November 30, 2009 • 26 mins
To breastfeed or not to breastfeed? That is the question. Join Molly and Cristen as they sift through numerous studies and anecdotal information in search of the answer in this episode of Stuff Mom Never Told You.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff Mom never told you?
From house stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. This is Kristen, This is Molly, So Molly.
(00:20):
Since we're talking about breastfeeding today, I thought i'd share
a recent anecdote that happened in our house Stuff Works
offices to MOI, uh, we have a dedicated lactation room.
We were one of those offices that does what it
can to provide nice facilities for um lactating moms. And
(00:40):
it's basically, you know, as as you probably know since
you work here. It's an old office you know, still
got a phone in it and everything. And one morning
I needed to I need to use the phone. I
just needed a quiet place to use the phone. And
the lactation room was open because it was, like I said,
it was early in the morning. And what I didn't
know was at the door locks behind you. So I
(01:01):
went in there and got all my stuff there and
try to make a phone call and the person wasn't
available yet, So I decided to leave and then come
back later. So I came back and lo and Behold,
the lactation room was locked. I was locked out, yes,
with someone in there using it. No, No, the door
was just the door was just locked. And um, so
I knew that our office manager had a key, so
(01:24):
I went around looking for him, and lo and behold,
he is in our break room. And it was in
the morning, so it was pretty crowded with people this morning.
It was all men, all getting coffee, all talking about football.
I kid you not. So I was just standing there
awkwardly in the doorway, trying to, you know, like telepathically
communicate to our office manager that I needed him to
(01:46):
come out of the break room and talk to me.
And finally he saw me, and and all of the
men noticed me standing awkwardly in the doorway, and um,
he asked me what I needed. I said, well, Michael,
I uh, I need to get into the lactation room,
at which point all the men in our office, knowing
(02:07):
that I am, you know, not a not a mom,
not married, uh, kind of got pretty quiet. And I
noticed I've traveled stealthily or not so stealthily from from
my face do my bust, and at which point I said,
it's for the phone, not for these and blushed and
(02:32):
walked away awkwardly. Would you say you learned any lessons
about using the lactation room for non lactation purposes? Never
closed the door behind even the lactation room. Do you
find yourself with the house stuff works offices and you
need to make a phone called a lactation room, make
sure the doors cracked because you're not getting back in
A good lesson, A good life lesson for everyone, I think.
But I think it's great though, that we do have
(02:53):
the lactation room for women who you know, who do
need to use. I think it's nice because it's really not.
It's not all that common, you know, it's not. I
just wrote an article called dust Breastfeeding Make Better Babies,
which is what we're going to discuss today, and it
was kind of disheartening to see around this country how
hard it is for working moms too to pump their
breast milk for later use. Right. Not only is there
(03:16):
are a lot of people uncomfortable with the thought of
women breastfeeding in public, which has angered many mothers. I mean,
I can understand and women have even had There was
an incident a couple of years ago when Barbara Walters
made a comment about how, um, a woman who is
breastfeeding next to her on a plane really made her uncomfortable,
and um, as a result, a bunch of women got
(03:37):
together and had a what do they called a breast
in a feed in I think outside the ABC offices
because she mentioned this on the view, and uh, it
really angered a lot of these women who were saying,
like we were constantly being uh judged for breastfeeding our
children in public. But you know what I mean, we
can't babies. Babies don't know where they are, they so
(04:00):
that they need the milk right. And so when I
was researching this, it was amazing just how much judgment
there is on every single side of this. And I'm
sure we're gonna get tons of mail no matter um
how we how we phrase this podcast, Christian, because it
seems like right now women who do breastfeed are judged
for doing it in public for not doing it, and
you know what other people deem an appropriate place, um,
(04:21):
women who don't breastfeed, or judge for maybe not not
doing what's best for their babies, which was sort of
what this article goes into, whether it really is best
for a baby, And you know it just it's I
think it's kind of sad that moms who are already
stressed out enough have to deal with all this judgment
just by she's by feeding a child. Yeah, I mean,
I would venture to say that breastfeeding is the number
(04:41):
one most contentious issue involved with motherhood today, right, so
let's just get into whether it's really something to be
contentious about. I was really struck by learning that, UM,
the US Department of Health and Human Services ran these
public service announcements UM and two thousand four and two
thousand and six that showed pregnant women writing mechanical bulls
and then they'd fall off, and then the commercial will
(05:03):
be like, you wouldn't take risk when you're pregnant, why
take risks when you're having a new baby, saying, basically,
the risk of writing a mechanical bowl while you're pregnant
is the same as the risk that not breastfeeding your
child in curse. Yeah, and the the American Academy of
Pediatrics Pediatrics currently recommends the mother's feed their babies exclusively
with breast milk, and that it's not necessarily breastfeeding, that's
(05:24):
just breast milk. Right, For the first six months of life.
