Yet Chinese mothers rarely breast feed, concerned that the quality of their breast milk is poor.
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These include the reluctance of some mothers to breast feed their children and a lack of access to fortified foods.
"There's a dichotomy of 'good mothers breast feed, bad mothers formula feed', " says journalist Madeleine Morris, who is writing a book about the topic.
The city's Latch On NYC initiative to encourage mothers to breast feed has ignited a fierce debate, as mothers' groups and bloggers debate one of the most personal decisions they'll ever make.
Mothers who come in intending to breast feed and decide they want some formula will be subject to an educational talk (read: a "breast is best" lecture), and hospital staff will have to document a medical reason before they sign it out.
Via email and telephone, many women I talked to rattled off stories about going into New York City hospitals saying they wanted to breast feed exclusively and then having nurses bully them into using formula as a supplement because they were having difficulties nursing.
At the Brigham and Women's Hospital, Susan Bradley has decided to breast-feed Michaela Rose, born Tuesday morning.
On the one hand, she argues that nearly the only biological difference between men and women is that men can't breast-feed.
Women who breast-feed their babies for at least six months are more likely to achieve a healthy weight after pregnancy, Ostbye adds.
About 70 percent of Caucasian women like Bradley now breast-feed their babies.
And at three months, 79% of the formula group was exclusively breast-feeding, significantly more than the 42% of moms in the group originally instructed to breast-feed.
Lieberman says that the findings may have been affected by the attitude of the women themselves, who said they wanted to exclusively breast-feed but were also open to using formula.
And third, by failing to breast-feed, a mother in many parts of Africa is in effect announcing that she has the virus, and thus exposing herself to both stigma and discrimination.
She also says that the ultimate goal of the study was to find a way to help more mothers breast-feed, and to do so for as long as possible to help their babies.
At one week of age, 10% of the formula group was still using formula in some way as part of their feeding strategy compared to 47% of the group originally assigned to breast-feed but who added formula.
So far the Scottish government has failed to meet a target that 33% of women feed their babies breast milk alone at six weeks old.
"Human breast milk is designed to feed human infants and cows' milk is designed to feed baby cows, " says Professor Terence Stephenson, president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health.
And if we're going to remove formula samples for women to promote breast-feeding, we better come up with a plan to feed the babies of that 5% of women who can't sustain them -- with 4 million births a year, that's 200, 000 moms who need extra help.
Finally, donors are flocking to China's first breast milk bank in Guangzhou that was set up in March to help feed premature babies and sick infants, Yangcheng Evening News reports.
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