Our co-founder Dr. Christie del Castillo-Hegyi was recently interviewed by Kavin Senapathy of Forbes.com about the Fed Is Best Foundation, The article is being met with an enormous amount of positive feedback, and talks about why our mission is so very important to us, and why we’re determined to spread the word.
For those of you who may be unfamiliar with Kavin, she’s a science and health writer, also known for her work with GroundedParents.com, which focuses on evidence-based medicine and health practices for parenting. We think she did a stellar job on this piece – a huge thank you to Kavin for her hard work and for helping us get the word out! Here is a short excerpt, and a link so that you can read the piece in full:
Beware Of Accidentally Starving Your Breastfed Newborn, Warns The Fed Is Best Foundation
Written by Kavin Senapathy for Forbes.com | September 27, 2016
The Fed is Best Foundation turns the “breast is best” adage on its head in an effort to inform new parents that insufficient feeding in the early days of life, before mother’s milk comes in, can have serious, lasting consequences. The resulting low blood sugar, jaundice and dehydration can cause brain injury, and Fed is Best works to educate, increase awareness and offer solutions. Moms feel the pressure to breastfeed well before baby arrives, and while benefits of breastfeeding are well known, the potential harms in the first few days remain largely unrecognized among parents.
Though studies suggest benefits, like decreased likelihood of allergies, asthma and illness, and higher IQ and wages, breast milk is only marginally better than formula when taking confounding factors into account. (It’s important to note that this is only in the developed world, where we have access to safe drinking water with which to prepare formula.) This column won’t focus on the exaggeration of breastfeeding benefits, but on the effects of insufficient feeding in exclusively breastfed newborns, the potential complications, and how to prevent them. For more information on common misrepresentations about breastfeeding, see this article from FiveThirtyEight and this onefrom The Philadelphia Inquirer, both of which are good primers.
The Fed is Best Foundation is a non-profit volunteer organization of parents and health professionals who study the scientific literature on infant feeding and real-life infant feeding experiences of mothers. Dr. Christie del Castillo-Hegyi, M.D., an emergency physician who researches newborn brain injury and breastfeeding complications, is the co-founder of Fed is Best, along with Jody Segrave-Daly, a newborn ICU nurse and IBCLC (lactation consultant) with over 30 years of experience caring for newborns, and extensive experience managing starvation-related complications from exclusive breastfeeding in her patients. “We’re both clinicians who have dealt with the impacts of underfed breastfed babies firsthand,” del Castillo-Hegyi tells me. (Click here to to continue to Forbes.com)