So we've got these you know, big government health institutions
saying you know, breast milk is best. Yes. And I
think the reason that, um, we needed such a big
campaign about this in the United States is I think
that more than any other country, two things happened. One, Um,
(05:45):
we sexualized the breast to the point that people got
freaked out at certain points when a woman would whip
it out to feed a child. And Two, I think
that our society is more susceptible to sort of the
formula arguments that came about in the late eighteen eighties,
Like you said, in the late eighteen eighties, baby formula
arrived on the market and women start to think that
(06:07):
they were unable to breastfeed. Um. And it might have
been because doctors were actually paid off by formula manufacturers
to tell this to these new mothers, right, And so
it became kind of, um, a lower class thing to breastfeed,
because if you could afford the formula, then you would
give formula to your chat. And it seemed to be
a very scientific thing. Some doctors who were telling women
(06:27):
that the children weren't getting enough to eat when they breastfed,
so they'd say measure out exactly this many ass of formula,
and that way you can be sure that your doctors,
I mean, that your children get enough to eat. And
even before formula came around, a lot of the upper
class women would have wet nurses who would breastfeed their
children for them. So there was still this kind of
(06:48):
societal stigma involved with with breastfeeding in the US. Right,
So the shift back to the breast comes around the
nineteen fifties to the nineteen seventies. In ninety eight we've
got the formation of La Leche League, a famous support
group for breastfeeding women, and it was a group of
Catholic moms who said, you know what, God wants women
(07:08):
to use their bodies to breastfeed. And then just a
few years later, nineteen seventy one, the famous book Our Bodies,
Ourselves comes out and shows women that their bodies are
not to you know, please men, that breasts aren't just
you know, sexual objects, that they are uh endowed with
a purpose to give breast milk to baby. So I
think that that was sort of the real revolution, a
(07:28):
combination of UM Catholic moms and feminists. So we have
this cultural history UM with breastfeeding. But what do studies say,
Because this is where things kind of start to get tricky, because, um,
as we'll find out in a in a few moments,
a lot of these studies, UM seemed to say that
(07:52):
breastfeeding is the best you know, it's going to prevent
all the host of diseases from your infant. But at
the same time, when you look closer at all of
these studies, uh, they aren't as iron clad as you
might think, right. And when I started researching all these studies,
it was just amazing all the benefits that get promised women.
I mean, it really does seem like this magical lixir
of life. UM. The t s A. You know, you
(08:14):
can only carry three ounces of UM liquids on board
of plane. They classified breast milk as liquid medicine so
that women could carry more of it. And so UM,
there's this, you know, just this big ship that what's
in that milk is the absolute best thing, the most
nutritionally balanced meal you can give an infant. UM. Now,
the things that the diseases and conditions that breast milk
(08:34):
promises to prevent our sudden infant death, syndrome, respiratory infections, meningitis, pneumonia, diarrhea,
ear infections, asthma, diabetes, autoimmune diseases such as crons and leukemia,
just to name a few. I mean, it is study
after study of diseases that are that are promised to avoid. Now,
(08:54):
I will say Christina, and I started reading all these studies,
I felt a little bit biased because I know that
I was not breastfed, and I'm I'm a healthy person.
I think, I think I'm a superre specimen of human
being and so um. I really started to kind of
dig deeper because I was like, surely my mother would
not disadvantage me so much just by feeding me a bottle.
(09:16):
You know, is this true? Because the American Academy of
Pediatrics is saying that if all babies were breastfed, we
would save three point six billion an annual healthcare a coffs.
Right and uh and Molly, I was a breastfed child,
and because of that, according to research, I was given
a rich formula of natural antibodies, hormones, neuropeptides, and natural
(09:38):
opioids that right now formulas can't necessarily replicate. And that
is why they think that breast milk has all of
this life giving magical properties, right, And you know it's
not just good for the baby. There's tons of stuff
about how good it is for a mother to um.
It probably lessens depression and the mother thanks to the
(09:58):
oxytocin that's in the blood in the breast milk UM,
it can help you heal after childbirth and you have
a lower risk of heart attacks, stroke, diabetes, and osteoporosis.
But the thing about it is is that all these
studies are not as iron clad as as they might seem, right,
because it comes down to this whole issue of correlation
(10:21):
versus causation. And this was there was an article written
by Hannah Rosen earlier this year in the Atlantic. It's
highly controversial, and she um basically said that, well, I
think she does breastfeed her children. But she said that, um,
all these studies heralding the amazing benefits of breast milk
UM are not very consistent and that they can only
(10:43):
show an associative relationship and not a causal relationship. Uh.
In other words, you can't say that the actual breastfeeding,
the milk coming from the breast directly into the child's body,
is causing all these beneficial outcomes. Um. In fact, it
my just be more of the time spent with a child,
and that that closeness to physical closeness to the mother,
(11:07):
and also just other factors that might lead a woman
to breastfeed. Right now, in this country, the women who
breastfeed are largely upper class. They have really great educations. Um,
they're probably in good shape themselves. So let's take something
like obesity. The study says that breastfeeding UH lowers the
rate of childhood obesity. Does the breast milk do it?
(11:28):
Or does the fact that you have a healthy, educated
mother who knows you know what to serve for dinner
so that you can balance meal and takes you out
for walks does that? Is that what makes the difference?
Is it just you know, being born into a house
where a woman takes the time to educate herself about
breastfeeding versus a woman who you know is busy in
works and may not be around as much when you're
an infant. It's just impossible to separate out all those factors.
(11:51):
And I will say, you know, I worked in UH.
I worked in daycare for a couple of years, um,
a lifetime ago. It seems like now and I worked
in the infant room for a while and you could
definitely see the difference between the children who um received
a lot of parental interaction when they weren't in daycare
(12:12):
and the ones who might not have. I mean, I
think there really is a developmental curve with that. I
mean I say that from just a very um anecdotal perspective. Um.
But still, I think one of the most telling studies
to talk about when we when we're discussing breastfeeding is
this thing um called probit Yeah. Um. And it was
conducted in two thousand one by Michael Kramer of McGill University,
(12:35):
and basically he evaluated the breastfeeding effects on seventeen thousand
children in Belarus. Yeah. And the thing that really is
kind of unique about the study is all the other studies.
In addition to not being able to separate out um,
those you know, coinciding factors, it's also people who are
self selecting into a certain study. You know, you're saying, okay,
(12:56):
I'm already breastfeeding study me, and women are saying, okay,
well I'm not going to speed you can study me.
So it's not very random, which is usually a factory
like to see in scientific studies, and also um, scientific
studies really don't have the ethical ability to tell a
woman what to breastfeed, I mean, what how to feed
a child, so they can't say, hey, you breastfeed and
you don't. So you know, these groups aren't really random.
