Breastfeeding Not for You? Sisters, Listen Up

World Breastfeeding Awareness Week is this week and Aisha Qaasim flags the need for stronger cultural support in the United States, particularly for African American moms. Negative attitudes, she says, are making our children sick.

"That is the most disgusting thing I have ever seen," she said to the small woman at her side loudly enough to ripple through the weekday lunch crowd at the Westfield Shopping Mall in Bethesda, Md. I've brushed off some pretty awful insults in my life.
In law school I received hate mail covered with pictures of gorillas demanding that I, and all of the other African American first-years, go back to "Cooley High."

Yet, I was caught off guard when I realized the insult was aimed at me, as I sat on a bench breastfeeding my 2-month-old daughter.
A nameless woman at a mall was somehow the one to find the insult that I could not toss onto the neat pile of words that would never hurt me. It did hurt. And, these attitudes toward breastfeeding are making our children sick, especially African American children, who are the least likely to get the benefit of mothers' milk.

Our babies are more than twice as likely to die before age 1 than Asian, Latino or white babies. A 2001 study in Pediatrics concluded that an increase in African American breastfeeding rates alone could reduce this disparity. In other words, we cannot afford to treat breastfeeding like the choice between cloth and disposable diapers.

More Outreach Needed
As mothers we have gotten out of the house and have shown off our pregnant bellies at the office and on the red carpet. Now we need to give and get strong cultural support to breastfeed wherever we please.

We also need to know our legal rights: Forty-five states have enacted laws that either grant mothers the right to breastfeed in public or exempt breastfeeding from state obscenity laws.
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that mothers feed infants breast milk and nothing else for the first six months of life, and continue to breastfeed for at least one year. Yet, many women dread the negative attention they receive while breastfeeding in public.

To counter that, we all need to amplify the reasons breastfeeding is so good for mother and child. Compared to their formula-fed counterparts, breastfed children stand a better chance of withstanding a long list of health problems including diabetes, leukemia, cold and flu viruses, bacterial meningitis and obesity to name a few. Some of these benefits continue into adulthood.

Women Lower Risks
Women who breastfeed lower their risk of developing uterine cancer, osteoporosis, Type 2 diabetes and breast cancer over their lifetimes. But the irony is that in today's ambitious parenting climate--where millions of dollars are being spent on educational toys and organic baby products--breastfeeding as the most important developmental head-start is often neglected. Among African American women that's particularly true.

In 2004, 74 percent of U.S. women initiated breastfeeding soon after giving birth. Among black women it was 60 percent. By the time infants reached 6 months of age--a key health target--only 14 percent of U.S. infants were breastfed exclusively. Among black infants it was 7 percent.

Only 36 percent of U.S. babies received breast milk in combination with formula or other foods at 6 months of age. For African American babies make that 29 percent. Black women are the least likely to breastfeed, even those of us with a college education, health insurance and a nice paying job. African American women across the spectrum breastfeed less than women who have only a high school education, less than women who live below the poverty line and less than adolescent mothers, according to the Centers for Disease Control 2004 National Immunization Survey.

Interrogations Instead of Support
Ironically, the criticism I faced while breastfeeding in public almost always came from other women. When I would complain to friends or family about the ridicule or hostility I received, instead of feeling supported I felt interrogated. "Did you forget to feed the baby before you went out?" "Didn't you have a blanket to cover yourself with?" I was often asked.
"So what if I did?" I would always respond, feeling like the caricatured rape victim scorned for wearing a miniskirt where both men and booze were present.

America's cultural obsession with the breast as a sexual object undermines the U.S Health and Human Services Department's goal of having 50 percent of infants breastfed exclusively at 6 months of age. If anything, we should be more disturbed as a society by the sight of breasts filled to bursting with silicone and perched unnaturally on collarbones than the sight of a woman breastfeeding a child.

If we as a society can somehow find a way to tolerate breast augmentation, shouldn't we also be able to support the natural and healthy role of the breast in mother-baby nutrition and bonding? We need to desensitize our communities away from viewing the breast as either titillating or obscene.

Out and proud, I nursed my daughter at the salon, on the subway, in dozens of restaurants, at the swimming pool and on airplanes. I pumped breast milk in my office while on conference calls. "What is that whooshy sound?" colleagues would sometimes ask, as I smiled to myself. Que viva la leche!

The positive impact of breast milk on the mental and physical development of children is unparalleled. Want a healthy baby? Put the Baby Einstein videos and hand sanitizer away and breastfeed. All the mammals are doing it. And, our children's health depends on it.

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source:(WOMENSENEWS)
Editor's Note: The above article is a commentary. The opinions expressed are those of the author and not necessarily the views of Women's eNews.
Aisha Qaasim is a civil rights attorney and writer based in Redondo Beach, Calif.

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What do Americans eat and why?

The great food debate

Come on in

Aug 29th 2002 | SAN FRANCISCO
From The Economist print edition

How bad is American food? And whose fault is it?

AMERICANS are in a pickle over food. Just as a decade of financial optimism has given way to the shocked discovery that people are poorer than they thought they were, so an era of working out in gyms and low-fat dieting has been mocked by reports of the nation's shocking chubbiness and other food-related forms of ill-health.

The figures on fat are striking. The proportion (if not the proportions) of Americans who are obese rose from 15% in 1991 to 27% in 1999. Youngsters show the same trend: 10% of them are now obese. Add in the merely overweight and you cover 60% of American adults and 25% of children. David Satcher, who retired as surgeon general in February, has estimated that obesity contributes to 300,000 of the 2m deaths each year in America. Treating diet-related conditions such as cancer and heart disease cost $117 billion in 2000.

