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 _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com *********************************************** The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(TM) mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html