Comment by endorphone | Hacker News Reader

Comment by endorphone | Hacker News Reader

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This story got quickly flagged off the front page, and your falsehood laden comment sits at the top. Both are a bit surreal and demonstrate how bizarre partisan everything is.

"There absolutely is controlled research out there on the effects of breastfeeding"

Neither of those studies is remotely as you claimed. One researched how effective breastfeeding advocacy was, and the other on the outcomes of alternatives for children who couldn't be breastfed. The first only controls education, and the other is purely observational.

"A good overview"

Not even remotely a good overview. Someone else looking for justifications.

"This isn't due to formula substitutes (i.e. Abbott laboratories isn't going around killing kids to make money), this is due to improper substitutions"

This is just fundamentally wrong. Just as we exported tobacco when we got wise, formula has become a big export market where the same misleading advocacy presents it as an equal if not superior alternative. Cultures that had no issue breastfeeding started treating it as brutish, moving to worse alternatives.

Impact of breast milk on IQ, brain size and white matter development (2010):

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2939272/

Is Breast Truly Best? Estimating the Effect of Breastfeeding on Long-term Child Wellbeing in the United States Using Sibling Comparisons (2014):

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4077166/

Breastfeeding 'linked to higher IQ' (2015):

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-31925449

While I'm not as familiar with these issues, GP did at least attempt to cite sources. Can you cite sources which prove or suggest the contrary?

In particular, I'm interesting in this claim:

> "Cultures that had no issue breastfeeding started treating it as brutish"

GP didn't cite relevant sources. They simply included some tangential links as a bit of sophistry, and it's a ruse that unfortunately works too often.

As to me citing sources, what are you looking for a source on?

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/feb/27/formula...

There are thousands of articles like this. As the formula makers were limited to actual reality in the first world, they moved on to developing countries (following the playbook set out by tobacco companies) where the rate of breastfeeding absolutely collapsed. This is a recursive cycle, though -- if you don't exclusively breastfeed from birth, the natural result is often the loss of the ability for that child. So now formula is the only option, yet it's out of reach financially as the exclusive choice so those mothers start adding in cow milk, water, juice, etc. This is all a trivial search away.

We know observationally that breastfed babies have a huge array of outcome benefits, but there are no truly controlled studies because the morality of telling a group of mothers not to breastfeed would be reprehensible and is unfathomable.

All of this is a trivial search away. As is the fact that the WHO estimates that 800,000 babies a year die because of this problem.

Thank you, the link is appreciated. However, it doesn't support your claim that "Cultures that had no issue breastfeeding started treating it as brutish".

It does support the claim that formula makers are using underhanded tactics and aggressive incentives. It's awful they're doing that. It's also far away from your claim that shifting a cultural mindset to viewing breastfeeding as "brutish".

I can tell you're passionate and knowledgeable about the topic which is why I was interested in your perspective. But you also seem guilty of hyperbole so I can't take what you write seriously.

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