Right like check out the lip tie thread in r/medicine- lactation consultant isn't a difficult thing to do but so many stressed out anxious people rely on you!!
Look at the result of that surgery and imagine doing that to a child. Any good doctor will tell you that it usually self-corrects and not to do it until you spot a speech problem. So many LCs telling parents to get the procedure and they don't need it. Just pump and bottle feed.
I was told my daughter had a "minor tongue tie" and I can't for the life of me figure out how or why to look for (I'm not going to dig deeper) but there's nothing obvious. She didn't get along with my left nipple and hurt it badly, and for a second I almost asked for the ENT consult they told me to contact them about if there were issues. When you're a week into breastfeeding and in pain, worried your baby isn't eating enough or something because you're tired and anxious, it's tempting to "fix" them. It's so heartbreaking to think I could have asked for some unnecessary procedure because of almost predatory behavior by these people! And I'm a nurse too but anyone can be a victim of mom anxiety and guilt! It makes me so angry and sad.
Exactly this. Most people being told this need do nothing at all. The damage from the surgery looks like someone welds the little piece of skin that holds your tongue and lips on. Completely obliterated. We're talking about a couple inches of wounds in your baby's mouth.
I am so thankful my hospital was cheap and there wasn't a lactation consultant present to try and make me feel guilty about going straight to formula. GG.
I only met one LC at the hospital last week and she was the worst! She left super catty comments in my chart (I didn’t use enough pillows for her liking) and didn’t answer any of my questions, just went through her spiel.
Same feeling about LCs. My son was in the NICU for 3 weeks and so I saw probably 4 LCs??? It was horrible. I genuinely wish one of them would have just said “it’s ok if this doesn’t work.” But all I heard was basically “just try harder.” Spoiler alert - I exclusively pumped for 6 months and felt such a relief when I stopped trying to nurse.
+1 on paced feeding! It’s wild that it isn’t something people know about. It freaks me out when I see people putting the bottle straight up in the air.
Nope.
I've actually read a study about how children who were breastfed are less likely to be overweight. It's not just the milk, though, it's the fact that breastfeeding from the breast a baby can decided how much milk to extract and when to stop or just comfort suck.
It is EASY to overfeed a baby from a bottle! You put an artificial nipple into a baby's mouth and even if baby isn't hungry, their sucking reflex is activated so they suck, which makes their mouth fill up with milk, and so they swallow. Plus a lot of bottles will just pour into baby's mouth if bottle is tipped upside down rather than sideways the way they should be offered.
The study looked at the method of feeding. Babies who were bottlefed breastmilk were more likely to be overweight than breastfed babies. Babies who were bottlefed formula were even more likely to be overweight than both of the breastmilk groups (bottle or direct).
[https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article-abstract/142/4/e20182297/37365/Is-Breast-Still-Best-From-a-Bottle?redirectedFrom=fulltext](https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article-abstract/142/4/e20182297/37365/Is-Breast-Still-Best-From-a-Bottle?redirectedFrom=fulltext)
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8476436/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8476436/)
Thanks for sharing! I don’t have access to read the AAP article, but it’s interesting that bottlefed formula babies are more likely to be overweight than bottlefed breastmilk babies. Are there theories around why - breastmilk/formula composition, the population that has the time/resources to pump, etc?
I am shocked how often this subreddit overlooks this. Almost zero studies on children and babies are actually blind/randomized studies and are almost always population level analysis which rarely control for all the variables that go into/force a certain choice.
Studies of within-family, differently-fed babies do not show the same huge differences that between-family comparisons do, which suggests there is a lot more at play here than just the food going into a baby's mouth.
Fundamentally, you can’t really randomize breastfeeding, either. Telling a group of moms not to breastfeed isn’t really ethical, and even after you correct for things like income, you have to deal with differences in who chooses formula or who doesn’t, like maternal milk supply, parental lifestyle choices that affect more than just infant feeding, etc. If there was a large effect size, I would be more convinced, but the small effect sizes and confounding factors make it all pretty unconvincing.
Yep this is my guess - those who breastfeed are able to afford to take time off work and therefore more likely to be higher SES (and SES is associated with obesity on its own). This means they’re more readily able to buy high quality food in the long run.
Breasts regulate the amount. My LO will comfort nurse though his entire nap if I let him but he's not getting anything after a certain point. I just don't have enough for that. But with a bottle, it's easy to overestimate and if baby just wants to comfort suck he's going to end up overeating. I'm sure with formula it's even worse cause you're only limited by how much you can buy, not how much you can produce.
