I always wondered how society got to the point where people started feeding their babies with something filled with ingredients most of us can not pronounce and smells so bad. When was the turning point where mothers started feeding their babies something manufactured in a factory? Why did mothers start to believe that what their own bodies were producing was not good enough for their babies? Jennifer Grayson tackles that question in her book Unlatched: The Evolution of Breastfeeding and the Making of a Controversy. Honestly, before I started reading this book I thought that I would never be able to finish it. However, quite the opposite was true. I could not put this book down.
Since the dawn of humans, mothers have been breastfeeding their…show more content… Pediatricians were actually the first people to start to experiment with the recipes for formula because they saw so many babies dying from drinking rotten cow’s milk (Grayson, 2016). The race to the best formula started there. After a successful recipe was made and formula companies were feeling the benefits, they were not only advertising to women, but designing the maternity wards and giving out free samples to doctors (Grayson, 2016). If a woman got a certain formula in the hospital, she is more likely to believe that one is the best and continue to buy it for her baby. The WHO began to catch onto this though. In 1981 they banned milk nurses, formula advertising to the public, distribution of samples to mothers, formula promotion in hospitals, and gifts to healthcare workers (Grayson, 2016). Not surprisingly though the United States was the only country in the world that would vote against this…show more content… 207). Although WIC is trying to push the message that “Breast is best” by giving out more food vouchers breastfeeding rates are still quite low. A lot of women see how expensive formula is and think they deserve that formula (Grayson p. 213). The fact that women can receive the formula for free and that its much easier to mix up a bottle of formula and put it in the baby’s mouth than to have to devote time to breastfeeding. This is a serious problem. With all the research that shows what effects formula can have on a baby such as obesity and asthma later in life, something needs to be done to decrease the number of women that are receiving free formula. One of the points that Grayson makes that I really liked is “One thing at least is clear: the government can promote breastfeeding all it wants, but as long as it continues to hand out free formula, mothers will assume that formula is endorsed by the government,” (Grayson, p. 231). Don’t get me wrong, there are many women that absolutely need the free formula. If they went back to work and are not longer breastfeeding but don’t make enough to keep up with the two hundred dollar a month cost of formula, many more babies would be quite sick. When it gets to the end of the month and there