(13:18):
You're getting um kind of a bias group to start with.
So that's what Kramer tried to address in this study
because rather than telling a woman how to feed their children,
he just followed women who had been breastfeeding, and some
of them received this inter intervention where they were told, hey,
breastfeed more, it's the best thing for your baby, and
the other women were just sort of allowed to stop
(13:39):
when they were going to stop anyway. And so then
he compared those two groups, the women who didn't breastfeed
as long as the group that received an intervention and
did breastfeed longer. So, in a nutshell, Kramer's research showed that, yes,
breastfeeding is a little bit better than than formula feeding,
but it's not necessarily These are near words, Molly, from
(13:59):
your from your article, if I may quote you, the
universal panacea that its supporters claim, because they said the
extended breastfeeding can reduce the risk of eczema and also
reduced a risk of gastro intestional intestinal infection by UM.
And in addition, Kramer found that breastfed babies scored seven
point five points higher on i Q tests than other babies,
(14:23):
but he said that those results really weren't that statistically significant, right,
and those are just verbal tests UM. Two point nine
tests on non verbal intelligence UM. One of my favorite
quotes when I when I was reading this articles, Kramer says, yes,
seven point five points higher on i Q test, which
I saw just duplicated on all sorts of breastfeeding sites.
(14:43):
But Kramer says, it's not like this is the difference
between a genius and a mentally retarded child. That's a
direct quote I wasn't mine, UM, And he said he
actually likened them to the difference between a firstborn child
and a second porn child, because think of how much
extra time you have to vote to that first born child, UM,
and then when you have the second child, it's not
like you give them any less care, but your tensions
(15:06):
are divided somewhat. And so studies have shown that you know,
birth order matters, and it may just be that maybe
the only difference that breastfeeding maybe comes down to. It's
just that difference between a firstborn child who's continually followed
around to make sure that everything is stimulating and nothing
is painful, versus the second born, who admittedly maybe falls
down a little bit more. And you know, it's it's
(15:28):
less deemed precious. You know, Molly were you was second
and that was the first born, which is why I'm
talking about how smart they are. But you know, um,
you just have more time with that firstborn. And maybe
that's the difference in the i Q and the and
the breastfeeding. Yeah, and and I thought it was interesting
that they scored higher on verbal intelligence because Cramer suggested
(15:50):
that those benefits are coming from the time spent with
the mothers. And you would think, you know, the mother
is gonna be sitting there, She's probably gonna be talking
to her baby. You know. Maybe uh, I don't know,
maybe they just pick up language a little little quicker
because of that. Yeah time, I think that you sit
there and you coo with the baby. Now, I'd be
interested to see a study where, like, um, a woman
(16:11):
just focuses exclusively on breastfeeding versus a woman who breastfeeds,
but like watches TV at the same time or talks
on theself and at the same time, Like, I wonder
how much of it has to do with like looking
at the baby and talking to the baby. So I
don't know, that's that's a big question for me. But
obviously with working mothers today, we don't all have time
(16:31):
to breastfeed our children. We have a lactation room in
our office for working moms who can't breastfeed, but they
still want to give their children breast milk, and so
they use this thing called a breast pump. Right. And
this UM, despite being a very common access rate for
women in the workplace today, only really came on the
marketplace in the previous to that was mainly just a
(16:52):
hospital accessory UM. But now that maternity leaves in the
United States are so short, women are buying them and
taking them to work, and you in the lactation room
when Kristen isn't in it making her phone calls. So
just reading UM this research when I was wearing this
article where it seems that breastfeedings benefits come more from
the time you spend with your child, I just wonder
if women are going through a lot of unnecessary pain
(17:14):
to pump out breast milk. But there are Like we
said earlier, though, there are certain antibodies and chemicals in
your breast milk that formula cannot replicate. True right now,
True that could be beneficial um for the child. When
I was researching this article, I came across a few
things that compared breasts to placentas and that they take
(17:37):
over the role that the placenta serves when the baby
is in the womb in terms of delivering all these
essential nutrients to a child. But I did find a
pretty interesting piece on Salon that talked about how while
most people think that the breast milk pumps all these
anybodies into the blood stream like the placenta does, it
actually just feeds all those nutrients into the gastro intestinal track,
(17:58):
which makes sense when you think about how many digests
of elms might be prevented by breast milk. Is Cramer found. Yeah,
He points out that the author points out that basically,
once the babies in the placenta, they're receiving all the
antibodies from the mom that they ever will even after
after birth. But he also points out that the breastfeeding
can predict against diar real ailments in three ways because
(18:18):
we always see those uh those studies, survey study results.
Excuse me saying that breastfeeding can benefit their gastro intestinal health,
and he says that, um, it's preventing the chance that
formula could be mixed with contaminated water. And they're also
not taking in contaminated food. And then finally, because like
you said, the maternal antibodies are going straight into the gut,
(18:42):
those antibodies actually de activate swallowed bacteria and viruses otherwise
would infect the cells. Right, So maybe the baby is
exposed to the flu virus, which would manifest itself with
a lot of vomit, diarrhea, other growth things. Because the
antibodys are straight to the gut as opposed to the bloodstream,
that might be what prevents uh, actual infection, but didn't.
(19:05):
Hannah Rosen in the Atlantic piece also point out that
those results would, in real world terms, uh, shake out
to maybe a baby having one less case of diarrhea
every year, right, one and forty babies I think would
have one less day of diarrhea, which doesn't sound that
um conclusive, and I mean doesn't sound that exciting in
real world terms. But I guess when it's your baby
(19:26):
and it's one less day of diarrhea, that's something. UM.
