Analytical scrutiny reveals how complex fluid nourishes infants and protects them from disease
"WHEN IT COMES to feeding infants, the mantra is "breast is best." A diet of breast milk for babies is correlated with benefits including less diarrhea as well as lower incidence of diabetes or asthma when compared to formula-fed babies. But precisely how breast milk confers those advantages is unclear. Scientists know the basic ingredients of breast milk but don't fully understand how exactly they work to provide optimum nutrition for infants and protect against disease.
2008 BF Challenge
Or, as it is known in the Philippines; The Breastfeeding Olympics
What: A fun event to challenge geographic areas to see who can get
the most babies breastfeeding at one time. The winners are determined
by a percentage of birthrate.
When: October 11, 2008
Time: 11:00 am your time
Why: To celebrate breastfeeding, to educate the general public, to
develop peer support, and to just have fun!
Location/Site: Anywhere you can get 2 or more moms together. Some
sites are in someone's home. Other sites are in hospitals. Sites can
be in a park, at a clinic, at City Hall, on the Capitol grounds, in a
Hi Smallbany! So... you know my husband, know Amy and Ray, the three of them went to your wedding 8 years ago?! Now you're big into the LLLI group locally, have two kids, I'm married to Mark, and somehow you found our blog and have been following it and seen photos of Ezra, etc. And I went to a LLL meeting 3 months ago that you were at, and we're sitting next to each other at the NENY Regional Perinatal Forum Breastfeeding Subgroup! With our babies!
Well hi!
And Saturday night at River Street Cafe (I linked to Dish and Dirt because... well... I enjoyed the food, but felt as though dining there WAS overly complicated!
Follow-up to the beginning of the last post (Train of thought):
Pediatricians are usually required to take ONE nutrition course, a couple developmental courses, and a briefing on breast feeding. The whole well-child visits idea came from the need to ensure all children in the US were receiving on-time vaccinations. The well-visits correspond with a schedule of vaccinations.
The health promotion/preventive medicine aspect of the visits is after-the-fact, and pediatricians are asked to provide parenting advice and preventive medicine care, when their education has largely been based on ILLNESS and disease. Western medicine is non-holistic and based on treatment rather than prevention. Yet MDs trained in treatment are being asked to provide all sorts of recommendations that end up being largely anecdotal and rarely evidence-based.
In one of my online discussion forums, the topic of pediatricians and parenting advice comes up over and over again. Every day there's another mom saying, "My pediatrician said ______!! But from everything I read and researched, speaking with other professionals, and following my mom instincts, I should be doing something else! What do I do?!"
It ranges from breastfeeding/nutrition advice to ... more breastfeeding and nutrition advice! Sleeping and schedules also come up often.
After reading yet another post and reassuring yet another mom that she doesn't have to start cereal RIGHT NOW with her four-month old, that he WILL learn to swallow food (what neurologically intact baby doesn't develop that ability once their extrusion reflex goes away later on!), that she shouldn't limit breastfeeding (since that's his main source of nutrition for the first year), that solids are more about practice and experimentation, not particularly nutrition, I decided to write this post.
Ezra and I spent the weekend in Goshen with my dad and Libby. It was a great time - my brother Tim and sister Maggie were there, as well as stepsister Mady and her daughter Rosie! We had a blast going to Mystic Aquarium on Saturday... and Ezra LOVED the huge tank of fish in the indoor exhibit! His little face was mesmerized by the fish swimming by.
It was over 90 degrees and the cool indoor exhibit was packed with people, but a note on the mirror in the women's restroom stated, "If you would like a quiet place to nurse your child, come to the administration office". If there was one place I appreciated a "nursing room", it was there!! THANK YOU!!! Honestly, once it got that packed in the exhibit, there was no way Ezra would settle to nurse, and it was ungodly hot outside. It was their "nurse's office" room, just off the main exhibits, and they had a "please do not disturb" sign for the door.
I found The International Breast Milk Project from the Ovusoft Forums...
From their site:
- 25% of my milk will be donated to infants orphaned by HIV/AIDS and 75% will be retained by Prolacta Bioscience for critically ill infants in the US.
Prolacta Bioscience is a US company (and the only company in the world at this point) that uses breast milk to create fortifiers to meet the nutritional needs of NICU babies. Often, even breast-fed NICU babies will need fortifiers to increase their caloric intake. And for premature or ill infants, breast milk is SERIOUSLY superior to cows' milk-based replacements.
A Random Post
I just completely my first day in my CLC training program down in White Plains, NY. This has been hosted by the The Breastfeeding Advocacy Network.
One little tidbit gleaned from my day (well...maybe two):
Did YOU know that there are closed-system non hospital-grade pumps on the market?? I didn't know - I've worked and had clinical at hospitals that exclusively used a certain brand of pumps. Now, they work well, and our hospital-grade pumps ARE closed-systems and safe for use for multiple users...
