

The Language of Breastfeeding - zargon
http://www.bobrow.net/kimberly/birth/BFLanguage.html

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pbhjpbhj
It's actually a good treatise on marketing language -

> _Because breastfeeding is the biological norm, breastfed babies are not
> "healthier;" artificially-fed babies are ill more often and more seriously.
> Breastfed babies do not "smell better;" artificial feeding results in an
> abnormal and unpleasant odor that reflects problems in an infant's gut._

~~~
Mz
It is. I especially liked this part:

 _Nowhere is the comfortable illusion of bottlefed normalcy more carefully
preserved than in discussions of cognitive development. When I ask groups of
health professionals if they are familiar with the study on parental smoking
and IQ (1), someone always tells me that the children of smoking mothers had
"lower IQs." When I ask about the study of premature infants fed either human
milk or artificial milk (2), someone always knows that the breastmilk-fed
babies were "smarter." I have never seen either study presented any other way
by the media--or even by the authors themselves. Even health professionals are
shocked when I rephrase the results using breastfeeding as the norm: the
artificially-fed children, like children of smokers, had lower IQs.

Inverting reality becomes even more misleading when we use percentages,
because the numbers change depending on what we choose as our standard. If B
is 3/4 of A, then a is 4/3 of B. Choose A as the standard, and B is 25% less.
Choose B as the standard, and A is 33 1/3% more. Thus, if an item costing 100
units is put on sale for "25% less,"the price becomes 75. When the sale is
over, and the item is marked back up, it must be marked up 33 1/3% to get the
price up to 100. Those same figures appear in a recent study (3), which found
a "25% decrease" in breast cancer rates among women who were breastfed as
infants. Restated using breastfed health as the norm, there was a 33-1/3%
increase in breast cancer rates among women who were artificially fed. Imagine
the different impact those two statements would have on the public._