But I did think that that piece UM by Sydney
Spiezl that we're talking about with how the baby, how
the milk was strange the gut was interesting because UM,
it was talking about how babies know they're full by
the precise way in which breast milk comes out of
the breast. There's four milk, there's hind milk, and it
(19:47):
teaches the baby that they're done feeding when the hind
milk comes out. And so by pumping it all gets
mixed together. And it's possible that when you put it
in a bottle, the babies don't know when they're done
quite as well, and bottle fed babies don't know what
might not know when they're downe quite as well, and
that may be the difference in the case of childhood
obc Um. You know, it seems that there's a study
(20:10):
from Temple University that showed that UM, when you feed
a baby from the breast, everyone's more in tune the
baby and the mother to knowing when the baby is full,
whereas if it's a bottle of milk that you paintstakingly
pumped in the leftation room. You might be inclined just
to say drink it all baby. Yeah, I mean, you
know you worked for it. You gotta gotta use it
(20:32):
well and then or lose it well and then finally
just a kind of toss. One more study in here
that questions this whole correlation causation factor that that keeps
coming up. Um. There was one that was published in
the British Medical Journal that suggests that breastfed babies would
cope better was stressed than bottle fed babies. But once
again they Researchery's question whether or not that was the
(20:53):
role of the breast milk or the mother child interaction
in shaping those neural pathways. So I think with this
whole does breastfeeding make for a better baby argument um
or debate if you will. Uh, it's still so. I
think it's just still such a shady area, And it
seems the only thing that seems conclusive from all of
(21:15):
these studies. The one strand that runs through all of
them is the importance of time spent with the infant right,
which I think is why it's so disheartening that there
is so much judgment around this issue. If a woman
decides not to breastfeed or is unable to breastfeed for
some medical reason, if she goes home and spends all
that one on one time with the infant, I think
(21:37):
it's really hard to make the argument that that baby
will be disadvantaged or not as smart down the road
as a baby that was breastfed. And so I think
that this is just an issue where it be nice
if there was a little less judgment. Yeah, and I
do think that breastfed women don't need that guilt of
you know, feeding when they have to. Yeah, I think
that there is. It's only twenty one states along with
(21:59):
the puertourry go and do see that require employers to
make a quote reasonable effort to accommodate nursing mothers and
not to mention, you know, just the problem. I think
there was a case with um with Starbucks where women
wanted to go into the bathroom to breastfeed or no
women were breastfeeding in a Starbucks and the employees would
come up and ask them to go into the bathroom.
(22:20):
And because of that, there was a huge letter writing
campaign to Starbucks and now Starbucks is, you know, very
pro breastfeeding, but I think that yeah, on all sides
of whether your breastfeeding or not. I mean there's just
there's judgment from from all sides, which I think is
very unfortunate. But let us know what you guys think,
uh thoughts on breastfeeding. We welcome them. Yeah, guys who
want to hear from you too. You might not be able,
(22:42):
you might have vestigial nipples, but your opinions are not vestigial.
How about that. So, now that we have officially welcomed
your opinions to mom stuff at how stuffworks dot com,
will read a few people who have are written to us.
And since we just talked about breasts, I'm going to
read an email from Joe that talked about our bra episode.
(23:03):
Uh do bras for any purpose? It had one of
my favorite subject lines in a while, called what up bra?
That is true? Um? He says, of course that he
doesn't have any firsthand experience with bras, but he understands
that we women have it tough. He writes, it's not
just mens constantly starting at your chest, but there are
also stigmas among women. Again, the judgment Okay, sorry that
(23:23):
was my aside, not Joe's. Joe writes, if it's okay,
I'd like to share a little story about a friend
of mine. Will call her M, and my boss at
the time will call her BE. About seven years ago,
I worked at a jewelry store and a small suburban
rural town northwest of Atlanta. The manager was a woman
in her sixties and my friend was in her twenties.
Being that was a jewelius store, especially when in a
rather conservative small town, professional dress was expected and enforced.
(23:44):
M had no problem with this and always wore a bra,
a top, and a card gainner business jacket. But she
was a skinny girl who was naturally well endowed be
a conservative woman whose concerned was often about appearance and propriety,
and from the customer have been making comments to cover
those things up to M over several weeks. This was
in reference to MS nipples, which, in our cold work environment,
had the habit of prominently poking out through three or
(24:06):
four layers of clothing. M tried to comply with what
she told me, we're thicker bras and an extra top,
but she didn't make enough to change her entire wardrobe,
even though her dress was always followed, has always followed
the guideline step by the company. The harassment by the
older lady put M at her wits end. Things came
to a head when b, frustrate the m s nipples
were again visible, went up to M and flicked her
(24:26):
nipple through her shirt hard. I can't imagine why the
conservative woman will be driven to the point of madness
and think this was an appropriate action. But when I
saw her do what she did, my jaw hung open
and utter shock. The event humiliating my friend to the
point that she seed the company for sexual harassment, but
it ended up settling on a court and getting a
transfer to a different branch. I suppose the point of
(24:46):
the stories that while you advise your female listeners to
go without, if they feel comfortable enough to do it,
it's probably best to do it with discretion. There are
still social stigmas in place today. They can cause forward thinking,
bright young woman humiliation and harassment for no other reason
than adherence to an to quated ideas of Victorian era propriety.
What a story, Joe, I know. So again another example
of how judgment can just affect our daily lives. Breasts
(25:11):
judgment breast judgment all over the name of my first book,
A memoir by Molly Edmunds. Um Well, if you guys
have any thoughts you want to share with us again,
our email is mom Stuff at how stuff works dot com.
And if you'd like to head over to our blog,
it's called how to Stuff. And if you want to
read Molly Edmunds wonderful article does breast Feeding Make for
(25:33):
Better Babies? Which will include all of the studies and references,
et cetera that we that we made today. If you
want to fact check us, head on over to how
stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands
of other topics. Does it How stuff works dot Com
(25:56):
brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready, Are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff Mom never told you?
