Breast (milk) is indeed best!
This shouldn’t come as any kind of surprise to anyone who has actually researched the matter (or even just thought it through), but it’s always nice to see acknowledged the fact that breast milk is what’s best for newborn babies.
Indeed, for babies born early or underweight, it can be nothing less than life-saving!
UC San Diego Medical Center recently launched a website dedicated to offering families and the medical community valuable information about the best way to provide human milk to premature and underweight infants. The website was developed with a $10,000 grant from The March of Dimes’ San Diego chapter. “One of the goals of this website is to help fellow hospitals adapt our model of human milk nutrition in their own neonatal intensive care units,” said Jae Kim, MD, PhD, medical director of the Supporting Premature Infant Nutrition Program (SPIN) at UC San Diego Medical Center. “Since the implementation of our feeding protocols, we have seen rates of human milk feeding go up by 15 percent. We’d love to see this become a nationwide trend.”
Infants born prematurely sometimes develop an infection called necrotizing enercolitis (NEC), the most common life-threatening gastrointestinal emergency in the newborn period. NEC causes intense inflammation and acute intestinal necrosis or death, compromising one to five percent of all NICU admissions and affecting 10 percent of infants born at less than three pounds. Before the SPIN program started, the rate of NEC at UCSD Medical Center was 5.8 percent; last year it was less than 1 percent.
While I will grant the point that some women cannot produce breast milk in sufficient quantity to support a growing infant, I generally tend to think that formula just…shouldn’t be. Not only is there a ton of crap in the stuff that babies really don’t need to be exposed to, but the whole idea behind it is just…it’s very much a product of our modern culture’s disordered attitude toward babies, children, and child-rearing. It’s a convenience feature, for the most part, a substitute for the breast milk that a mother should be providing for her children but is unable to because she is not at home with said children; she is at work instead.
Which in turn speaks to larger disorders in society. It’s bad enough that our society has misled — or attempted to mislead — women into thinking that motherhood is of secondary importance to things like continued education or career advancement. It’s equally bad (if not worse) that living day-to-day in Western society has become so prohibitively expensive that both mother and father, in the average home, must work day jobs just to make ends meet.
Thus far, Grace and I have managed to avoid the latter, and I am more than blessed that Grace’s attitude is very much the opposite of the former; she takes her duty as a mother very seriously, and her love for Ella is beyond question or reproach. And yes, she breastfeeds. We have a can of formula in the house, which I believe we received in the mail because we signed up for…something baby-related. We’ve never even cracked the seal on it, and after reviewing the ingredients have more or less avoided any thought of doing so.
Breast is best, and life-saving at that. But this much we already knew, or at least could have suspected; it’s not exactly a secret that breast-fed babies have better immune systems and fewer allergies (on average).
Lest I sound too harsh, I will again note that some mothers just can’t breastfeed, or at least cannot exclusively breastfeed. Physiology being variable from person to person, it’s understandable that some women simply cannot produce enough milk to satisfy the nutritional needs of their children. It’s justifiable, in such situations, to use artificial sources of nutrition to satisfy the needs of the child. But only then, I think.
(hat tip)
