Ina May's Guide to Breastfeeding by Ina May Gaskin

Ina May's Guide to Breastfeeding by Ina May Gaskin, a leading midwife and the author of Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth, is a deeply compassionate and comprehensive guide to making breastfeeding a joyful experience for both mother and child.

Drawing on her decades of experience in caring for pregnant women, mothers, and babies, Ina May Gaskin’s newest book explores the health and psychological benefits of breastfeeding. Inspiring as well as informative, Ina May’s Guide to Breastfeeding is a powerful and practical guide filled with helpful advice, medical facts and real-life stories that will help mothers understand how and why breastfeeding works and how they can use it to more deeply connect with their children and their own bodies without fear, inhibition, or embarrassment.

Endorsements

"Ina May Gaskin is an international treasure. Her new guide to breastfeeding is the best thing ever written on the subject. A must-have for all pregnant women interested in the best start for their babies.” Christiane Northrup, M.D., Author of Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom and The Wisdom of Menopause

Extract from introduction

It should not come as any surprise that the most desirable milk for a human baby is human milk. It is the most complete and perfect food for babies, just as camel milk is best for baby camels and cow’s milk is best for calves. Breast milk even tastes better to young humans than other milks do. I’ve met many adults who were breastfed until the age of four or five who can recall the taste of their mother’s milk, and each remembers it as incredibly delicious. Do you know anyone who buys infant formula because it is so delicious or who even has fond memories of it? I don’t.

The composition of breast milk varies from mother to mother, and the composition of a given mother’s milk varies according to her baby’s needs. This means that if your baby is born prematurely, your milk will automatically adjust itself to contain the most advantageous mix of nutrients for him at his particular stage of development. No matter how many claims a manufacturer of a substitute milk formula makes about its similarities to breast milk, any substitute milk, no matter what brand, is quite different from human milk and is an inferior food source for human babies. As the AAP says, the superiority of human milk for human babies stands whether we are talking about the baby’s growth, its development, or all other short- and long-term outcomes.

Immunologically speaking, mother’s milk is medicine as well as food. It contains living cells, many of which will coat the mucous membranes of your baby’s entire digestive system, protecting him against all kinds of bacteria and viruses. Artificial milk products do not contain any living cells, because anything that once lived in any formula concoction was long since killed during the production process. The protection offered by breast milk is important because, during birth, your baby leaves the sterile environment of your womb and sticks his head out into the highly contaminated environment outside. His system is not fully prepared for this shock, and he can use all the protection he can get.

Exclusive breastfeeding (meaning that a baby consumes nothing but his mother’s milk) until the age of six months will continue to protect your growing baby’s digestive tract, reducing the risk of allergy-causing foreign proteins entering his system. Such protection is especially important in families with a history of allergies, whether these allergies manifest as asthma, a specific food allergy, dermatitis, or allergy rhinitis (runny nose). Some babies started on artificial milk have to be switched from brand to brand several times during the early weeks of life because of their inability to tolerate these products. After the age of six months, babies begin to produce enough of their own antibodies to protect their intestinal walls against food antigens that may cause allergies.

Another strong reason for the ideal of exclusive breastfeeding for six months is that babies’ digestive systems are just not sufficiently developed before that time to digest solid foods well. Incomplete digestion can cause intestinal pain, diarrhea, gas, inconsolable crying, and, in severe cases, damage to the baby’s intestinal tract.

Babies who get artificial formulas instead of mother’s milk miss out on these benefits and are more open to infection. Strong evidence shows that in all populations, in both wealthy and poor countries, these babies will have a higher incidence and severity of many serious diseases, including bacterial meningitis, bacterial infection of the blood, diarrhea, respiratory-tract infection, serious gastrointestinal infection, middle-ear infection, urinary-tract infection, and late-onset infection in premature babies.(2–13) And, according to one study, preemies who are fed artificial milk formulas have a higher incidence of the kind of blindness (retinopathy of prematurity) that has long been associated with premature birth.(14–15) Published research has shown that more than 1,000 childhood deaths per year in the United States could be prevented through breastfeeding and that for every 1,000 bottle-fed babies in the United States, seventy-seven hospital admissions are likely to result. Compare this with the five hospital admissions that can be expected for every 1,000 breastfed babies.(16)

And there’s more. Several studies have suggested increased rates of sudden infant death syndrome in the first year of life, as well as a higher incidence of diabetes mellitus; childhood cancers such as leukemia, Hodgkin’s disease, and lymphoma; overweight and obesity; asthma and high cholesterol levels in older children and adults who were fed artificial milks compared with those who got their mothers’ milk.(17–22)

Breastfed babies are not only healthier; there is some evidence demonstrating that they tend to be more intelligent. Several studies on the development of intelligence in babies have shown that the feeding of artificial milks was associated with lower performance.(23–25) A study involving about three hundred premature babies who were too small to suckle compared those given breast milk with those who received formula through a tube. When the two groups were IQ-tested at the age of eight years and the mothers’ social and educational status were taken into account, the breastfed children scored significantly higher on the IQ tests than their formula-fed counterparts did.

Does this mean that a baby who is bottle-fed on formula will not be as intelligent as his breastfed sibling? I certainly wouldn’t go that far, especially if the formula-fed baby receives high-quality loving attention while being fed. It’s possible that the bottle-fed babies in some of these studies received less of their mothers’ touch while feeding, since bottles can be propped on pillows, leaving the mother free to do something else while her baby feeds. Babies need more than milk to thrive—they need love expressed through touch. Skin is our most sensitive organ, and touch is the first language we speak. There is a lot of evidence from studies of other mammals about how important licking and touch are to the good health and even survival of their newly born young, and there’s plenty more showing that human babies who are cuddled and given plenty of touch when young grow up to be more comfortable “in their own skins” than those who grow up deprived of touch. My opinion is that babies fed on artificial milks, particularly preemies and babies under the age of three to four months, need to be held as close to the breast as breastfed babies are, so they get the cuddling and loving touch they need and deserve. This is true as well if Dad is the one holding the bottle.

Breastfeeding is also the best analgesic for babies. Mothers who breastfeed their babies during painful procedures—for example, the heel poke to draw blood (sometimes called the PKU screening), which is generally given to babies within the first ten days of life—often find that their babies cry little if at all.(26–27) The analgesic effects also extend to times when a baby has his first cold or flu and, like the rest of us, feels miserable. Breastfeeding then becomes an especially valued comfort for both mother and baby.