From house stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. This is Kristen, This is Molly, So Molly.
(00:20):
Since we're talking about breastfeeding today, I thought i'd share
a recent anecdote that happened in our house Stuff Works
offices to MOI, uh, we have a dedicated lactation room.
We were one of those offices that does what it
can to provide nice facilities for um lactating moms. And
(00:40):
it's basically, you know, as as you probably know since
you work here. It's an old office you know, still
got a phone in it and everything. And one morning
I needed to I need to use the phone. I
just needed a quiet place to use the phone. And
the lactation room was open because it was, like I said,
it was early in the morning. And what I didn't
know was at the door locks behind you. So I
(01:01):
went in there and got all my stuff there and
try to make a phone call and the person wasn't
available yet, So I decided to leave and then come
back later. So I came back and lo and Behold,
the lactation room was locked. I was locked out, yes,
with someone in there using it. No, No, the door
was just the door was just locked. And um, so
I knew that our office manager had a key, so
(01:24):
I went around looking for him, and lo and behold,
he is in our break room. And it was in
the morning, so it was pretty crowded with people this morning.
It was all men, all getting coffee, all talking about football.
I kid you not. So I was just standing there
awkwardly in the doorway, trying to, you know, like telepathically
communicate to our office manager that I needed him to
(01:46):
come out of the break room and talk to me.
And finally he saw me, and and all of the
men noticed me standing awkwardly in the doorway, and um,
he asked me what I needed. I said, well, Michael,
I uh, I need to get into the lactation room,
at which point all the men in our office, knowing
(02:07):
that I am, you know, not a not a mom,
not married, uh, kind of got pretty quiet. And I
noticed I've traveled stealthily or not so stealthily from from
my face do my bust, and at which point I said,
it's for the phone, not for these and blushed and
(02:32):
walked away awkwardly. Would you say you learned any lessons
about using the lactation room for non lactation purposes? Never
closed the door behind even the lactation room. Do you
find yourself with the house stuff works offices and you
need to make a phone called a lactation room, make
sure the doors cracked because you're not getting back in
A good lesson, A good life lesson for everyone, I think.
But I think it's great though, that we do have
(02:53):
the lactation room for women who you know, who do
need to use. I think it's nice because it's really not.
It's not all that common, you know, it's not. I
just wrote an article called dust Breastfeeding Make Better Babies,
which is what we're going to discuss today, and it
was kind of disheartening to see around this country how
hard it is for working moms too to pump their
breast milk for later use. Right. Not only is there
(03:16):
are a lot of people uncomfortable with the thought of
women breastfeeding in public, which has angered many mothers. I mean,
I can understand and women have even had There was
an incident a couple of years ago when Barbara Walters
made a comment about how, um, a woman who is
breastfeeding next to her on a plane really made her uncomfortable,
and um, as a result, a bunch of women got
(03:37):
together and had a what do they called a breast
in a feed in I think outside the ABC offices
because she mentioned this on the view, and uh, it
really angered a lot of these women who were saying,
like we were constantly being uh judged for breastfeeding our
children in public. But you know what I mean, we
can't babies. Babies don't know where they are, they so
(04:00):
that they need the milk right. And so when I
was researching this, it was amazing just how much judgment
there is on every single side of this. And I'm
sure we're gonna get tons of mail no matter um
how we how we phrase this podcast, Christian, because it
seems like right now women who do breastfeed are judged
for doing it in public for not doing it, and
you know what other people deem an appropriate place, um,
(04:21):
women who don't breastfeed, or judge for maybe not not
doing what's best for their babies, which was sort of
what this article goes into, whether it really is best
for a baby, And you know it just it's I
think it's kind of sad that moms who are already
stressed out enough have to deal with all this judgment
just by she's by feeding a child. Yeah, I mean,
I would venture to say that breastfeeding is the number
(04:41):
one most contentious issue involved with motherhood today, right, so
let's just get into whether it's really something to be
contentious about. I was really struck by learning that, UM,
the US Department of Health and Human Services ran these
public service announcements UM and two thousand four and two
thousand and six that showed pregnant women writing mechanical bulls
and then they'd fall off, and then the commercial will
(05:03):
be like, you wouldn't take risk when you're pregnant, why
take risks when you're having a new baby, saying, basically,
the risk of writing a mechanical bowl while you're pregnant
is the same as the risk that not breastfeeding your
child in curse. Yeah, and the the American Academy of
Pediatrics Pediatrics currently recommends the mother's feed their babies exclusively
with breast milk, and that it's not necessarily breastfeeding, that's
(05:24):
just breast milk. Right, For the first six months of life.
