The Breastfeeding Conspiracy
Believe it or not, formula isn't poison.
by Marjorie Ingall
December 11, 2006
Certainly the Scottish study indicates it's unlikely that breastfeeding will make my baby smarter. (The fact that I am a total mega mongo genius will.) But as for another frequently touted benefit of breastfeeding, postpartum weight loss, another recent study indicated that breastfeeding doesn't help women shed pregnancy weight. Researchers at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center found women who breastfed actually shed about two-and-a-half pounds less than those who didn't nurse. Study author Karen Wosje, Ph.D. said, "Nursing women tend to exercise less and have higher levels of the hormone prolactin, which stimulates appetite to help milk production."
As for cancer prevention, Mary Jane Minkin, a clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Yale University School of Medicine, says that maintaining a healthy weight and exercising are far more important than breastfeeding. And as with intelligence, having good genes is probably the best strategy of all. Not much you or your baby can do about that one.
Still, the U.S. Government's "Healthy People 2010" initiative set a goal of 75% of all new moms initiating breastfeeding, 50% exclusively breastfeeding when their babies at six months, and 25% still nursing when their babies are a year old. In 2001, the last year for which statistics were available, 70% of all women initiated breastfeeding, 33% were still nursing at six months (though not exclusively; of those only 17% weren't also using formula) and 18% were still nursing six months after that. Those numbers have been inching up steadily since the 1960s. But if more of us are getting the message that breast milk is best, then why are only 17% of us still exclusively breastfeeding at six months? Not every workplace is conducive to pumping.
For one thing, our world certainly doesn't make it easy for women to breastfeed. Family-leave policies in the U.S. lag far behind the rest of the industrialized world. A survey of sixteen European countries and Canada found that these countries provide an average of sixty-eight weeks of maternity leave, with thirty-three of those weeks paid. At my last job, I got six weeks paid leave. And not every workplace is conducive to pumping. (Several self-styled experts have informed me that anyone, anywhere can pump. I challenge them to show me how the girl working the fry-o-later at the fast-food place on the corner is going inform her manager that she's going to take forty minutes off every four hours to haul her electric pump into his office, which he should obligingly vacate for her, then provide facilities and opportunity for her to sterilize her equipment and store her milk. Not on this planet.) And not every woman wants to or can afford to be a stay-at-home mother.
Some experts say the problem is that women still aren't informed enough about how beneficial breastfeeding is. They believe that doctors are cowed into underselling breastfeeding by the powerful formula lobby, and that women lack social support for nursing. "Less than five percent of the U.S. population can't breastfeed," says Nancy E. Wight, MD, a neonatologist at Children's Hospital in San Diego and an Internationally Board Certified Lactation Consultant. "And babies not being breastfed has great costs to society. This is a public health issue, not just a lifestyle choice. It's like car seats and immunizations. If a mom chooses not to use a car seat and something happens to her child, of course she'll feel guilty. If we inform women of the risks of not breastfeeding, and women make a different choice, they need to understand there will be repercussions. If your doctor tells you to lose weight or manage your cholesterol and you don't, and you feel guilty, is that guilt such a bad thing?"
Some women say they stopped breastfeeding because their babies weren't gaining weight. But until recently, most experts insisted that insufficient milk supply was actually quite rare, and usually caused by "mismanagement," lactation-speak for human error. Peggy Robin, the author of Bottlefeeding Without Guilt (Prima, 1995, renamed When Breastfeeding is Not an Option in 1998) asks, "Why is it so hard to believe that there really are women with low milk production? There are diabetics for whom the pancreas doesn't make enough insulin; there are hemophiliacs whose blood doesn't make enough clotting factor; there are people whose eyes don't make enough tears or whose ovaries don't make enough estrogen. Why do we think the breast is the one body part that always works perfectly?" She adds, dryly, "And telling someone to nurse through agonizing pain is like telling someone with a broken leg, oh, just walk it off."
©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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