Your last paragraph absolutely shocked me. “Anything goes?” Just don’t stress yourself out? What about the baby? What a selfish outlook on birthing, just do it anyway you feel like, no matter what the impacts to your child are, and then go ahead and call it “natural” to make yourself feel better about drugging your baby with narcotics, deforming its head with forceps, shocking it into breathing, cutting the umbilical cord too soon before it can breath, etc, etc…. Just as long as it “doesn’t unduly stress you!”

I thought this blog was supposed to debunk myths, not create new ones.

As a graduate nursing student myself, I have become very interested in the differences between breastmilk, formula and how each impacts babies, children and adults in the short term as well as the long term. I have done lots and lots (over 40 hours to date) of research on the benefits of breastmilk over formula and the current research (within the past 3 years) is suggesting that breastmilk is not nearly as protective for obesity as previously thought. Also, for the claims that breastmilk will increase your child’s intelligence….it’s just not true. Intelligence is such a difficult thing to measure and current research is saying that there is no difference between breastmilk and formula fed babies in these areas.

Breastmilk is obviously better than formula for passing along antibodies to newborns until they are able to begin making their own, and it has a wider variety of fats than formla could ever match, but we need to be careful when ‘pushing’ “breast is best” on every mother and child.

When we have our next child I will most certianly try to breastfeed, but after all of the research I have done I know that my child is going to grow up to be a healthy, smart and wonderful little boy. And that my relationship with his is what’s most important.

To any of you who have questions about the ’science of things’ (like I do!) I recommend going to your local university and doing your own research so you know first hand why you believe what you belive. Don’t rely on other people’s research…it can be outdated or just plain wrong.

When it comes to running with scissors and eye injuries, personally (I have no statistics to back this up) I have found many children the problem is actually door knobs. When children are running around they can very easily run into one and they are convienently at eye level.

great article

???

I’m really confused. I was under the impression that most fruits and vegetables (tomatoes, apples, citrus fruits, onions, etc.) were acidic–often more acidic than meats.

Besides, our stomachs are very acidic (more acidic than most foods that we eat). I would imagine that anything passing through the stomach also ends up being acidic (or at least less basic) naturally.

(pH of food from the FDA (cached): http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:gOn-RF7hlYsJ:vm.cfsan.fda.gov/~comm/lacf-phs.html+ph+of+fruit&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

My personal opinion is, I’d like to see well funded public schools start at Kindergarten like they have done since the advent of public education. I believe that those like Gramomster, who feel strongly that all toddlers should be educated to become future Innovators and Engineers (not a likely outcome under the best of circumstances), and that people other than the parents should pay for it, would do well to start a foundation and host some fundraisers. Let like minded donors with overflowing bank accounts help fulfill that dream. In the mean time, I’ll give birth to the number of children I can support and try not to make my neighbors pay for it.