I think it's almost unfathomable for us to imagine how far we are from a "traditional" homosapien life. I read a book called "Hunt, Gather, Parent" where they describe the life of multiple 'less developed' societies, and how they spent a large portion of their life interacting with babies, adolescents, older children, pregnant relations.<p>It's a miracle people are still able to reproduce at all given our isolation from reproduction and the processes of rearing children.
I started aggressively filtering my water (Berkey black + white filters) during my last pregnancy, and I was amazed how much better I felt and how much more water I wanted to drink. I was trying <i>very</i> <i>hard</i> to drink lots of water to support the pregnancy, and found it difficult. When I started filtering it, it became really easy and I felt a lot better to boot.<p>I still get pretty low key dehydrated if I try to subsist on tap water. I suspect my body is balancing my need for water against something in the water it doesn't like. Fluoride is a prime suspect, but any number of other things are possibilities and I wouldn't really have any way to know. But I do often wonder if I'm far from the only one with such an issue, and most people never find it.
I didn't for a long time. It is an easy guess for me that if there's something in the water that's bothering you, and you need to dramatically increase your intake to support two people, biological problems and tradeoffs might ensue. And nursing in particular does require an awful lot of water.<p>I ultimately started filtering all of my water, and it seems like an obvious thing to do in retrospect -- like having a firewall for your home network. It seems silly to me now that I ever assumed that any old pipe sludge that found its way into the system at any point was something I would necessarily want in my body.
Most of the comments here are implying that there is some environmental change which has caused breastfeeding to become harder or less efficient. The article doesn't seem to say that, though. I didn't see any implication that breastfeeding was better back in prehistory.<p>It's possible that it's always been hard. Being in a social group large enough that there are other mothers would solve the issue, largely.
My mom breastfed me in the 80s, but didn't produce enough milk. So, she had a wet nurse. This practice was mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, and probably goes back even further. That women are taught that this is a biological imperative is astonishingly ignorant of human history. Humans are not solitary by nature. We evolved as a society. It should be no surprise that we have evolved to rely upon that. And, no surprise, wet-nursing occurs in other social mammals too, even cross-species, just as we supplement with cow's milk.<p>That said, it's great to hear that scientists are exploring the mindbogglingly complex hormonal interactions at play. We won't change the culture, failure to breastfeed will still cause shame for this perfectly normal occurrence. It would be good for new parents to feel less stress in regards to this aspect of childrearing.
anecdotally, my wife struggled to breastfeed our first born. The hospital lactation consultant wasn't very helpful. Ultimately, we found another who's knowledge and bedside manner was very good. I'd hypothesize the lack of generational homes leads to lack of information for new moms. Add on stress about things like jobs, careers, family expectations, and it becomes very difficult.
i was expecting to find something about society-wide chronic stress, lo and behold<p>> And chronic stress has been found to deplete the body of the energy it needs to make milk.<p>lets just say our profit and growth driven society is not structured to nurture humans, neither grown nor newborn.
For my wife, it was the fact that our kids all had tongue and cheek/mouth ties. As soon as those were cut, they nursed normally. We'd asked at the hospital if our kids had tongue ties, and their rubric was, "Can your kid make a taco tongue? If they can, then they don't have a tongue tie." It turns out that this is not the case. According to modern American medicine, tongue ties don't exist, and if they did exist, your kid will get over them, and anyway here's a bottle, good luck. After we took our kids to a specialist to fix their tongue ties, they went from nursing and crying all night long, to nursing for 15 minutes and sleeping normally. Tongue ties are a thing. If your kid is exhausted from trying to nurse all night and can't get full, then they might have a tongue tie.
My wife is breastfeeding our 10 month old.<p>It was very difficult as the start, getting the latch right, etc.<p>There's the element of "how to do it" which isn't passed down so readily. Great Grandma didn't tell grandma, and grandma had a hard time helping mum. Western society doesn't have a good track record of intergenerational support and family wisdom.<p>Stress is also a large part of it. We turned off all news and removed TVs, etc. Once she's on "perpetual maternity leave" and not pressured to return she was a lot calmer just staying around the house with me and the baby.
As a young father, I did not know how to bathe my little baby. I poured water over her face and she inhaled the water. She couldn’t breathe and turned slightly blue. I called 911.<p>I feel so terribly ashamed of that. I did not know the basic fact that one must not pour water over the face of a baby. There was nobody around me to teach me how to bathe a baby.<p>National Geographic must also write an article about dad like me who can’t bathe their babies.<p>My daughter is okay. She is a grown kid now.
A friend managed the relationship between her diet and her baby's digestive happiness/distress with experimental care. Slowly expanding her dietary envelope; backing out unsuccessful additions; doing retries; retreating to a small core when there was non-determinism, etc. Careful documentation, timing, observation - I was impressed. She accumulated lists of foods which weren't working. Which isn't novel - there were various on the internet. They even overlap.<p>A thick booklet came in her mail. Part of the pregnancy ad deluge. It was a free cookbook, of easy to prepare recipes for the nursing mother. But curiously, the recipes overlapped with her causes-distress list. Like, massively overlapped. I was puzzled - how could this be? Then, in small print, on a back page: Nestlé.<p>I wonder how many of those they send out each year?
Best observation I heard relating to this is:<p>As a new parent you go to class for the delivery experience, an experience which lasts for a day or so and is well-supported while it happens by all kinds of staff.
You also get a couple of classes on breastfeeding, an experience which lasts for months and is very poorly supported while it happens.<p>The emphasis is off -- as noted by the OP when it observes that we know far more about cow milk than breast milk.<p>And of course, there has been a lot of back-and-forth (google term: Mommy wars) on practices and expectations around breastfeeding.
My wife had major problems in the hospital trying to feed our first born. A couple of days in and a charity worker visited, showed her how to do it, and 10 minutes later all was sorted.
Breastfeeding isn't easy! Some babies just never really get it, and if you don't start right away it's hard to produce enough breast milk.