Stephanie, Expanding on the replies of some previous posters, here are my 2 cents The term ‘breastfeeding jaundice’ really is the answer to the question. There are 2 parts to that answer. The first is, as a previous poster mentioned, the way we see things that happen with breastfeeding (like increase in jaundice) as more abnormal, and compare it to the ‘normalcy’ of bottle feeding. The second part is that, we are encouraging and promoting breastfeeding, but we live in a bottle culture, and many of our moms, exacerbated by hospital practices (i.e. infant sleeping in a cot, the ‘need’ to bathe, weigh and measure baby within an hour, and the restrictions on cosleeping) are beginning down the breastfeeding path with a bottle feeding mentality. That is, we want to breastfeed, but still want to breastfeed in a bottle way – every couple of hours, and baby sleeps nicely in between. It is still difficult to get around the bottle culture idea that a baby feeds for a set amount of time, then sleeps for many hours. I try to tell moms that babies feed 8-12+ times in 24hrs, but if you do the math on that, that means babies could be feeding almost constantly, and that is hard for us to cope with since we live in a culture which has stressed the normalcy of babies sleeping (in a separate location) for long periods between feedings. This is compounded by hospital practices which don’t allow for mom to simply put baby between her bare breasts and leave him/her there for the next 24hrs. So, the human baby, which should be breastfed frequently and held constantly, sort of like a baby kangaroo, is being fed and cared for in a bottle feeding way, fed every few hours, and put in a cot to sleep. This results in less colostrum getting to the baby and stimulating the passage of meconium, which results in elevated bilirubin levels, which lead to the term ‘breastfeeding jaundice’ and cause people to see formula as the savior for the breastfed baby. In reality, if we treated human babies like human babies, or even like kangaroo babies, and cared, fed and nurtured them like the immobile, immature creatures they are – that is, they need to be held, they cannot ambulate over for their food, and they need to be fed frequently – then we would probably see the more normal and even healthy levels of jaundice that is normal for human babies. So ‘breastfeeding jaundice’ is really ‘bottle culture’ jaundice in my humble opinion. Caesy Clubb, RN, IBCLC West Linn, OR *********************************************** Archives: http://community.lsoft.com/archives/LACTNET.html Mail all commands to [log in to unmask] To temporarily stop your subscription: set lactnet nomail To start it again: set lactnet mail (or [log in to unmask]) To unsubscribe: unsubscribe lactnet or ([log in to unmask]) To reach list owners: [log in to unmask]