leon
(Mitoulas) found that infant growth was only correlated to volume intake.
This in fact supports much earlier research (Butte et al. 1984) "the amount
of milk, and not the concentration of its constituents exerted the greatest
impact on growth".

The trouble with ongoing research is we only learn a little bit at a time -
always building on what went before. Trying to see the full picture without
all the pieces is sometimes really hard - each time we get a new piece we
update our interpretation of the whole picture so that we go through so many
different interpretations (which are not always going to be right) until we
finally (if ever) get to the truth. But still, we have to work with what
we've got and we must keep up to date.

Cathy Fetherston
Perth Western Australia

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