The Breastfeeding Conspiracy
Believe it or not, formula isn't poison.
by Marjorie Ingall
December 11, 2006
Unlike Debra, I was serenely confident in my ability to breastfeed. I have hippie tendencies. I work at home, eat organic, and once lived in San Francisco, the epicenter of all things earthy-crunchy. But breastfeeding was not what I'd expected. Josie had difficulty latching from the start. I had to feed her through tubes and tiny medicine cups (because God forbid she should have nipple confusion and refuse to return to the breast after drinking from a bottle). I experienced plugged ducts and several bouts of mastitis so severe that my left breast turned the color of a Cosmopolitan and I ran fevers of 104 degrees. I saw a lactation consultant in the hospital the day Josie was born, then spent $995 on six sessions with her over the next four months. I then fought with my insurance company for nearly a year to be reimbursed. (Need it be said that not every woman can afford that kind of out-of-pocket expense?) I grimly persevered, despite a breast surgeon and even my midwife telling me it was okay to stop. But I couldn't let myself quit nursing.
Suddenly, at around the four-month mark, it got easier. I breastfed without further problems for another seven months, until Josie self-weaned. (She had places to go, stuffed animals to chew.) It wasn't until I sat down to write this story that I started to think about why I'd been as obsessive as I was. I'd wanted a natural childbirth, and didn't have one. I'd had to be induced because of dangerously low amniotic fluid, and I couldn't handle the pain of Pitocin-induced contractions. So I had an epidural. And I felt like a failure. Breastfeeding was my last chance to get something right.
But could it be that we've been tormenting ourselves with guilt and pumps unnecessarily? There are new studies suggesting that breast milk may not be quite as stratospherically superior to formula as we've been lead to believe.Women who breastfeed tend to be wealthier and better educated than women who don't, so it's hard to tease apart how much of the benefit to their children comes from breastfeeding.
Asked about the pressure to breastfeed, Andrew Liu, MD, Assistant Professor in Pediatric Allergy & Clinical Immunology at the National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver says, laughing, "Guilt begins at conception!" He elaborates: "I think we all look for a magic bullet, the one thing we can do to insure that our kids come out perfect in an uncertain world. And there's something about human nature that wants us to see what we eat as the cause of poor or healthful outcomes." But, Liu says, in his field, there's actually conflicting evidence as to whether breastfeeding is helpful. "There have been excellent studies around the world, following young children for a long time, and they still come back with conflicting data," he says.
It is true that breastfed babies are healthier in many ways than formula-fed ones. But does that in and of itself prove a causal relationship between health and breast milk? Women who breastfeed tend to be wealthier and better educated than women who don't, so it's hard to tease apart how much of the benefit to their children comes from breastfeeding and how much comes from other factors correlated with money and education. (For instance, women who breastfeed are less likely to smoke.)
A large study recently co-conducted by the University of Edinburgh and Scotland's Medical Research Council found that breastfed babies do indeed tend to be smarter than formula-fed babies. But it also found that mothers who breastfeed also tend to have higher IQs and more education, and tend to provide more stimulating home environments than formula-feeding mothers. Once the numbers were corrected to account for the mom's IQ, the relationship between breastfeeding and intelligence disappeared. (And there was no statistical difference between siblings when one was breastfed and one wasn't.) The study, analyzing data on nearly 5,500 American children, was published in the British Medical Journal in October 2006. Previous studies, for the most part, hadn't factored in the mom's IQ when declaring that breastfeeding made babies smarter.
©2006 Marjorie Ingall and Nerve Media
About the Author
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Marjorie Ingall is a contributing writer at Self and a columnist for The Forward. She's written for Glamour, The New York Times, Food & Wine and Sassy. |
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