Author: Guest
The advice in this book should come with a strongly worded health warning: it can be DANGEROUS for breastfed babies. Trying to follow Gina Ford's routine can lead to not establishing a good milk supply -- or reducing the milk supply once it is established -- and babies consequently not putting on weight and growing as they should.Ford expresses sympathy with women who want to breastfeed their babies, and gives some partially accurate advice for establishing a good milk supply in the early days. However her book is riddled with so many innaccuracies that if you try to follow it "to the letter", as she insists you must, it is inevitable that you will have to provide top-ups of formula before your baby turns one, whether you want to do this or not, or risk damaging your baby's health and growth. Ford is very critical of "feeding on demand" (less judgementally known as "baby-led feeding") and blames it for all sorts of behavioural and sleeping problems. She proposes a feeding schedule instead. She rightly points out that health professionals advise women to "feed on demand" because this is the only way to ensure that a baby gets as much milk as she needs. What she fails to address is how her feeding routines can ensure that a baby will get enough milk to meet his needs. Here are just a few of the problems with Ford's breastfeeding advice: 1) For women whose babies are having sleep problems, she recommends that you express your milk at a usual feeding time on the theory that this will show you how much milk your baby is getting. WRONG. A woman's body responds to her baby in a different way than to a pump, and breastfed babies are more efficient at getting milk from the breast. Expressing will NOT tell you how much milk your baby is getting. 2) Ford states that feeds need to be spaced 3 hours apart because it takes the baby this long to digest breastmilk, so feeding more often than 3-hourly may cause gas problems. There is NO scientific evidence to support this belief. And if you examine Ford's routines, some of her feeds are scheduled 3 hours apart. If it takes the baby 1/2 an hour to finish a feed, this leaves only 2 1/2 hours in between feeds for it to be digested. So even Ford's routines don't adhere to this schedule. (Incidentally, a windy baby may breastfeed more often because this helps to RELIEVE wind.) 3) Breastfed babies who are fed as often as they wish to feed, do not need any additional fluids during hot weather, because the composition of breastmilk changes -- thus more foremilk is available to naturally increase their intake of fluids. The key however is to feed the baby as often as they wish. Breastfeeding on a schedule could lead to a baby becoming dehydrated in hot weather. Ford never addresses this possibility. (Giving water between feeds is not the answer, as this can fill up the baby's stomach and reduce their hunger, thus replacing some of the breastmilk which he or she needs for optimum growth.) 4) To avoid the "inconvenience" of feeding more often when a baby is going through a growth spurt, Ford recommends having a stock of expressed breastmilk available so that you can just give the baby more milk at his usual feeding times, rather than feeding the baby more often. There are two problems with this. Firstly, the composition of breastmilk changes over time to keep pace with the growing baby's needs. Furthermore, when a baby feeds more often it signals to the mother's body that the baby needs more milk, thus increasing her supply. Continuing to feed on a rigid schedule during a growth spurt may mean that the milk supply does not increase adequately to meet the baby's needs. 5) At one point in this book Ford states that a feed from one breast "can be classed as" half a bottle feed. Though her wording is vague, this seems to indicate that she believes a baby feeding from one breast is receiving the same amount of milk as a bottlefed baby who drinks half the milk in a bottle. This is an absolutely ridiculous idea, and suggests that mothers should be restricting breastfeeds in a completely arbitrary way to bring them in line with the number of times a bottlefed baby would be fed. 6) Ford says that once protein has been introduced at lunchtime, a baby no longer "needs" a milk feed at this time and that the milk will interfere with the absorption of iron from the protein. This is true of dairy products, but not of breastmilk. The iron in breastmilk is far more readily absorbed by the baby than that in dairy products (including formula). Dropping the breastfeed at lunchtime -- especially if the baby still needs and wants it -- will thus reduce the amount of iron that the baby gets overall. 7) As the baby grows older Ford recommends dropping breastfeeds so that by the time the child is one, they are only receiving two breastfeeds per day, in the morning and at night. This is not consistent with the recommendation of the American Academy of Pediatrics and breastfeeding experts worldwide that breastmilk should remain a baby's primary source of nutrition for all of the first year. Furthermore, once a baby is only breastfeeding twice a day, the mother's body is receiving the signal that a baby is almost weaned, and therefore only needs a small quantity of milk -- which in most cases will not be enough to enable the baby to sleep through the night, thus leading to the night wakings that Ford's routine is designed to avoid at all costs. Ford's advice may well be suitable for bottlefed babies. However she is very ill informed about the physiology of breastfeeding, and for her to offer such inaccurate advice on breastfeeding is highly irresponsible and potentially dangerous for the health of babies. I would recommend that both she and her publisher seriously consider amending future editions of this book to state that its advice is only suitable for bottlefed babies.
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