To the outrage of breastfeeding campaigners and probably the utter confusion of most women with small babies, scientists today advocate rewriting the rulebook to drop the current guidance that says mothers should breastfeed exclusively for the first six months of their child’s life. Modern scientists are saying that by failing to start weaning babies on to solids before six months, parents could be harming their babies health! We say – since when did science (which changes it’s mind from decade to decade) know better than the innate intelligence of nature which has been around and has supported life and reproduction since time began? Who told this mother when to introduce solid foods to her babies’ diet? Who told her mother, her grand mother, her great grandmother and those before her?? How did they all know?? They trusted their own intuition and I believe we should trust ours too!
Joanne Moorehead from the Guardian had this to say - The truth is that stories like this affect the most important thing a breastfeeding mother has, which is confidence that her milk can nourish her baby. As a society, we have been chipping away at that confidence since the middle of the 20th century, believing that what comes out of a bottle has to be better than what comes out of a breast.
What a tragedy that is: if breast milk was invented today, it would be the most valuable patent of all time. Nothing on earth has the potential to transform a generation’s health as much as breast milk, yet we undermine it simply because no one stands to make a profit and the budgets to defend it are minuscule. Breastfeeding works: the only thing we have to fix is our belief in it.
For the record Joanna says - I breastfed four babies exclusively for six months. They’re all healthy, none has been a fussy eater in the long term, none has ever been anaemic, and none has an allergy. Breastfeeding works. It just doesn’t have a big budget to promote itself, and as a society we’ve forgotten that the very best is sometimes what nature gives us for free.
Read more about the decline of the popularity of breastfeeding during the war years here. Government agencies advocated bottle feeding as being best for babies – because the government wanted mothers to be available to do the jobs that the men had left behind when they went to war!!!!! Was this information delivered to mothers for their welfare, or the welfare of their babies? – I DON’T THINK SO! By supporting mothers to do what they know is intuitively right for their baby we provide an opportunity for better health for both mother and child.