So we've got these you know, big government health institutions
saying you know, breast milk is best. Yes. And I
think the reason that, um, we needed such a big
campaign about this in the United States is I think
that more than any other country, two things happened. One, Um,
(05:45):
we sexualized the breast to the point that people got
freaked out at certain points when a woman would whip
it out to feed a child. And Two, I think
that our society is more susceptible to sort of the
formula arguments that came about in the late eighteen eighties,
Like you said, in the late eighteen eighties, baby formula
arrived on the market and women start to think that
(06:07):
they were unable to breastfeed. Um. And it might have
been because doctors were actually paid off by formula manufacturers
to tell this to these new mothers, right, And so
it became kind of, um, a lower class thing to breastfeed,
because if you could afford the formula, then you would
give formula to your chat. And it seemed to be
a very scientific thing. Some doctors who were telling women
(06:27):
that the children weren't getting enough to eat when they breastfed,
so they'd say measure out exactly this many ass of formula,
and that way you can be sure that your doctors,
I mean, that your children get enough to eat. And
even before formula came around, a lot of the upper
class women would have wet nurses who would breastfeed their
children for them. So there was still this kind of
(06:48):
societal stigma involved with with breastfeeding in the US. Right,
So the shift back to the breast comes around the
nineteen fifties to the nineteen seventies. In ninety eight we've
got the formation of La Leche League, a famous support
group for breastfeeding women, and it was a group of
Catholic moms who said, you know what, God wants women
(07:08):
to use their bodies to breastfeed. And then just a
few years later, nineteen seventy one, the famous book Our Bodies,
Ourselves comes out and shows women that their bodies are
not to you know, please men, that breasts aren't just
you know, sexual objects, that they are uh endowed with
a purpose to give breast milk to baby. So I
think that that was sort of the real revolution, a
(07:28):
combination of UM Catholic moms and feminists. So we have
this cultural history UM with breastfeeding. But what do studies say,
Because this is where things kind of start to get tricky, because, um,
as we'll find out in a in a few moments,
a lot of these studies, UM seemed to say that
(07:52):
breastfeeding is the best you know, it's going to prevent
all the host of diseases from your infant. But at
the same time, when you look closer at all of
these studies, uh, they aren't as iron clad as you
might think, right. And when I started researching all these studies,
it was just amazing all the benefits that get promised women.
I mean, it really does seem like this magical lixir
of life. UM. The t s A. You know, you
(08:14):
can only carry three ounces of UM liquids on board
of plane. They classified breast milk as liquid medicine so
that women could carry more of it. And so UM,
there's this, you know, just this big ship that what's
in that milk is the absolute best thing, the most
nutritionally balanced meal you can give an infant. UM. Now,
the things that the diseases and conditions that breast milk
(08:34):
promises to prevent our sudden infant death, syndrome, respiratory infections, meningitis, pneumonia, diarrhea,
ear infections, asthma, diabetes, autoimmune diseases such as crons and leukemia,
just to name a few. I mean, it is study
after study of diseases that are that are promised to avoid. Now,
(08:54):
I will say Christina, and I started reading all these studies,
I felt a little bit biased because I know that
I was not breastfed, and I'm I'm a healthy person.
I think, I think I'm a superre specimen of human
being and so um. I really started to kind of
dig deeper because I was like, surely my mother would
not disadvantage me so much just by feeding me a bottle.
(09:16):
You know, is this true? Because the American Academy of
Pediatrics is saying that if all babies were breastfed, we
would save three point six billion an annual healthcare a coffs.
Right and uh and Molly, I was a breastfed child,
and because of that, according to research, I was given
a rich formula of natural antibodies, hormones, neuropeptides, and natural
(09:38):
opioids that right now formulas can't necessarily replicate. And that
is why they think that breast milk has all of
this life giving magical properties, right, And you know it's
not just good for the baby. There's tons of stuff
about how good it is for a mother to um.
It probably lessens depression and the mother thanks to the
(09:58):
oxytocin that's in the blood in the breast milk UM,
it can help you heal after childbirth and you have
a lower risk of heart attacks, stroke, diabetes, and osteoporosis.
But the thing about it is is that all these
studies are not as iron clad as as they might seem, right,
because it comes down to this whole issue of correlation
(10:21):
versus causation. And this was there was an article written
by Hannah Rosen earlier this year in the Atlantic. It's
highly controversial, and she um basically said that, well, I
think she does breastfeed her children. But she said that, um,
all these studies heralding the amazing benefits of breast milk
UM are not very consistent and that they can only
(10:43):
show an associative relationship and not a causal relationship. Uh.
In other words, you can't say that the actual breastfeeding,
the milk coming from the breast directly into the child's body,
is causing all these beneficial outcomes. Um. In fact, it
my just be more of the time spent with a child,
and that that closeness to physical closeness to the mother,
(11:07):
and also just other factors that might lead a woman
to breastfeed. Right now, in this country, the women who
breastfeed are largely upper class. They have really great educations. Um,
they're probably in good shape themselves. So let's take something
like obesity. The study says that breastfeeding UH lowers the
rate of childhood obesity. Does the breast milk do it?
(11:28):
Or does the fact that you have a healthy, educated
mother who knows you know what to serve for dinner
so that you can balance meal and takes you out
for walks does that? Is that what makes the difference?
Is it just you know, being born into a house
where a woman takes the time to educate herself about
breastfeeding versus a woman who you know is busy in
works and may not be around as much when you're
an infant. It's just impossible to separate out all those factors.
(11:51):
And I will say, you know, I worked in UH.
I worked in daycare for a couple of years, um,
a lifetime ago. It seems like now and I worked
in the infant room for a while and you could
definitely see the difference between the children who um received
a lot of parental interaction when they weren't in daycare
(12:12):
and the ones who might not have. I mean, I
think there really is a developmental curve with that. I
mean I say that from just a very um anecdotal perspective. Um.
But still, I think one of the most telling studies
to talk about when we when we're discussing breastfeeding is
this thing um called probit Yeah. Um. And it was
conducted in two thousand one by Michael Kramer of McGill University,
(12:35):
and basically he evaluated the breastfeeding effects on seventeen thousand
children in Belarus. Yeah. And the thing that really is
kind of unique about the study is all the other studies.
In addition to not being able to separate out um,
those you know, coinciding factors, it's also people who are
self selecting into a certain study. You know, you're saying, okay,
(12:56):
I'm already breastfeeding study me, and women are saying, okay,
well I'm not going to speed you can study me.
So it's not very random, which is usually a factory
like to see in scientific studies, and also um, scientific
studies really don't have the ethical ability to tell a
woman what to breastfeed, I mean, what how to feed
a child, so they can't say, hey, you breastfeed and
you don't. So you know, these groups aren't really random.
