It happened again! I wrote about something and activists rush to demonstrate exactly what I was talking about.
Yesterday I mentioned the rabid hatred that lactivists direct toward the Fed Is Best Foundation. With three little words, “Fed Is Best,” Christie del Castillo Hegyi, MD and Jody Segrave Daly RN, IBCLC have blown apart lactivist frames with a more accurate frame, one that doesn’t marginalize and silence women who can’t or don’t breastfeed.
[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]The Becoming Breastfeeding Friendly group at the YSPH are apparently unfamiliar with the breastfeeding literature.[/pullquote]
In other words, Jody and Christie (both of whom breastfed) are whistle blowers. And like most people who blow the whistle on any industry, they have been subjected to industry sponsored abuse
The Yale School of Public Health has joined the pile on. Surprisingly for a group of people who run a program called Becoming Breastfeeding Friendly, they don’t seem to know very much about breastfeeding.
Let’s state the situation is simple terms. Breastfeeding, which has been promoted as the optimal nutrition for all babies, is actually resulting in the iatrogenic brain damage and preventable deaths of babies. The breastfeeding industry, instead of moving to prevent these injuries and deaths, is reacting with fury.
As I’ve written in the past, it reminds me of the response of Merck when the news became public that Vioxx, a blockbuster pain reliever, was leading to preventable deaths: deny, defy and decry. In this case, they are attacking Kavin Senapathy,who wrote in Forbes about the World Health Organizations declaration that breastfeeding related brain damage and deaths are “not a priority.” Through her, they are going after the Fed Is Best Foundation.
The Yale authors write:
In Kavin Senapathy’s opinion article, the suggestion that the 2017 revised WHO Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative (BFHI) guidelines place newborns at risk of starvation or severe complications is not supported by the evidence of decades of research in the area of breastfeeding and human milk. We are deeply concerned because it could lead to serious misunderstandings for expecting parents and the general population.
The tactic of denial is typically the first step employed by Big Pharma when one of its drugs comes under attack. The drug company claims that the scientific research did not show that the drug was harmful. It’s as if we are supposed to pretend the deaths didn’t happen because they weren’t anticipated by the research.
In the case of Vioxx, the scientific research DID show that Vioxx led to unanticipated cardiac deaths; that research was suppressed. In the case of breastfeeding, the research DOES show that breastfeeding leads to unantipicated brain injuries and deaths; the members of the Yale Breastfeeding Friendly group are either unaware of that research or choose to ignore it.
They write:
We agree with the notion that we must acknowledge the existence of the problem of insufficient breastmilk. However, the article fails to consider that this problem, which is manifested as an inadequate supply of breastmilk needed to properly feed one’s baby (Neifert, 2001; Wilson-Clay & Hoover, 2013), is most often characterized by a phenomenon known as perceived insufficient milk (Safon et al., 2017; Segura-Millán et al., 1994). Also known as insufficient milk syndrome, in the vast majority of cases it is the result of widespread lack of access to both prenatal and postnatal optimal breastfeeding support and lactation management rather than primary biological reasons (Gussler & Briesemeister, 1980; Tully & Dewey, 1985).
Horrifyingly, the group is gaslighting women whose babies have been brain injured and died as a result of insufficient breastmilk. Lactivists have attempted to frame the problem of insufficient breastmilk as a figment of mothers’ imagination.
Sure, insufficient breastmilk is not a problem according to lactivist theory, but then Vioxx was not a problem according to Big Pharma theory, either. But just as in the case of Vioxx, in practice, insufficient breastmilk DOES injure and kill babies and the perception of insufficient breastmilk is NOT a figment of womens’ imagination.
Let’s look at the real evidence, not the theory.
Insufficient breastmilk is common, not rare.
In 2010, the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine acknowledged:
It is important to recognize that not all breastfed infants will receive optimal milk intake during the first few days of life; as many as 10–18% of exclusively breastfed U.S. newborns lose more than 10% of birth weight.
There is a biomarker for insufficient breastmilk.
From a 2001 paper:
High levels of sodium in breast milk are closely associated with lactation failure. One study showed that those who failed lactation had higher initial breast milk sodium concentrations, and the longer they stayed elevated, the lower the success rate.
Insufficient breastmilk is NOT a figment of women’s imagination.
This was confirmed in a 2017 paper that also showed that women who felt they had insufficient breastmilk were more likely to have the biomarker present.
…[E]levated day 7 breast milk Na:K occurred in 42% of mothers with a day 7 milk supply concern, compared with 21% of mothers without a day 7 milk supply concern (unadjusted relative risk, 2.0; P = .008) (Table II). The unadjusted odds of elevated Na:K were 2.7 greater (95% CI, 1.3-5.9) with maternal report of milk supply concern (refer- ence = no concern, P = .01) and further increased after ad- justment for maternal ethnicity (3.4; 95% CI, 1.5-7.9; P = .003).
The potential brain threatening and life threatening consequences include kernicterus, hypernatremic dehydration and severe hypoglycemia.
Kernicterus, thought to have nearly disappeared, is making a comeback.
Dr. Lawrence Gartner revealed to other lactation professionals in a 2013 lecture, 90% of cases of kernicterus (jaundice induced brain damage) are caused by insufficient breastmilk.
The Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine reported in a 2017 paper:
In the U.S. Kernicterus Registry, a database of 125 cases of kernicterus in infants discharged as healthy newborns, 98% of these infants were fully or partially breastfed …
Neonatal hypernatremic dehydration is more common than SIDS.
From 2016 paper :
In a retrospective study in the United Kingdom, the frequency of breastfeeding-associated neonatal hypernatremia was found to be greater than all-causes combined of hypernatremia among late preterm and term newborns.81 In the mentioned report, the incidence of sodium level ≥ 160 was 71 per 100 000 breastfed infants (1 in 1400).
The consequences include death and potentially devastating neurologic injury as this 2017 study explains:
In our study 7 out of 65 patients died as a result of complications of hypernatremia. There was a significant correlation between severity of hypernatremia and mortality (p = 0.001). All who died had serum sodium concentration >160 mmol/L…
All infants in the control group were developmentally normal at ages 6 and 12 months, but in the case group 25% and 21% had developmental delay at 6 and 12 months, respectively. At 18 months the incidence of developmental delay was 3% for the control group and 19% for case group, and at 24 months 12% of case infants had developmental delay versus none for the control group…
Hypoglycemia also injures and kills babies.
A 2017 paper reports that the UK has paid out $250 million dollars for brain injuries due to hypoglycemia, nearly all cases the result of insufficient breastmilk.
I’m going to charitably assume that the Yale breastfeeding group is simply unaware of the depth and breadth of the literature on insufficient breastmilk and the brain injuries and deaths it causes. The alternative would be that the group is actively concealing the latest research findings in order to keep women in the dark about the deadly risks of breastfeeding.
They close their piece with a paragraph that would be laughable if the issue weren’t so serious:
Overall, an extensive review of the literature was warranted but not employed in writing this opinion piece. We need to provide mothers with high-quality, unbiased and uncompromised breastfeeding support both during and after pregnancy…
The people who failed to do an adequate literature review were the folks from Yale.
The bottom line, though, is this: If Yale School of Public Health group doesn’t have command of the breastfeeding literature, especially the latest scientific papers, they have no business criticizing those who do. Otherwise that criticism comes across the same way as such efforts on the part of Big Pharma do: attempts to silence whistle blowers in order to keep market share.