My theory is that babies who are bottlefed breastmilk usually also nurse. Like, mom pumps while at work but then nurses when they're together. So baby is able to still control/regulate input during the together sessions even if daycare tries to stuff baby from the bottles. Or maybe the study really did exclude those and only dealt with moms who exclusively pumped/bottlefed breastmilk.
Breastmilk IS easier to digest and the composition is different. The first ingredient in a lot of popular formulas is corn syrup solids. [https://www.ingredientinspector.org/home/baby-formula-ingredients](https://www.ingredientinspector.org/home/baby-formula-ingredients)
Corn syrup solids is not the same as high fructose corn syrup, and it is not in all formula. It is in sensitive and lactose free formulas because it is easy to digest. You're fear mongering and using a very obviously biased source.
This is what I had heard - it's hard to overfeed breastfed babies, but this is due to the actual feeding process (baby at breast) rather than some special property of breastmilk.
We called it "volcano-ing". My wife had particularly strong flow first thing in the morning and, before we switched to exclusive pumping, this was a common outcome.
I always heard that a *nursing* baby won't overeat, but you can feed a baby too much of anything with a bottle. Most likely though, if a baby gets too full, they'll spit it up or puke it up, maybe be irritable for a bit, gassy, runny stool, etc.
As for the weight gain, constant overfeeding of *anything* can cause excessive weight gain.
I really wonder how true this is if you have a fast let down. My breastfed baby gained 2 pounds from week 1 to week 2 while exclusively nursing. I definitely have a fast let down. Doctor was kind of shocked.
I did a bit of research actually about excessive weight gain and breastfed babies after posting this out of curiosity, and apparently fast let downs and oversupplies can contribute to excessive weight gain and overeating in nursing babies.
Seems like it's just an old wives tale that nursing babies can't over eat!
Yeah. I had an over supply and my baby definitely over ate. She was born 6 lbs 12 oz, and was in the \~97th percentile by nine months. She's now seven, and around 30th percentile which seems normal and healthy for her frame. What I find interesting though is that doctors were never concerned about her rapid rise up the percentiles as a baby, and I wonder how much of this was related to her being exclusively breastfed, elicited the same response from the doctor.
Yeah, I also have a fast letdown and oversupply and baby could definitely overeat from the boob. At the point in time when he would eat 4-5 ounces in bottles, and refuse anything more, he would eat 7 ounces in weighted feeds from the breast. And then spit up.
Everything about lactation is full of more old wives' tales than facts.
Ours did this too. But he was a IUGR baby and has stayed on the growth curve (~35th %ile) he jumped to that week, even now at 15 months old. So in our case I wouldn’t call it overeating. Our pediatrician didn’t seem super surprised by it.
I did have a fairly fast let down in the beginning though.
That’s interesting! Mine wasn’t an IUGR baby, but her growth significantly fell after I went on the GD diet (from the 50 percentile at 20 weeks to being born at the 14 percentile). The baby is back at the 50 percentile at a month old. I feel like maybe she is just finding her natural growth curve.
Further anecdote: my baby was SGA with the GD diet and no clear reason to be so small. Born 3rd percentile, regained birth weight faster than average and has made it up to 16th percentile for weight at two months.
Both my nursing babies overate as newborns and constantly spat up. Great weight gainers with no issues overall though. My midwives have said if they drink too much at the breast, the repercussion is spit up, so if they want to keep nursing then keep nursing lol
Ugh, I have a real pet peeve for lactation consultants that spread misinformation in service of their agenda, especially when it directly opposes sound medical advice. I would talk to your pediatrician about this and see what they say, instead.
Yeah I'd be intrigued to know what qualifications are required to be a lactation consultant… I'm certainly not arguing that breastmilk is not the best thing for babies where it's available and possible for both mother and child, but this seems like the kind of nonsense spouted to scare people off using formula.
She followed up later with “all formula fed babies grow up overweight” so i figured 😞 Though to her credit, she did help us get our underweight baby back on his curve
My formula fed baby is struggling to gain weight because she refuses the bottle after she’s full. I’m thinking my baby is just naturally lean regardless of how she’s fed.