(13:18):
You're getting um kind of a bias group to start with.
So that's what Kramer tried to address in this study
because rather than telling a woman how to feed their children,
he just followed women who had been breastfeeding, and some
of them received this inter intervention where they were told, hey,
breastfeed more, it's the best thing for your baby, and
the other women were just sort of allowed to stop
(13:39):
when they were going to stop anyway. And so then
he compared those two groups, the women who didn't breastfeed
as long as the group that received an intervention and
did breastfeed longer. So, in a nutshell, Kramer's research showed that, yes,
breastfeeding is a little bit better than than formula feeding,
but it's not necessarily These are near words, Molly, from
(13:59):
your from your article, if I may quote you, the
universal panacea that its supporters claim, because they said the
extended breastfeeding can reduce the risk of eczema and also
reduced a risk of gastro intestional intestinal infection by UM.
And in addition, Kramer found that breastfed babies scored seven
point five points higher on i Q tests than other babies,
(14:23):
but he said that those results really weren't that statistically significant, right,
and those are just verbal tests UM. Two point nine
tests on non verbal intelligence UM. One of my favorite
quotes when I when I was reading this articles, Kramer says, yes,
seven point five points higher on i Q test, which
I saw just duplicated on all sorts of breastfeeding sites.
(14:43):
But Kramer says, it's not like this is the difference
between a genius and a mentally retarded child. That's a
direct quote I wasn't mine, UM, And he said he
actually likened them to the difference between a firstborn child
and a second porn child, because think of how much
extra time you have to vote to that first born child, UM,
and then when you have the second child, it's not
like you give them any less care, but your tensions
(15:06):
are divided somewhat. And so studies have shown that you know,
birth order matters, and it may just be that maybe
the only difference that breastfeeding maybe comes down to. It's
just that difference between a firstborn child who's continually followed
around to make sure that everything is stimulating and nothing
is painful, versus the second born, who admittedly maybe falls
down a little bit more. And you know, it's it's
(15:28):
less deemed precious. You know, Molly were you was second
and that was the first born, which is why I'm
talking about how smart they are. But you know, um,
you just have more time with that firstborn. And maybe
that's the difference in the i Q and the and
the breastfeeding. Yeah, and and I thought it was interesting
that they scored higher on verbal intelligence because Cramer suggested
(15:50):
that those benefits are coming from the time spent with
the mothers. And you would think, you know, the mother
is gonna be sitting there, She's probably gonna be talking
to her baby. You know. Maybe uh, I don't know,
maybe they just pick up language a little little quicker
because of that. Yeah time, I think that you sit
there and you coo with the baby. Now, I'd be
interested to see a study where, like, um, a woman
(16:11):
just focuses exclusively on breastfeeding versus a woman who breastfeeds,
but like watches TV at the same time or talks
on theself and at the same time, Like, I wonder
how much of it has to do with like looking
at the baby and talking to the baby. So I
don't know, that's that's a big question for me. But
obviously with working mothers today, we don't all have time
(16:31):
to breastfeed our children. We have a lactation room in
our office for working moms who can't breastfeed, but they
still want to give their children breast milk, and so
they use this thing called a breast pump. Right. And
this UM, despite being a very common access rate for
women in the workplace today, only really came on the
marketplace in the previous to that was mainly just a
(16:52):
hospital accessory UM. But now that maternity leaves in the
United States are so short, women are buying them and
taking them to work, and you in the lactation room
when Kristen isn't in it making her phone calls. So
just reading UM this research when I was wearing this
article where it seems that breastfeedings benefits come more from
the time you spend with your child, I just wonder
if women are going through a lot of unnecessary pain
(17:14):
to pump out breast milk. But there are Like we
said earlier, though, there are certain antibodies and chemicals in
your breast milk that formula cannot replicate. True right now,
True that could be beneficial um for the child. When
I was researching this article, I came across a few
things that compared breasts to placentas and that they take
(17:37):
over the role that the placenta serves when the baby
is in the womb in terms of delivering all these
essential nutrients to a child. But I did find a
pretty interesting piece on Salon that talked about how while
most people think that the breast milk pumps all these
anybodies into the blood stream like the placenta does, it
actually just feeds all those nutrients into the gastro intestinal track,
(17:58):
which makes sense when you think about how many digests
of elms might be prevented by breast milk. Is Cramer found. Yeah,
He points out that the author points out that basically,
once the babies in the placenta, they're receiving all the
antibodies from the mom that they ever will even after
after birth. But he also points out that the breastfeeding
can predict against diar real ailments in three ways because
(18:18):
we always see those uh those studies, survey study results.
Excuse me saying that breastfeeding can benefit their gastro intestinal health,
and he says that, um, it's preventing the chance that
formula could be mixed with contaminated water. And they're also
not taking in contaminated food. And then finally, because like
you said, the maternal antibodies are going straight into the gut,
(18:42):
those antibodies actually de activate swallowed bacteria and viruses otherwise
would infect the cells. Right, So maybe the baby is
exposed to the flu virus, which would manifest itself with
a lot of vomit, diarrhea, other growth things. Because the
antibodys are straight to the gut as opposed to the bloodstream,
that might be what prevents uh, actual infection, but didn't.
(19:05):
Hannah Rosen in the Atlantic piece also point out that
those results would, in real world terms, uh, shake out
to maybe a baby having one less case of diarrhea
every year, right, one and forty babies I think would
have one less day of diarrhea, which doesn't sound that
um conclusive, and I mean doesn't sound that exciting in
real world terms. But I guess when it's your baby
(19:26):
and it's one less day of diarrhea, that's something. UM.
