So many good reasons to breastfeed your baby. Here are 23 of my favorites.
1. Breast milk has never been recalled. Similac has. Oops, so has Enfamil. Ut oh, so has Good Start.
2. Breast milk has never been found to contain metal particles. Formula has. A great reason to breastfeed your baby is that you don’t want her to be drinking metal particles.
3. Breast milk has never killed 3 babies, caused renal failure in 158 others, and made 6,244 babies sick. But in this case it wasn’t from contaminated formula, right?
4. Breast milk doesn’t get stolen in huge quantities. (Hmm, I wonder how thieves would pull that off?) Because brand-name formula is so expensive, there’s a thriving black market trade in it.
5. Breast milk doesn’t get “off odor.” The off odor can make you sick to your stomach. Breastfeed your baby so you don’t vomit.
6. Your baby’s burps don’t smell hideously of miso soup.
7. Breast milk isn’t made in a laboratory or a factory where it can get contaminated with a deadly bacteria, cronobacter.
8. Breast milk has never been found to be contaminated with common warehouse beetles (larvae and adults).
9. A calf drinks cow milk, a kid drinks goat milk, a lamb drinks sheep milk, a human should drink ______ milk. A) Artificial B) Cow C) Human. You only get one choice.
Feed your baby the ‘bad’ formula, and he is blind at age one. Feed him branded formula, and he has picture perfect vision. This misleading advertisement of an alarmingly out-of-focus rubber ducky is a tactic used by formula manufacturers to lie to and scare new moms. Ah, but the generic and name brand formulas have the same ingredients from the same suppliers. If you want your child to have healthy vision, a smart brain, and optimal growth, BREASTFEED him.
10. In 1912 a pediatrician with twenty-five years of clinical experience, Henry L. Coit, tested the effect of feeding raw versus boiled cow’s milk on humans and other animals. He also reviewed previous experiments of giving one animal’s milk to another animal. He found that when human milk was fed to puppies they stayed alive but “in a very miserable condition,” and observed that: “All the animals fed by different methods of artificial feeding were inferior to the breast-fed animals, both at the time of the experiment and afterwards.”
11. Humans—like other mammals similar to us—have named ourselves after the very glands that produce milk. Unlike fish or reptiles, humans are of the Class Mammalia, bearing live young (instead of eggs), and suckling them with milk produced in the female’s mammary glands. Infant formula is not produced in the mammary glands.
12. Breastfeeding helps you lose weight.
13. When your baby is with you, he always has something safe and healthy to eat and drink.
14. Breastfeeding is less expensive.
15. Breastfeeding reduces your risk for diabetes.
16. Breastfeeding reduces your risk for breast cancer.
17. Breastfeeding helps you get more sleep.
18. Breastfeeding is cool.
19. Breastfeeding is fun.
20. Breastfeeding is sexy.
21. Breastfeeding advocates don’t “decline to comment” over and over when they are approached by journalists wanting to report on both sides of the story.
22. Breastfeeding advocates aren’t found guilty of a 5th infraction for running deliberately misleading advertising campaigns. Nor have they been told to pay $13.5 million for lying about their product.
23. Breastfeeding, especially extended breastfeeding, makes your baby smarter. Despite the advertisements to the contrary (see #22), adding synthetic fatty acids (DHA/ARA) extracted by processing alga or fungus with a toxic chemical, hexane to an artificial concoction of desiccated milk and corn syrup solids, does not.
What if you “can’t” breastfeed your baby?
If someone told you your breasts were broken, and you believed them, you have every right to be mad.
When a mom “isn’t able” to breastfeed, it’s a systems failure. Our society failed you. YOU did nothing wrong.
Related Content:
Breastfeeding Past Three
Tylenol and SIDS Have too Much in Common
Baby Reindeer Don’t Have Horns
Science Shows Breasts are Good for Babies, Bad for Business
Published: April 6, 2012
Last updated: December 19, 2019
The post 23 Reasons to Breastfeed Your Baby appeared first on Jennifer Margulis.