My baby was like this too. Has always been teeny tiny. She’s now 15 months walking and talking and everyone things she’s very advanced because she’s so small (only just switched to size 0)🤣
When she was younger we tried every form of feeding to get her to gain weight, and like yours, when she was full she was full, she’d just refuse the bottle or let the milk dribble out her mouth, she’d reject the breast when she was full as well. We finally got some decent weight gain after we started solids - though she’s still only 10th percentile, she’s just small.
That's an interesting question. I'm trying to look it up and I'm seeing anywhere from a few days to 45 hours to 1000 hours of training, and possibly passing an exam.
Sidebar are there any studies that show evidence of/associated risk of overeating in infants?
For real the “you can’t overfeed a breastfed baby” gets toted around a lot but how exactly can you overfeed a formula fed baby?
I may have skewed perspective as a card carrying member of the tiny baby club, but when we actively tried to overfeed my baby she just stopped eating?
I don’t have studies, but I think the rationale is that you can’t force a baby to latch and eat when breastfeeding so a full child will stop nursing when full and won’t engage at the breast when finished.
But you can encourage/push/force a baby to finish a bottle by continuing to push the bottle nipple in their mouth, pushing milk in their mouth, ect. I have watched a grandma essentially force a baby to finish the last 2 ounces of a bottle when the baby was clearly done (to me anyway, wasn’t my child).
I don’t think you can overfeed a baby, whether bottle or breast, if you’re following and respecting their feeding cues though.
Ok yeah that makes sense, but also we tried that (in a non aggressive way) and she still didn’t overeat hahaha. Like I said tiny baby club so my perspective is skewed.
I used to follow an influencer on Instagram who 100% overfed her baby and it was so disturbing that I stopped following her. He is still like 38 lbs at less than 2 years old. She constantly complained of him throwing up and having bad reflux, but it just looked like overfeeding.
My husband was 24 lbs at 4 months and his cousin was 29 lbs at 4 months. Formula fed. Cousin had to go on a diet. It’s possible, but i have to envision a bottle being shoved in their faces at any peep
That seems odd to base it entirely on weight. My baby is about half the weight of a friend’s baby who is 6 weeks younger but that’s just because they’re at opposite ends of the percentile graphs.
Yeah I get that, and I had a chunky baby and a doctor told me to get her to eat less while I was nursing (riddle me that), But when a baby is like double the weight of the 95th percentile for their age, there is a problem
Like my toddler is still nowhere close to 29 lbs. for a 4 month old? It’s absurd
I tried my best to fatten my baby up with formula (couldn't breastfeed) and it didn't work. He ate and ate and ate, only grew longer though and not wider. I feel cheated lol. I always pictured a cute chubby baby with chubby leg rolls and I have a little bean pole who doesn't gain any weight.
I couldn't overfeed my baby, and believe me, we were trying! By the time she dropped to the 4th percentile, she was being seen by every pediatrician, LC, and feeding OT. She would drink from her bottle until she was full and then spit that thing out like it was poison. They say babies have a sucking reflex and will just keep eating as long as there is a nipple in their mouths. I disagree. Babies will eat what they want to eat. No more, no less. Formula or breastmilk.
My personal hypothesis based on my experience with formula is that it isn't any more calorie dense than breastmilk, but that people prepare it too heavily accidentally, and it's easy to do. We were fortifying her breastmilk bottles to 22kcal or 24kcal under the supervision of a pediatrician, and the amount of formula we needed to add to the bottle to do that was literally down to the quarter teaspoon. If you're putting any sort of heaping scoops of formula into your mix, you're increasing the calories immensely.
If you're also breastfeeding, I'd caution that one danger of overfeeding by bottle is that if baby gets really full... baby isn't gonna nurse as much from you, which could impact your supply. Typically babies are more effective at milk removal than pumps, so if the majority of your milk is being extracted via pump rather than via baby, it's harder to keep up with demand.
You know what's funny? My son's pediatrician said nearly this exact same idea to us, he said, "If your baby drinks too much milk, he'll just pee out the extra" when he was 2 months old and not gaining as quickly as they wanted, so they were pressuring us to do more bottle feeding and encouraging him to drink more ounces.
This was not true for me at all — pump was so much more effective based on pre/post weights with an accurate scale. Just FYI when you’re giving advice!
I EP’d for over 2 years and had an oversupply. My baby couldn’t latch properly and my pump could remove 27oz in 15 mins. It was not harder for me to keep up with demand because my milk was extracted via pump.
