Yahoo! Life News: Why ‘breast is best’ can send a harmful message: ‘If your baby needs more, they need more’

From the article:

She says her pediatrician told her she could either formula feed or wait for her milk to come in at day four or five. “Wanting badly to succeed in breastfeeding him, we went another day unsuccessfully breastfeeding and went to a lactation consultant the next day who weighed his feeding and discovered that he was getting absolutely no milk,” del Castillo-Hegyi — who co-founded the nonprofit Fed Is Best Foundation in 2016 with Jody Segrave-Daly, a veteran nursery and NICU nurse and retired international board certified lactation consultant — shared in a 2015 blog post. “When I pumped and manually expressed, I realized I produced nothing.”

She wrote that following the breastfeeding guidelines and her pediatrician’s advice “resulted in my child going four days with absolutely no milk intake requiring ICU care.” Her son experienced hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) and severe dehydration due to “insufficient milk intake from exclusive breastfeeding in the first days of life,” she wrote, adding that her son was subsequently diagnosed with multiple neurodevelopmental disabilities, which del Castillo-Hegyi attributes to the lack of milk.

“What I unwittingly did to my son was what I thought was best at the time — what I was taught was best,” del Castillo-Hegyi, who eventually was able to produce enough milk to exclusively breastfeed her son for several months, followed by supplementing with formula, tells Yahoo Life.

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