 Thank you very much, let's see if this works. No, it doesn't good So before we start I think I should give you some provisos because this could be fairly contentious And whilst you're a nice crowd and you're generally not vegan, so you won't throw things at me There's nevertheless some room for Heat So I'll try not to mansplain. I by definition might not succeed. I know that a Cis hetero male who's here to talk about women's breasts is perhaps a little contentious But we'll see how it goes this talk should speak to fellow males largely So I'm not here to mansplain to women. I'm here to mansplain to men It is cis normative and largely hetero normative the alternative variables still need to be crunched and This is complicated enough. So I'm certainly not the expert to do the other Also, this usually is required in European conferences. I have to say sorry for Brexit I didn't vote for it. It's not really on topic, but every British speaker seems to have to say that. So there you go I've I've said it now a little bit about me I talked last year at the ancestral health symposium about paleo and appeal to nature fallacy And this is going to be a slightly different talk. So here I am in 2009 a few hours after the birth of my daughter Judith in the hospital I'm feeling quite relieved because it's been several days of labor for my wife Victoria I'm also relieved that I'm not in America. So don't have to worry about co-payments and things like that at this point Really guys. I like you but sort out your health system Between this photograph and the next photograph There was about ten days during which a crazy health visitor came to us and wrote down a mad feeding schedule Where every one and a half hours the baby had to be woken up given a specific side than another side because of Course she wasn't on the appropriate graph, which of course is based on formula feed third children After about five to ten days. We threw that piece of paper away But before that five to ten days I'd actually gone completely mad and converted that piece of paper into a pearl program Which I had on a laptop on the side of the bed And was running at every hour and it was beeping and eventually the laptop was closed And I was told if I wanted to survive it wasn't going to be opened again So that's ten days later There's there's my wife and the cat and Judith and we'd settled into things by that stage what you can't see On the other side of the sofa is the Xbox controller with which she coped with breastfeeding by playing half-life to most of the time While she was doing it This was the beginning of her breastfeeding Adventure and she eventually became a qualified anti no anti natal tutor and breastfeeding counselor And indeed the reason that she couldn't come with me today Is that one of the reasons is that she's actually teaching a big anti natal class in London yesterday and today? Her breastfeeding adventure continued And this is the article that she wrote about in The Guardian if you want to seek it out you can it's quite interesting It led to Lady Gaga calling her names So I want to talk about three times in my life that I profoundly changed my mind And they were all related to seminal books that I read and we'll start with The latest time I changed my mind it was related to this book. I don't think that'll come as a surprise to many people in this audience I Was recommended it I read it and I suddenly realized that everything we had been told about nutritional science and the health of eating was on its head and was largely to do with manipulations by industrial and pharmaceutical forces The second most recent time that I changed my mind was to do with barefoot running I eventually gave into my genetic destiny and after refusing for many years finally Decided to start running like all the rest of my family do but I was running in the usual horrible Squidgey shoes. I read this book and then I realized that again We had been manipulated by the industrial complex to suggest that we were broken and needed to fix ourselves And this was of course nonsense. So I then got the vivos and didn't look back But the first time I changed my mind was actually when I read this book after my wife's advice And it's a classic in the genre. It was written in the 70s But it's been updated the politics of breastfeeding by Gabrielle Palmer And if you haven't read it, I suggest you do it is as the title says Inspirational and a real eye-opener and you will feel very angry afterwards And you will never be able to come to a conference and be happy about the fact that they've used Nestle branded water again And again, I realized that the farmico industrial complex Had manipulated us into thinking we were defective Which that's my tale. Let's talk about what the AHS's tale is and it's largely of course tales of evolutionary mismatch Modern mismatches with the involved with the evolved environment modern mismatches with the evolved diet and Modern mismatches with evolved society. That's generally what the ancestral health symposium is about and This talk is no exception There's one mismatch that rarely gets talked about dare not speak its name perhaps And it's something that we can actually agree on whether we're keto or vegans or on a shite So whatever we call ourselves. I think we will agree that we are mammals And particularly we're carry mammals a very specific sort of mammal So if you were to describe our species to somebody visiting you might say this is probably what you'd expect to see and They wouldn't be that surprised or carry mammals They might be a little more surprised if you