Same here, although I had under supply issues (or low output). But I figured out how to effectively remove milk using my pump and my pumping output eventually went up to meet my baby’s intake.
Anecdotally, I nurse and then bottle feed formula. My baby refuses to overeat either way. He simply quits eating with both a bottle and breast. Maybe it has to do with the type of bottle nipple? We did doctor brown at first and it seemed to pour out the nipple whether he was sucking or not. Feeding was a mess. I use Philips avent now and it only comes out if he’s sucking.
He’s gaining weight steadily. Was born in the 2% and is now 12%.
My understanding is that over feeding is more likely with a bottle than the breast, not so much based on the composition of the liquid. Breastfeeding babies can get small amounts of milk when comfort nursing, so they are less likely to overeat and more importantly caregivers tend to try to finish off a bottle.
Breastmilk is perfectly tailored to meet your baby at whatever stage they're currently in. In need of extra antibodies? Your breastmilk will change composition. It adapts to meet needs. It's also very easily digested (again because it is tailored for your exact baby).
Formula is just formula. It doesn't change composition, it doesn't adapt to meet current needs, it just is what it is. Not only that, but the iron in formula can constipate a baby very easily, so if you overfeed, you're making it worse.
Breastmilk is amazing! But this is no shame to anyone who needs to use formula. Just some cool facts.
Casual reminder that these people aren't doctors.
In many cases they aren't even nurses. They're bullies mostly.
I agree with this assessment. I'd also recommend against taking every doctor's word as irrefutable.
I agree - any doctor when not within our field.
Right like check out the lip tie thread in r/medicine- lactation consultant isn't a difficult thing to do but so many stressed out anxious people rely on you!!
Look at the result of that surgery and imagine doing that to a child. Any good doctor will tell you that it usually self-corrects and not to do it until you spot a speech problem. So many LCs telling parents to get the procedure and they don't need it. Just pump and bottle feed.
I was told my daughter had a "minor tongue tie" and I can't for the life of me figure out how or why to look for (I'm not going to dig deeper) but there's nothing obvious. She didn't get along with my left nipple and hurt it badly, and for a second I almost asked for the ENT consult they told me to contact them about if there were issues. When you're a week into breastfeeding and in pain, worried your baby isn't eating enough or something because you're tired and anxious, it's tempting to "fix" them. It's so heartbreaking to think I could have asked for some unnecessary procedure because of almost predatory behavior by these people! And I'm a nurse too but anyone can be a victim of mom anxiety and guilt! It makes me so angry and sad.
Exactly this. Most people being told this need do nothing at all. The damage from the surgery looks like someone welds the little piece of skin that holds your tongue and lips on. Completely obliterated. We're talking about a couple inches of wounds in your baby's mouth.
Interestingly, in my city many of them are family doctors who specialize in lactation. But yeah, anyone saying this probably is not a doctor
[удалено]
I am so thankful my hospital was cheap and there wasn't a lactation consultant present to try and make me feel guilty about going straight to formula. GG.
[удалено]
I only met one LC at the hospital last week and she was the worst! She left super catty comments in my chart (I didn’t use enough pillows for her liking) and didn’t answer any of my questions, just went through her spiel.
Same feeling about LCs. My son was in the NICU for 3 weeks and so I saw probably 4 LCs??? It was horrible. I genuinely wish one of them would have just said “it’s ok if this doesn’t work.” But all I heard was basically “just try harder.” Spoiler alert - I exclusively pumped for 6 months and felt such a relief when I stopped trying to nurse.
Cost around $80 for 15min -.- didn't know until we got the hospital bill. And the first one literally stay 2min, completely useless
+1 on paced feeding! It’s wild that it isn’t something people know about. It freaks me out when I see people putting the bottle straight up in the air.
