Let’s have a round of applause for lactivist Charlotte Young, the Analytical Armadillo and founder of Milk Matters UK. She briefly ventured out of her social media echo chamber and — asked to demonstrate that the benefits of breastfeeding are real — promptly scurried back.
Young illustrates in the most emphatic way possible that no mother should worry her baby missed out on the benefits of breastfeeding. They are clearly so trivial that even a committed lactivist who presumably has command of the breastfeeding literature CAN’T find any evidence that they occur.
[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Asked to provide data that the claimed benefits of breastfeeding really exist Charlotte Young, the Analytical Armadillo, couldn’t.[/pullquote]
Nonetheless she deserves credit for being willing to at least sniff the air outside the echo chamber. Other lactation professionals like Prof. Amy Brown, Lucy Martinez Sullivan, Kimberly Seals Allers and Dr. Jack (“formula is like a condom”) Newman can’t even manage that. Sure, they tell themselves that they block and ban me because I’m a “troll,” and maybe they even believe it. But the real reason they block me is because I keep asking an uncomfortable question that they cannot answer:
If breastfeeding has the benefits claimed by lactivists, why can’t we detect them in large populations?
It is lactivists themselves who have handed me the means I use to easily discredit them. They have created and aggressively promoted mathematical models (and even a “calculator”) that to purport to show how many diseases could be prevented and lives and healthcare dollars saved if more women breastfed. It’s a nifty method for pressuring new mothers and — even more importantly! — pressuring governments to subsidize lactation professionals.
Lactivists failed to consider that their models could be applied as easily to the past as to the future. When you put in data for the years since 1973, when breastfeeding rates in the US reached their nadir, the calculator makes grandiose predictions for the diseases prevented, and lives and healthcare dollars that should have been saved by now. Yet, to their shock and dismay, lactation professionals can’t find them. In technical terms that means that they never bothered to validate their models and that their models are obviously and fatally flawed.
But back to the Analytical Armadillo. In writing a recent piece decrying gaslighting and strawmen, Young gives a masterclass in — you guessed it — gaslighting and strawmen. I’ll let you read it for yourself and you will see that it doesn’t even make sense. I posted it on the Skeptical OB Facebook page with the comment:
AA, which part of “You-are-hurting-babies-and-mothers!” are you having trouble understanding?
Instead of ignoring women’s pain and concerns (gaslighting), why not try LISTENING to what THEY are saying instead?
Young promptly appeared with what she presumably regards as a witty rejoinder:
You might need to read it again, I’m not sure you’ve entirely understood – perhaps you were triggered, half my client base are formula feeders…
I asked a simple question and she promptly scurried back to her burrow:
[C]an you show any population data for term babies in industrialized countries that demonstrates ANY detectable benefit in rates of mortality and severe morbidity from increased breastfeeding rates?
This is the part that I want women who feel fearful or guilty about using formula to pay close attention to: these are simple questions that Young cannot answer. If breastfeeding truly had the benefits lactation professionals claim, she should be inundating me with data.
Instead she is trying to baffle her followers with bullshit.
That’s because she alerted her Facebook followers to the fact that I was discussing her piece. I’ve included the link because you must read it; it is comedy gold! Lots of snark, not a single piece of data.
Where’s the evidence that increased breastfeeding has reduced the incidence of any serious disease? Young can’t find any.
Where’s the evidence that increased breastfeeding has saved lives of term babies? Young can’t find any?
Where’s the evidence that increased breastfeeding has saved healthcare dollars? Once again Young comes up short.
And if Charlotte Young, the Analytical Armadillo and founder of Milk Matters UK, can’t manage to find ANY evidence that increased breastfeeding rates have had ANY detectable impact on term infant mortality or serious morbidity, you know that it doesn’t.
So thank you, AA, for dropping by. You’ve (inadvertently) offered yet more comfort and support to women who might be feeling fearful or guilty for giving their babies formula, and yet more encouragement for women who want to formula feed but are holding back.
You’ve demonstrated in the clearest way possible that most of purported “benefits” of breastfeeding exist only in lactivists’ imaginations, not in real life. That’s a public service!
