Breast is not always best

I can feel a controversy brewing.

Joan Wolf, an American academic, examines the medical studies on breastfeeding in painstaking detail in her forthcoming book.

Her conclusion?

“The evidence to date suggests it probably doesn’t make much difference if you breastfeed.”

And the many of the world's leading experts agree. While breastfeeding is beneficial for babies, some of its benefits have apparently been 'oversold' to new mothers. Wolf, herself a mother and one that did breastfeed her babies, says she was shocked by the information that she found. One of the major problems she says is that it is very hard to separate the benefits of the mother’s milk from the benefits of the kind of mother who chooses to breastfeed. In the UK, for example, the highest class of women are 60 per cent more likely to breastfeed than the lowest, so it is not surprising that research shows that breastfed infants display all the health and educational benefits they were born into. In effect, breastfeeding studies could simply be showing what it’s like to grow up in a family that makes an effort to be healthy and responsible, as opposed to anything positive in breast milk.

Michael Kramer, professor of paediatrics at McGill University, Montreal agrees. He has advised the World Health Organisation, Unicef and the esteemed scientific body, the Cochrane Library, and been conducting research into the health effects of breastfeeding since 1978. “The public health breastfeeding promotion information is way out of date,” Kramer says. The trouble is, he said, that the breastfeeding lobby is at war with the formula milk industry, and “neither side is being very scientific ... when it becomes a crusade, people are not very rational.”

Thoughts?

A story of (breast)milk

Fantastic article by Jill Lepore this week in The New Yorker about the history of breastfeeding and how it has come to pass that more American women are pumping their milk:

"Pumping is no fun—whether it’s more boring or more lonesome I find hard to say—but it has recently become so common that even some women who are home with their babies all day long express their milk and feed it in a bottle. Behind closed doors, the nation begins to look like a giant human dairy farm."

Check it out: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/01/19/090119fa_fact_lepore?currentPage=1

How many of you out there pump? Does your workplace have a room for expressing or nursing?

Wentz sour on breastmilk

Leave it to Pete Wentz to warm your heart on Christmas.

After talking about his sexual escapades with recently pregnant wife Ashlee Simpson, today Wentz described tasting his wife's breastmilk as "soury and weird". He went on to tell Sirius Satellite Radio, "The baby loves it, it's the only thing he's had a chance to have."

Ya think?

Source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/detail?blogid=7&entry_id=33953

Breast milk jewelry?

Yes, you did read that title correctly. JEWELRY. MADE. OF. BREAST. MILK.

A French design collective, Duende, is displaying a collection of objects that explore the sharing of food between mother and child in France in September.

Objects will include containers for burying the placenta, tableware for the ritual of eating the placenta and conceptual jewellery that could be made from the mother’s breast milk.

The 'milk pearl' shown above is made from solidified casein, the protein in animal/human breast milk. According to the designers:

"The ‘Perle de lait’ range of jewellery imagines a new set of personalized post-natal objects. The breast-feeding mother sends a feeding bottle full of her milk to a laboratory where it is transformed into a gem-like substance that can be mounted on a neck-piece or any other form of jewellery."

The objects in the collection are evocative and beautiful:

http://www.dezeen.com/2008/07/02/la-part-des-anges-by-duende/