then said that this was a new image of what we consider Feeding our young is and when we say that we're carry mammals They might wonder what that child is doing in a prison with a piece of rubber shoved into its mouth So we clearly have some issues to discuss here that are to do with mismatch We can I think I hope agree that if we're talking about mismatches then breast milk is a profound ancestral match There is very little argument about that except if you are paid to argue about it It is one of our most important ancestral foods And I'm not going to rehearse the benefits of breast milk in this topic I'll assume that we all agree about that To one degree or another and if you look at Philip Koschinski's AHS 2014 talk the first paleo food It's breast milk, and it's alive. I highly recommend you look it up on YouTube. It's a wonderful talk as Is Abra Herne's AHS 2016 talk about optimal weaning if you look at both those talks You'll pretty much get what you need and then if you read Gabriel Palmer's book, that'll be the cherry on the top So we're mammals. This is something that should come naturally to us. Why is it such a fraught topic? We have a profound ancestral adaptation to breastfeeding developing infants expect its panoply of provisions well beyond just gross nutrition is to do with bonding and All sorts of other things. It's substantially beneficial to mothers as well in a number of very surprising ways So why are there all these problems? And they are indeed puzzling problems because here's the Lancet study about children that have any breast milk at one year in The USA 7% Australia 15% and so on but the the two statistics that I really want to look at is that one Which is unbelievably disgraceful and that one which is perhaps surprising to some What that I think shows is that as a species we haven't suddenly devolved We haven't changed clearly. There is something else at play and that thing at play is cultural and As Kimberley seals Alice says women don't breastfeed cultures breastfeed and I think those statistics clearly bear that out This might surprise you as well the reasons given for choosing Formula feeding the reason number three is the need to return to work Which you'd understand the reason number two is that the woman felt she could not trust her supply Now all of these things are again to do with mismatch. We're mismatching what we expect people to do when they have infants And we are telling people that they shouldn't trust then their native biological processes But reason number one might surprise some Which is the mother's perception of the father's attitude that was the number one given reason Why women sometimes did not choose breastfeeding which is interesting and eye-opening and Again and again, whatever study you look at successful breastfeeding is consistently correlated with male partner support So we like in this conference to go and look back at ancestral data to see Where we were and what went wrong now unfortunately ancestral data are fuzzy because paleontologists have until now Been quite obsessed with males and male rituals women tend to get marginalized Whether it's studying humans or whether it's studying chimpanzees We tend to be interested in what the males are doing by banging around sticks and so on and we ignore what the females are doing The background and we therefore missed more than half the story But we have clues from ancestral biology because of course that's our biology Women's bodies actually begin adapting to nursing when they become pregnant the milk glands grow in both size and number Whether she wants them to or not and lactation is triggered by the delivery of the placenta quite reliably Babies are born hardwired to nurses Odent says and you can actually see YouTube videos of newborn babies Manipulating themselves up to the nipple even before they have other gross motor control The interaction of nipple stimulation oxytocin and prolactin begins lactation and Lactation continues for as long as the hormonal stimulation continues. It's a demand-driven process it's a robust process once it's beginning and It's profoundly demand-driven and night feeds in particular Regulates supply so if we were looking for a way of throwing a spanner in the works. We would look at a way of damaging the beginning of the process Damaging the demand-driven nature of the process and screwing up night feeds that would be an effective recipe We have other clues from ancestral culture about what successful breastfeeding cultures look like Strong matriarchal religious customs we can look at Archaeological evidence tribal law activities of modern hunter-gatherer tribes understanding of anthropology and References to similar primates as well. You can do all those things and When we look at them we find some prehistoric commonalities which we'll discuss further Communal child rearing and feeding is common Indeed, it's common across all successful historical breastfeeding societies Males would involve themselves in the rearing of children but usually would not interfere with birth or early onset of feeding and Women continued their tasks within the tribe or society, but usually with their or indeed other people's babies attached There is evidence of deep matriarchal religious traditions to the degree where male rituals were often just an ersatz replacement for these and And Certainly, there was infant mortality through disease and predation and so forth But if we look at prehistoric societies, it was almost never as far as we can tell through starvation or infant malnutrition And we can look at modern-day tribal