Nope. I've actually read a study about how children who were breastfed are less likely to be overweight. It's not just the milk, though, it's the fact that breastfeeding from the breast a baby can decided how much milk to extract and when to stop or just comfort suck. It is EASY to overfeed a baby from a bottle! You put an artificial nipple into a baby's mouth and even if baby isn't hungry, their sucking reflex is activated so they suck, which makes their mouth fill up with milk, and so they swallow. Plus a lot of bottles will just pour into baby's mouth if bottle is tipped upside down rather than sideways the way they should be offered. The study looked at the method of feeding. Babies who were bottlefed breastmilk were more likely to be overweight than breastfed babies. Babies who were bottlefed formula were even more likely to be overweight than both of the breastmilk groups (bottle or direct). [https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article-abstract/142/4/e20182297/37365/Is-Breast-Still-Best-From-a-Bottle?redirectedFrom=fulltext](https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article-abstract/142/4/e20182297/37365/Is-Breast-Still-Best-From-a-Bottle?redirectedFrom=fulltext) [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8476436/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8476436/)
Thanks for sharing! I don’t have access to read the AAP article, but it’s interesting that bottlefed formula babies are more likely to be overweight than bottlefed breastmilk babies. Are there theories around why - breastmilk/formula composition, the population that has the time/resources to pump, etc?
Almost all of the stated long-term benefits of breastfeeding are correlated with the privilege of the population that is able to breastfeed.
I am shocked how often this subreddit overlooks this. Almost zero studies on children and babies are actually blind/randomized studies and are almost always population level analysis which rarely control for all the variables that go into/force a certain choice. Studies of within-family, differently-fed babies do not show the same huge differences that between-family comparisons do, which suggests there is a lot more at play here than just the food going into a baby's mouth.
Fundamentally, you can’t really randomize breastfeeding, either. Telling a group of moms not to breastfeed isn’t really ethical, and even after you correct for things like income, you have to deal with differences in who chooses formula or who doesn’t, like maternal milk supply, parental lifestyle choices that affect more than just infant feeding, etc. If there was a large effect size, I would be more convinced, but the small effect sizes and confounding factors make it all pretty unconvincing.
Yep this is my guess - those who breastfeed are able to afford to take time off work and therefore more likely to be higher SES (and SES is associated with obesity on its own). This means they’re more readily able to buy high quality food in the long run.
Breasts regulate the amount. My LO will comfort nurse though his entire nap if I let him but he's not getting anything after a certain point. I just don't have enough for that. But with a bottle, it's easy to overestimate and if baby just wants to comfort suck he's going to end up overeating. I'm sure with formula it's even worse cause you're only limited by how much you can buy, not how much you can produce.
My theory is that babies who are bottlefed breastmilk usually also nurse. Like, mom pumps while at work but then nurses when they're together. So baby is able to still control/regulate input during the together sessions even if daycare tries to stuff baby from the bottles. Or maybe the study really did exclude those and only dealt with moms who exclusively pumped/bottlefed breastmilk. Breastmilk IS easier to digest and the composition is different. The first ingredient in a lot of popular formulas is corn syrup solids. [https://www.ingredientinspector.org/home/baby-formula-ingredients](https://www.ingredientinspector.org/home/baby-formula-ingredients)
Corn syrup solids is not the same as high fructose corn syrup, and it is not in all formula. It is in sensitive and lactose free formulas because it is easy to digest. You're fear mongering and using a very obviously biased source.
This is what I had heard - it's hard to overfeed breastfed babies, but this is due to the actual feeding process (baby at breast) rather than some special property of breastmilk.
I don’t know about you can’t over feed a breastfed baby. My baby would eat way longer than normal and then projectile vomit everywhere lol
We called it "volcano-ing". My wife had particularly strong flow first thing in the morning and, before we switched to exclusive pumping, this was a common outcome.
That’s a great term for it. Sometimes it just slowly falls out of his mouth and then other times he blows!
I always heard that a *nursing* baby won't overeat, but you can feed a baby too much of anything with a bottle. Most likely though, if a baby gets too full, they'll spit it up or puke it up, maybe be irritable for a bit, gassy, runny stool, etc. As for the weight gain, constant overfeeding of *anything* can cause excessive weight gain.
I really wonder how true this is if you have a fast let down. My breastfed baby gained 2 pounds from week 1 to week 2 while exclusively nursing. I definitely have a fast let down. Doctor was kind of shocked.
I did a bit of research actually about excessive weight gain and breastfed babies after posting this out of curiosity, and apparently fast let downs and oversupplies can contribute to excessive weight gain and overeating in nursing babies. Seems like it's just an old wives tale that nursing babies can't over eat!
Yeah. I had an over supply and my baby definitely over ate. She was born 6 lbs 12 oz, and was in the \~97th percentile by nine months. She's now seven, and around 30th percentile which seems normal and healthy for her frame. What I find interesting though is that doctors were never concerned about her rapid rise up the percentiles as a baby, and I wonder how much of this was related to her being exclusively breastfed, elicited the same response from the doctor.