But I did think that that piece UM by Sydney
Spiezl that we're talking about with how the baby, how
the milk was strange the gut was interesting because UM,
it was talking about how babies know they're full by
the precise way in which breast milk comes out of
the breast. There's four milk, there's hind milk, and it
(19:47):
teaches the baby that they're done feeding when the hind
milk comes out. And so by pumping it all gets
mixed together. And it's possible that when you put it
in a bottle, the babies don't know when they're done
quite as well, and bottle fed babies don't know what
might not know when they're downe quite as well, and
that may be the difference in the case of childhood
obc Um. You know, it seems that there's a study
(20:10):
from Temple University that showed that UM, when you feed
a baby from the breast, everyone's more in tune the
baby and the mother to knowing when the baby is full,
whereas if it's a bottle of milk that you paintstakingly
pumped in the leftation room. You might be inclined just
to say drink it all baby. Yeah, I mean, you
know you worked for it. You gotta gotta use it
(20:32):
well and then or lose it well and then finally
just a kind of toss. One more study in here
that questions this whole correlation causation factor that that keeps
coming up. Um. There was one that was published in
the British Medical Journal that suggests that breastfed babies would
cope better was stressed than bottle fed babies. But once
again they Researchery's question whether or not that was the
(20:53):
role of the breast milk or the mother child interaction
in shaping those neural pathways. So I think with this
whole does breastfeeding make for a better baby argument um
or debate if you will. Uh, it's still so. I
think it's just still such a shady area, And it
seems the only thing that seems conclusive from all of
(21:15):
these studies. The one strand that runs through all of
them is the importance of time spent with the infant right,
which I think is why it's so disheartening that there
is so much judgment around this issue. If a woman
decides not to breastfeed or is unable to breastfeed for
some medical reason, if she goes home and spends all
that one on one time with the infant, I think
(21:37):
it's really hard to make the argument that that baby
will be disadvantaged or not as smart down the road
as a baby that was breastfed. And so I think
that this is just an issue where it be nice
if there was a little less judgment. Yeah, and I
do think that breastfed women don't need that guilt of
you know, feeding when they have to. Yeah, I think
that there is. It's only twenty one states along with
(21:59):
the puertourry go and do see that require employers to
make a quote reasonable effort to accommodate nursing mothers and
not to mention, you know, just the problem. I think
there was a case with um with Starbucks where women
wanted to go into the bathroom to breastfeed or no
women were breastfeeding in a Starbucks and the employees would
come up and ask them to go into the bathroom.
(22:20):
And because of that, there was a huge letter writing
campaign to Starbucks and now Starbucks is, you know, very
pro breastfeeding, but I think that yeah, on all sides
of whether your breastfeeding or not. I mean there's just
there's judgment from from all sides, which I think is
very unfortunate. But let us know what you guys think,
uh thoughts on breastfeeding. We welcome them. Yeah, guys who
want to hear from you too. You might not be able,
(22:42):
you might have vestigial nipples, but your opinions are not vestigial.
How about that. So, now that we have officially welcomed
your opinions to mom stuff at how stuffworks dot com,
will read a few people who have are written to us.
And since we just talked about breasts, I'm going to
read an email from Joe that talked about our bra episode.
(23:03):
Uh do bras for any purpose? It had one of
my favorite subject lines in a while, called what up bra?
That is true? Um? He says, of course that he
doesn't have any firsthand experience with bras, but he understands
that we women have it tough. He writes, it's not
just mens constantly starting at your chest, but there are
also stigmas among women. Again, the judgment Okay, sorry that
(23:23):
was my aside, not Joe's. Joe writes, if it's okay,
I'd like to share a little story about a friend
of mine. Will call her M, and my boss at
the time will call her BE. About seven years ago,
I worked at a jewelry store and a small suburban
rural town northwest of Atlanta. The manager was a woman
in her sixties and my friend was in her twenties.
Being that was a jewelius store, especially when in a
rather conservative small town, professional dress was expected and enforced.
(23:44):
M had no problem with this and always wore a bra,
a top, and a card gainner business jacket. But she
was a skinny girl who was naturally well endowed be
a conservative woman whose concerned was often about appearance and propriety,
and from the customer have been making comments to cover
those things up to M over several weeks. This was
in reference to MS nipples, which, in our cold work environment,
had the habit of prominently poking out through three or
(24:06):
four layers of clothing. M tried to comply with what
she told me, we're thicker bras and an extra top,
but she didn't make enough to change her entire wardrobe,
even though her dress was always followed, has always followed
the guideline step by the company. The harassment by the
older lady put M at her wits end. Things came
to a head when b, frustrate the m s nipples
were again visible, went up to M and flicked her
(24:26):
nipple through her shirt hard. I can't imagine why the
conservative woman will be driven to the point of madness
and think this was an appropriate action. But when I
saw her do what she did, my jaw hung open
and utter shock. The event humiliating my friend to the
point that she seed the company for sexual harassment, but
it ended up settling on a court and getting a
transfer to a different branch. I suppose the point of
(24:46):
the stories that while you advise your female listeners to
go without, if they feel comfortable enough to do it,
it's probably best to do it with discretion. There are
still social stigmas in place today. They can cause forward thinking,
bright young woman humiliation and harassment for no other reason
than adherence to an to quated ideas of Victorian era propriety.
What a story, Joe, I know. So again another example
of how judgment can just affect our daily lives. Breasts
(25:11):
judgment breast judgment all over the name of my first book,
A memoir by Molly Edmunds. Um Well, if you guys
have any thoughts you want to share with us again,
our email is mom Stuff at how stuff works dot com.
And if you'd like to head over to our blog,
it's called how to Stuff. And if you want to
read Molly Edmunds wonderful article does breast Feeding Make for
(25:33):
Better Babies? Which will include all of the studies and references,
et cetera that we that we made today. If you
want to fact check us, head on over to how
stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands
of other topics. Does it How stuff works dot Com
(25:56):
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