cultures that haven't yet completely been destroyed Men again are rarely involved in birthing or early feeding as a rule older women almost always act as channels of education Women are given substantial time and shared female company after birth infants always are attached to a mother or other women But men are often involved in child rearing soothing and play as well Co-nursing is extremely common and not the taboo it is obviously in this society and co-sleeping is the unquestioned default and an example of this today is the kong people and they were Follow a more community led model than Western societies allow infants are generally nursed to about four to five years of age The men tend to talk to their babies more than American men do according to Connor into in a 2004 study But they do not involve themselves in feeding or daily care But it was again assumed that the men didn't involve themselves at all But when it was analyzed was actually found that they involve themselves quite deeply But there were certain things that they butted out of Co-sleeping of course is the norm and new mothers are supported by knowledgeable elder women and relatives But let's not be kind of a racist noble savage types Yeah, they also do some very silly things like they discard colostrum thinking it's infected Then there is the akka tribe who are African pygmies the infants never leave attachment Women are involved in hunting actually even when they have their children, but they take their infants with them and strap them on Now what's interesting about the akka is that fathers will pacify their children by keeping them close and even letting them suckle at Their breasts to calm them down and what's interesting about this tribe is that nurturing behavior is not seen as demeaning in status even to High status men the majority of akka infants also are breastfed by women sometimes who are not their mothers and Of course if we look at Traditional religious beliefs that have echoes from prehistory there is full imagery of stories venerating breastfeeding and Associating it with our very spiritual and animalistic core the story at the end is actually an illustration in Hinduism of putano Who's one of the most fascinating characters? I think in all religious literature and you should look her up because a very ambivalent and interesting tale I don't think you get more ambivalent say outside ecclesiasties to be honest But of course that's seeped into Christianity and it's reflected in Catholicism and orthodoxy even today in the Maria Lakhtan's Iconography we can see how important that the notion of breastfeeding is for both spirituality and our continued physical existence and Indeed one of the miracles is the murray the miraculous lactation of Saint Bernard where he asked a statue of Mary to prove her Divinity and she squirted him with some of her breast milk and that was the miracle So we have a recipe now I think for successful breastfeeding women centric peer support women centric and culturation of breastfeeding knowledge Societal means including religion that value and venerate it Very little male involvement in birth rituals and initial mother-child bonding But good later male involvement in child nurturing and modeling so what disrupted this recipe and I think it's the boogeyman that's usually mentioned at this symposium and that's of course Agriculture now I'm actually not going to agree completely with Jared Diamond that it was the worst mistake in the history of the human race because for Every enormity that it brought it also allowed us to go and visit the moon create tacharters and fugues and have conferences like these so It's that we can take what we want from it, but there were deleterious effects Agriculture put into play that were confounders against breastfeeding that remain powerful today strict hierarchies strict schedules Obsessions with apportionment the devaluing of the feminine the over-emphasizing of what society considers the masculine and replacing what I call hunter-gatherer inefficient meta-stability with agricultural efficient instability and In the sense agriculture did not invent patriarchy, but it did systematize and globalize it But it didn't lead to an immediate disruption of all breastfeeding This mustn't look like it was a sudden binary state and we immediately started throwing goats milk down our Infants next but female-led birthing and feeding culture Asia mentioned that even in the society success remained But devaluing the feminine and the insistence on the patriarchal hierarchy did have effects and we begin to see at the beginning of agriculture evidence of infant desperate infant feeding strategies with bottles and goods and so on Usually sadly we find unsuccessful which indicate that many societies where peer feeding had collapsed as part of agricultural apportionment people were Desperate and there was a pressure on women as well, especially higher status women to stop breastfeeding in order to provide more airs Which brings us to the more generalized notion of male intervention which really caused problems The true feeding crisis began with male intervention and if you haven't seen this scene from Monty pythons the meaning of life I suggest you do because it pretty much summarizes this point So in the 17th and 18th century the female and what it represented was inferior pathologized and in need of repair help from New learned and enlightened men from the 18th century female sexuality and reproduction was systematically pathologized Women were seen as fragile and they're barely able to function without male