What to do? The Bush administration has launched a $190m advertising campaign aimed at making children more energetic. This week, the Los Angeles school board moved to ban the sale of fizzy drinks in its schools. In May, a Californian state senator abandoned her bill to impose a tax of two cents on every can of pop statewide, but others are still pushing for “sin taxes” on burgers and sugary drinks.

The courts have become involved too. Last month, a New Yorker sued four fast-food chains. He had eaten their food regularly in the course of reaching 272lb (123kg) and notching up two heart attacks. The restaurants, he said, had not warned him that his diet might be harmful.

Meanwhile, another battle has broken out within the fad-crazed health industry itself. The traditional low-fat, bran-and-broccoli dieticians have been challenged by another school that advocates high-protein eating. Beef and lobster, they say, are fine, but you have to stay off carbohydrates such as pasta and bread.

Is the American stomach really in such poor shape? By the standards of most of the world, Americans are fairly healthy. Life expectancy continues to rise; it is bettered only by places that absorb far fewer immigrants from poor countries. Despite jeers from Europe about the number of additives and hormones that go into American food, there have been no health scares on the scale of Britain's mad-cow disease.

Yet Americans are surely right to be agitated about their food. There is an overwhelming amount of evidence that their diet is doing many of them a great deal of harm. The “fat-acceptance” lobby is right that you can be heavy and fit; but without exercise, too much weight makes diabetes and other potentially fatal diseases more likely. Independent of the implications of being overweight, diet also plays a role in other illnesses, such as cancers of the bowel, colon and prostate.

There is also a clear social divide. Both hunger (which still afflicts 10m households in America) and unhealthy excess correlate closely with poverty and poor education. Shops in poor neighbourhoods stock less fresh food (and at higher prices), while fast-food joints proliferate. Poorer people also have fewer parks and playgrounds in which to exercise.

This sounds bad. Yet the food industry is largely giving American consumers (rich and poor) what they want. A pattern of life in which fewer families eat regular meals together, fewer parents remain at home during the day to cook, and increasing amounts of time are spent working or commuting creates demand for convenient, fast food (especially when it is as cheap as it is). Tummy size, then, is largely a side-effect of modern American life—and the choices that Americans make.

That said, there is a debate about how well informed consumers are when they make these choices. Even if you regard the case of the litigious 272lb New Yorker as absurd, America's food industry is particularly powerful and unfettered. In Europe, the most powerful bit of the food-production chain is the one closest to the consumer—the supermarkets. In America, the industry is controlled by food processors. Three facets of the food business are particularly troubling:

•Misleading information. Marion Nestle of New York University points out in “Food Politics” (University of California Press, 2002) that blurbs on packaging are highly selective. Breakfast cereals, for instance, come blazoned with information about how their added minerals and vitamins will strengthen young bones; they have less about what the coating of sugar will do to children's teeth and waistlines.

•Poor regulation. The power of the food lobby extends to Washington. The agriculture department has a huge conflict of interest. It is responsible both for promoting the interests of farmers and for disseminating nutritional information. The Food and Drug Administration has been restrained by Congress, at the behest of food interests, in its efforts to regulate dietary claims.

•Schools. Eating habits formed by children are hard to shake in adulthood: 60% of obese children grow up into obese adults. Fast-food firms often serve as official caterers, while soft-drink firms have installed numerous snack dispensers in schools (especially poor ones), in exchange for providing things like TVs.

Far from representing something new, the current debate about carbohydrates reflects the confusion created when science and marketing mix. While the 1990s fads concentrated on fatty foods and their link to cholesterol, the high-protein dieticians blame starchy carbohydrates. These, they say, produce a rush of sugar in the blood that destabilises the body's regulation of appetite and so lead to overeating.

This does help to explain one mystery of the past 20 years: why “low-fat” food did not work. The low-fat meals that Americans guzzled down were often packed with refined flour and heavily sugared to give them flavour (which the customers also wanted); people who tucked into them kept on wanting to eat more. The food industry did not rush to alert them to this point; nor did its packaging mention the sugar as clearly as the “low fat”.

Yet the more you delve into the issue, the more nuanced it appears. Just as some fatty foods, such as avocados and peanuts, are now thought to protect the heart (not harm it), there are also some sorts of carbohydrates, such as those found in whole grains, that don't encourage appetite. And the newest research seems to imply that people's genetic disposition might matter more than all these things. Variations in the apOE gene, for example, may determine your blood cholesterol level more than your diet. And all that is before you consider things like the amount of exercise people take.

Over the past 25 years or so, Americans have repeatedly jumped at quick-fix solutions for their fast-food habits. In the late 1990s there was a craze for anti-fat drugs, which inevitably led to lawsuits. But in the end nearly all the arguments about food come back to the choices that consumers make.

Americans have got larger because they have chosen (mainly consciously) to eat the way that they do. Millions of them actually eat rather well: these tend to be the richer and better-educated sorts, who go to gyms and buy their vegetables from organic farmers' markets. Their buying power is having an effect: one of the fastest-growing supermarket chains in America is Whole Foods Markets, based in Austin, Texas, which mixes organic vegetables and free-range chicken with a sorcerer's array of vitamin tonics. But, for the moment at least, they are in a clear thin minority.

My recommendation? Go vegetarian!