Enough With the Breast-feeding Wars!

No one is saying deny impoverished mothers access to information. Lenore, I believe, if trying to say that we need to stop shaming mothers that choose formula or shaming women who breastfeed.

Leanne makes a good point.

Right now the gov't promotes formula to poor women through the WIC program and promotes breast feeding to middle class and rich women by allowing a tax deduction for breast pumps.

I have no problem with any woman's choice on this matter--but choices are affected by available info and economic restrictions.

After you have been spending $75-$100 per month on formula for 2 to 3 months and are looking at another year of it, it is a bit late to decide to breastfeed.

I don't know if I'm responding to this thread in the right order, but it's not at all my experience that WIC promotes formula. You can get it if you need it, but what's wrong with that? They shouldn't provide it? There are many reasons lower income women have lower breastfeeding rates, but I really don't think one of the most successful government programs ever providing nutritious food to women and children has anything to do with it. It may be anecdotal, but every woman I know who gets WIC is an exclusive breastfeeder.

I am poor, on WIC and exclusively breastfeeding. My family was on welfare when I was a child, though it isn't now. I live with my mom and I don't work outside of the home. I'm also white and have a college education, and have done a lot of research. My older daughter was formula fed, is at a healthy weight and though she's in fourth grade, she reads at a high school level. Though I'm only one person and anecdotal evidence is not good science, it seems to me that education and parental involvement have a lot more to do with good outcomes than really anything else.

Really? Cite your source. According to "research" you should also have numerous ear infections, asthma, allergies, be cognitively deficient, and obese too. You would have had MS whether you were breast or formula fed. The "research" on that subject only SUGGESTS that mothers who have MS may not have as many exacerbations while they breast feed - not that being formula fed caused you to develop the disease.

You are siting the research release a couple years ago from Stanford. Actually, Eloise Gulick's research spotlighted the benefits of breastfeeding for the mother a few years ago and was nice enough to share her articles with me, but there are studies which show that breastfeeding does help to keep children from developing MS.

You need to look at the overall probability of development of a given illness. As I said the probability is more on the side that I would not have developed MS had I been breastfed. I firmly believe that breast milk is what is meant to be fed to our babies and young children by millions of years of evolution if you believe that or was designed by God if you believe that. Our lifestyles today have nothing to do with this fact. I am certainly not saying it is the only factor whether an individual develops a certain disease or not, but the absence of it or a short duration - less than what is expected of our species certainly can be a contributing factor.

Here is one of the studies:

i. Multiple Sclerosis
Although thought to be multifactorial in origin, and without a clearly defined etiology, lack of breastfeeding does appear to be associated with an increased incidence of multiple sclerosis.
Source: Dick, G. "The Etiology of Multiple Sclerosis. " Proc Roy Soc Med 1976;69:611-5.


Another study also looks not only at lack of breastfeeding, duration of breastfeeding, but also at the possibility that there could be a connection in the immunities:

Breast feeding and multiple sclerosis

1. A Pisacane,
2. N Impagliazzo,
3. M Russon,
4. R Valiani,
5. A Mandarini,
6. C Florio,
7. P Vivo

+ Author Affiliations

1.
Departmento di Pediatria Universitia di Napoli Federico II, Via Pansini 5, 80131 Naples, Italy.
2.
Divisione di Neurologia Ospedale Antonio Cardarelli, Napoli e Associazione Italiana Sclerosi Multipla, Naples, Italy.

* Accepted 17 December 1993

Several studies indicate that multiple sclerosis might be a rare result of delayed exposure to a common infectious agent,1 but some authors have suggested a “geographical predisposing factor” that could be associated with the diet in industrialised countries.2 We investigated the association between multiple sclerosis and breast feeding in a case-control study.

Patients, methods, and results

Cases and controls were selected from the patients attending the neurological outpatient department of Cardarelli General Hospital, Naples, where neurologists from the Italian association for multiple sclerosis follow up about 300 patients with this disease. Cases were all the patients observed between 1 March and 31 May 1993 who had a definite diagnosis of multiple sclerosis according to the criteria of Poser et al.3 Controls were the first patients observed in the same department during the same period who matched the cases in terms of age (plus or minus five years) and sex. Patients who declined to be interviewed or could not provide reliable information about their feeding during infancy were excluded.

The groups were contacted by two interviewers, who were blind to the objectives of the study and interviewed the same number of patients from each group. Whenever possible the mothers of the patients were interviewed, otherwise the patients provided the information, usually quoting their mothers. Relative risk was calculated by odds ratios with confidence intervals by Cornfield's method. Confounding and effect modification were investigated by stratified analysis. Ninety three cases and 93 controls were enrolled in the study. The diagnoses of controls were back pain and sciatic nerve injury (56), hemicrania (19), polyneuropathies (15), and other (four). The information was provided by the mothers for 56 (60%) cases and 54 (58%) controls.