assistance. This was in a sense the dark side of the Enlightenment Traditional Gynephobia was carefully systematized and legitimized for example hysteria and the wandering womb Which we had as ancient memes from the Greeks were suddenly revivified and turned into pseudo scientific hypotheses As Margaret Meade said in 1950 maleness has to be underwritten by preventing women from entering some field or performing some feet and This had repercussions throughout even Women managing their own reproduction So that brings us to artificial infant feeding The industrial revolution happened which learned some lessons from our culture and doubled down on them There was a further displacement of women who are now also needed in male specified work capacity And their requirement to feed children was an unnecessary burden on the factory system Also, it produced gluts which could be commoditized and new needs could be created to deal with those gluts Again the female was inferior pathologized and in need of repair this time from industry midwives were displaced as birth itself was medicalized and pathologized and Anybody who knows the story of Semmelweis knows that this wasn't a benign replacement Remember when he suggested that Surgeons helping women giving birth might want to clean their hands He was told to shut up because gentlemen's hands are clean and thereby a generation of doctors killed a generation of mothers Then there were baby farms and the toppling of the wet nurse from her pedestal formulas Patent medicine shysters to feed babies instead of breast milk were invented if you've ever wondered why it's called formula Think of snake oil because that's where it was born people who put together a bunch of magical Ingredients to shove down your baby when you thought your baby was poorly And that's why it was a formula each one had his own special bespoke patent formula And as you can see by this time the notion of breastfeeding or certainly of being aware of not even not using a wet nurse Was considered terrible a 19th century writer on customs in northern Germany a woman who wanted to nurse her infant herself Was openly called swinish and filthy by the local women her husband threatened He would no longer eat anything she prepared if she did not give up this disgusting habit So if you think that our squeamishness today is relatively recent. It's been brewing for some time So let's look at the ingredients of baby formula You need a scoop of disempowering patriarchal agriculturalism whip up a pathologization of women's bodies discourage female-led and culturation at alienating male-dominated birthing regimens and pour in a glass of poor quality cows milk and an industrialized process to dry it and That is the inevitable result and it remains thus today so What happened was women were told they were deficient and in need of industrial help as Women took that industrial help. They indeed became deficient Because their milk supply dwindled by a concomitant lack of stimulation They then became beholden to that industrial help grateful to it even though unwittingly its victim We've seen these vicious cycles in so many areas and this is just yet another one of them So the industrial narrative is lactation is delicate fraught arcane atavistic and they say you are lucky ladies to have us the annoying reality which still sometimes is allowed to poke through is That few women are actually biologically incapable of feeding their babies some are but as the results from Cameroon showed That's physiologically rare Women who haven't nursed in decades are capable of reestablishing lactation Even women who have never breastfed can lactate with stimulation It's robust women are robust and we are still despite Nestlé and Donon's best efforts carry mammals And as a profound example of this here's the grandmother Aisha Modu breastfeeding her granddaughter After the mother her daughter was murdered by insurgents and she relactated This is the most successful way of helping children in disaster zones and it's shown to be very good for child mortality unlike shipping in Formula which is disastrous So there's a business model that play of course there is Alienate women from their bodies alienate women from their bonding alienate women from co-sleeping alienate culture from infant rearing reciprocity atomize and commoditize Caregiving and on top of this and for this formula companies have been truly Psychopathic which is why when I look at this Nestlé bottle. I can't be happy about it Nestlé dressed saleswomen as nurses in developing nations with unsafe water They pretended to be nurses Their job was to discourage mothers from safe breastfeeding and into deadly but profitable formula feeding and deadly is not an exaggeration The water in this area was deadly if you fed it to an infant But they were told this is what sophisticated white people do don't be a savage Have formula in their colored clinics This is nest this is and was Nestlé's business model They do it in slightly more subtle ways today, but frankly not that much more subtle as we will examine The formula companies real job was to turn women with bodily agency into indentured industrial supplicants and they succeeded They encouraged women to consider breastfeeding as fraught and problematic They imply that their solutions were modern and progressive They bribed the medical community into reliance and they demonized milk banks milk sharing and other breastfeeding Cooperatives and this happened and continues to happen till today during the 80s AIDS epidemic that was a particular fruitful time for the companies to do