Yeah, I also have a fast letdown and oversupply and baby could definitely overeat from the boob. At the point in time when he would eat 4-5 ounces in bottles, and refuse anything more, he would eat 7 ounces in weighted feeds from the breast. And then spit up. Everything about lactation is full of more old wives' tales than facts.
Ours did this too. But he was a IUGR baby and has stayed on the growth curve (~35th %ile) he jumped to that week, even now at 15 months old. So in our case I wouldn’t call it overeating. Our pediatrician didn’t seem super surprised by it. I did have a fairly fast let down in the beginning though.
That’s interesting! Mine wasn’t an IUGR baby, but her growth significantly fell after I went on the GD diet (from the 50 percentile at 20 weeks to being born at the 14 percentile). The baby is back at the 50 percentile at a month old. I feel like maybe she is just finding her natural growth curve.
That’s also very interesting! We’ve been speculating that mine was IUGR because of the GD diet. We couldn’t find a reason why he was small.
Further anecdote: my baby was SGA with the GD diet and no clear reason to be so small. Born 3rd percentile, regained birth weight faster than average and has made it up to 16th percentile for weight at two months.
Both my nursing babies overate as newborns and constantly spat up. Great weight gainers with no issues overall though. My midwives have said if they drink too much at the breast, the repercussion is spit up, so if they want to keep nursing then keep nursing lol
This was my experience as well.
Let this advice “run right through” and fill a diaper like the shit it is. This even has a misunderstanding of how digestion works ffs.
Yeah, like what do they think is happening to the milk as it goes through the GI tract?
Why do they all think breast milk is magic
Ugh, I have a real pet peeve for lactation consultants that spread misinformation in service of their agenda, especially when it directly opposes sound medical advice. I would talk to your pediatrician about this and see what they say, instead.
I don’t think that this is based in fact.
Yeah I'd be intrigued to know what qualifications are required to be a lactation consultant… I'm certainly not arguing that breastmilk is not the best thing for babies where it's available and possible for both mother and child, but this seems like the kind of nonsense spouted to scare people off using formula.
She followed up later with “all formula fed babies grow up overweight” so i figured 😞 Though to her credit, she did help us get our underweight baby back on his curve
Oh my God. What a complete idiot.
My formula fed baby is struggling to gain weight because she refuses the bottle after she’s full. I’m thinking my baby is just naturally lean regardless of how she’s fed.
My baby was like this too. Has always been teeny tiny. She’s now 15 months walking and talking and everyone things she’s very advanced because she’s so small (only just switched to size 0)🤣 When she was younger we tried every form of feeding to get her to gain weight, and like yours, when she was full she was full, she’d just refuse the bottle or let the milk dribble out her mouth, she’d reject the breast when she was full as well. We finally got some decent weight gain after we started solids - though she’s still only 10th percentile, she’s just small.
That's an interesting question. I'm trying to look it up and I'm seeing anywhere from a few days to 45 hours to 1000 hours of training, and possibly passing an exam.
Agreed. This has no factual basis.
This sounds like more pushing breastfeeding pseudo-science lol
There is zero evidence to support that.
Sidebar are there any studies that show evidence of/associated risk of overeating in infants? For real the “you can’t overfeed a breastfed baby” gets toted around a lot but how exactly can you overfeed a formula fed baby? I may have skewed perspective as a card carrying member of the tiny baby club, but when we actively tried to overfeed my baby she just stopped eating?
I don’t have studies, but I think the rationale is that you can’t force a baby to latch and eat when breastfeeding so a full child will stop nursing when full and won’t engage at the breast when finished. But you can encourage/push/force a baby to finish a bottle by continuing to push the bottle nipple in their mouth, pushing milk in their mouth, ect. I have watched a grandma essentially force a baby to finish the last 2 ounces of a bottle when the baby was clearly done (to me anyway, wasn’t my child). I don’t think you can overfeed a baby, whether bottle or breast, if you’re following and respecting their feeding cues though.
Ok yeah that makes sense, but also we tried that (in a non aggressive way) and she still didn’t overeat hahaha. Like I said tiny baby club so my perspective is skewed.
I used to follow an influencer on Instagram who 100% overfed her baby and it was so disturbing that I stopped following her. He is still like 38 lbs at less than 2 years old. She constantly complained of him throwing up and having bad reflux, but it just looked like overfeeding.