The table shows characteristics of the groups. The mean (SD) duration of breast feeding was 8.4 (6.9) months for cases and 12.5 (7.5) months for controls (t=-3.9, df=184, P=0.001). The distribution of feeding was the same whether data were provided by the mothers or by the patients. Stratified analysis showed that no factor among those we analysed (birth weight, type of delivery, social class, sex, age group, number of other children in the household) confounded or modified the association between feeding and illness.
View this table:

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Characteristics of patients with multiple sclerosis according to case-control status
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Comment

Our data indicate that patients with multiple sclerosis were less likely than controls to have been breast fed for a prolonged period of time. Selection bias is unlikely because cases and controls were contacted in the same department and their mothers were all contacted by telephone by the same interviewers. The validity of information on feeding may be a limit of our methods, but there is no reason to suspect a differential recall between cases and controls.

There are several reasons why prolonged breast feeding may be associated with a decreased risk of multiple sclerosis. Cow's milk contains lower amounts of unsaturated fatty acids, and a different composition of cortex grey matter has been described in bottle fed infants.4 This fact could be associated by means of the formation of defective membranes with easier entry of an infective agent across the blood-brain barrier or with accelerated degradation of myelin itself.2 Human milk might actively influence the immune system of the offspring by different mechanisms,5 and some features of the immune response among those who have been breast fed for a prolonged period may last for a long time. Alternatively, prolonged breast feeding may be a marker of some unknown socioeconomic characteristic that could be associated with a low risk of illness. The prevalence of prolonged breast feeding in industrialised countries is currently much lower compared with the time when our patients were born. Should our data be confirmed another point would be added to the long list of the benefits of prolonged breast feeding.
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References

1. ↵
1. Martyn CN
.Childhood infection and adult disease.In: The childhood environment and adult disease.Chichester: Wiley,1991: 93–108. (Ciba Foundation Symposia 156.)
2. ↵
1. Agranoff BW,
2. Goldberg D
.Diet and the geographical distribution of multiple sclerosis.Lancet1974;ii:1061–6.
3. ↵
1. Poser CM,
2. Paty DW,
3. Scheinberg L,
4. McDonald WI,
5. Davis FA,
6. Ebers GC,
7. et al
.New diagnostic criteria for mutiple sclerosis: guidelines for research protocols Ann Neurol1983;13:227–31.
4. ↵
1. Farquharson J,
2. Cockburn F,
3. Patrick WA,
4. Jamieson EC,
5. Logan RW
.Infant cerebral cortex phospholipid fatty-acid composition and diet.Lancet1992;340:810–3.
[CrossRef][Medline][Web of Science]
5. ↵
1. Hanson LA,
2. Ahlstedt S,
3. Andersson B,
4. Carlsson B,
5. Fallstrom SP,
6. Mellander L,
7. et al
.Protective factors in milk and the development of the immune system.Pediatrics1985;75:172–6.
[Abstract/FREE Full text]




I encourage you to do an internet search if you are more interested in the topic. Thank you for your question.
Kitty

All women should have easy access to information to make the choices she feels are best for her: I'll agree with that. But if you think mothers aren't shamed for choosing to formula, you're either in denial or living under a rock. Anytime a mother on the internet mentions having chosen formula for her children, she's treated as a bad mother.

As for the rise in preventable disease, I call bullshit. Instead of blaming that on formula, try looking at things like the anti-vaccine movement and a decrease in preventive healthcare for underprivileged children. You might also want to take a peak into resistant bacteria: the longer and more often we use antibiotics, the fast bacteria evolve to become resistant to them and thus become more dangerous to us. There's also an increased use of hand sanitizer, which weakens our immune system because it kill the "good germs" on our skin, which protect us and causes the dangerous ones to become resistant. I bet those four factors have a lot more to do with a rise in preventable disease than formula feeding. The developmental advantages of breast milk end around 3 years of age when formula fed children catch up.

Alicia, I totally agree that formula feeding women are being shamed, and it is awful. At Best for Babes we have taken a ZERO tolerance position on any judging of moms. We are also doing more than any other non-profit to help mothers who can not breastfeed or choose not to.

I agree that there are many factors that influence health. But just as you would not deny the value of hugging your children on their emotional and physical health, you shouldn't deny the value of breastfeeding. Both are only part of healthy parenting, but I don't think breastfeeding efforts should be thwarted routinely any more than I think moms should be prevented from hugging and holding their babies.