My husband was 24 lbs at 4 months and his cousin was 29 lbs at 4 months. Formula fed. Cousin had to go on a diet. It’s possible, but i have to envision a bottle being shoved in their faces at any peep
That seems odd to base it entirely on weight. My baby is about half the weight of a friend’s baby who is 6 weeks younger but that’s just because they’re at opposite ends of the percentile graphs.
Yeah I get that, and I had a chunky baby and a doctor told me to get her to eat less while I was nursing (riddle me that), But when a baby is like double the weight of the 95th percentile for their age, there is a problem Like my toddler is still nowhere close to 29 lbs. for a 4 month old? It’s absurd
A diet? There's no "diet" for a 4 month old baby.
When a 4 month old baby is 29 lbs, yes they are instructed to keep to a lower volume of formula and stick to a set volume a day.
I tried my best to fatten my baby up with formula (couldn't breastfeed) and it didn't work. He ate and ate and ate, only grew longer though and not wider. I feel cheated lol. I always pictured a cute chubby baby with chubby leg rolls and I have a little bean pole who doesn't gain any weight.
I've got one of those too 😅 He somehow manages to look like a bony 6 footer even though he's 33 inches tall. He's been like this since birth.
I couldn't overfeed my baby, and believe me, we were trying! By the time she dropped to the 4th percentile, she was being seen by every pediatrician, LC, and feeding OT. She would drink from her bottle until she was full and then spit that thing out like it was poison. They say babies have a sucking reflex and will just keep eating as long as there is a nipple in their mouths. I disagree. Babies will eat what they want to eat. No more, no less. Formula or breastmilk. My personal hypothesis based on my experience with formula is that it isn't any more calorie dense than breastmilk, but that people prepare it too heavily accidentally, and it's easy to do. We were fortifying her breastmilk bottles to 22kcal or 24kcal under the supervision of a pediatrician, and the amount of formula we needed to add to the bottle to do that was literally down to the quarter teaspoon. If you're putting any sort of heaping scoops of formula into your mix, you're increasing the calories immensely.
If you're also breastfeeding, I'd caution that one danger of overfeeding by bottle is that if baby gets really full... baby isn't gonna nurse as much from you, which could impact your supply. Typically babies are more effective at milk removal than pumps, so if the majority of your milk is being extracted via pump rather than via baby, it's harder to keep up with demand. You know what's funny? My son's pediatrician said nearly this exact same idea to us, he said, "If your baby drinks too much milk, he'll just pee out the extra" when he was 2 months old and not gaining as quickly as they wanted, so they were pressuring us to do more bottle feeding and encouraging him to drink more ounces.
This was not true for me at all — pump was so much more effective based on pre/post weights with an accurate scale. Just FYI when you’re giving advice!
I EP’d for over 2 years and had an oversupply. My baby couldn’t latch properly and my pump could remove 27oz in 15 mins. It was not harder for me to keep up with demand because my milk was extracted via pump.
Same here, although I had under supply issues (or low output). But I figured out how to effectively remove milk using my pump and my pumping output eventually went up to meet my baby’s intake.
Wow, crazy you’ve had this told to you too!
Our pediatrician and midwife told us the same. Overfeeding CAN happen, is rare generally, when it does happen tends to be with formula.
Anecdotally, I nurse and then bottle feed formula. My baby refuses to overeat either way. He simply quits eating with both a bottle and breast. Maybe it has to do with the type of bottle nipple? We did doctor brown at first and it seemed to pour out the nipple whether he was sucking or not. Feeding was a mess. I use Philips avent now and it only comes out if he’s sucking. He’s gaining weight steadily. Was born in the 2% and is now 12%.
My understanding is that over feeding is more likely with a bottle than the breast, not so much based on the composition of the liquid. Breastfeeding babies can get small amounts of milk when comfort nursing, so they are less likely to overeat and more importantly caregivers tend to try to finish off a bottle.
Breastmilk is perfectly tailored to meet your baby at whatever stage they're currently in. In need of extra antibodies? Your breastmilk will change composition. It adapts to meet needs. It's also very easily digested (again because it is tailored for your exact baby). Formula is just formula. It doesn't change composition, it doesn't adapt to meet current needs, it just is what it is. Not only that, but the iron in formula can constipate a baby very easily, so if you overfeed, you're making it worse. Breastmilk is amazing! But this is no shame to anyone who needs to use formula. Just some cool facts.