that and They medical eye a medicalized birth again pathologizes women's experience until recently and I don't know whether it still happens here Women were put on in a wheelchair as soon as they arrived at hospital when they were about to give labor Hospitals run on military lines Babies are expected to shape up to military expectations and a way to deal with this is to titrate them formula to ensure this They need to be on the graph and in dust industry of manufactured failure to thrive crises are saved by artificial feeding and If you look at the little picture there, that's from a recent Formula companies poster. I'm thinking of getting a t-shirt made danger saw boobs says cow and gate a major Formula company in the UK where after one year 1% of women still breastfeed Companies find their way today to weedle their way around promotional regulations They invent new species categories like follow-on milk, which they can advertise the brand And they pretend to be there to help breastfeeding mothers But just emphasize the fraught fragile otherness of it This is from a website that I talked just a couple of weeks ago on the left is from from this formula companies website It's common breastfeeding problems and on the right moving on to formula feeding or combination feeding I wonder what they're trying to imply that Breast is best is given lip service But we think we know the reality when we have a whole industry carefully nudging the other narrative It's also a horrible phrase and this is one of my wife's pet peeves It suggests it's some premium option as opposed to the default option for Carrie mammals modern Medical institutions pay shallow abeasance to this but in reality Attempting to bully a woman who's bathed in agribusiness patriarchal memes at the last minute is not a successful strategy You know, they might squeeze out a few drops at the hospital tick the box and then she goes away and the hospital congratulates itself Bullying a woman and culture aided into accepting body bodily failure without ancestral levels of support It's like trying to bully someone obese into exercise It's not a winning strategy The reality behind the baby friendly lip service Medical institutions remain profoundly hostile to the actual culture required for breastfeeding So let's Talk about traditional Western masculinity and its complicity in all of this Paradeed perhaps but nevertheless there fear of the womanly other Jealous control woman her body fear that other men might look at her breasts And even envy at an infant for partaking of organs. He considers his primary sexual property These are all reflected even today in anti-natal classes when people are being frank But there were some opportunities from feminism to reform this but also to be exploited Mid-century feminism did bring liberation to women to a large degree women were empowered to demand their rights a focus on true Equality a demand for opportunities previously denied and an emphasis on empowerment rather than subjugation But there was also an ironic manipulation by the patriarchal milieu Liberation often came by encouraging women to aspire to the masculine masculine notions of the commercial and the mercantile success were Privileged and unique female abilities and perceived roles were belittled even the choice of domesticity was seen as failure And we see this today in art in pink shaming as it's called in UK I don't know whether it's come here yet the notion that whether it's voices upon her or not the very notions of princessdom and fairydom and whatever are inherently less valuable than the notions of a gun and a tank and Whatever else a boy should play with and in the article that I referenced there women and mothers and and and fathers who thought they were liberated were so happy when the daughter ditched the pink and Took the water pistol or whatever else because that was better Formula PR does co-opt feminism and this is another great book called the big let down which again, I would recommend you read Phrase like you're not a you're not a heifer be liberated from your baby get your life back it's your choice hun and also most painful to Kimberley seals Alice who herself is African-American is breastfeeding is what white people do doubly ironic bearing in mind the Cameroon data and She said very poignantly we have been told a message that we should not trust our bodies to do what our bodies can do No one wakes up and worries their kidneys won't work if there isn't a reason when it comes to lactation It's something women doubt. It is the messaging we receive when we're given infant formula just in case Already the seed of doubt is placed in our mind Yeah, you better get a dialysis machine in just in case And There is an ironic Manipulation by the patriarchal milieu of this notion of feminism get back to work as soon as possible Punk pump manically if you must prioritize early separation from your infant You need to emancipate yourself back into corporate and consumer life Accommodation to women is made on male terms The world of work uber Alice become active workers again become active consumers again stop being unproductive in the patriarchal sense In the world of work uber Alice the default creature doesn't feed its children Any creature that joins the world of work that needs to feed its children is othered and is an alien those aliens If lucky are allowed to pump manically in between meetings. This allows those aliens to earn a salary They must then use most of their salary to pay for the privilege of being away from their children in order to earn that salary What would a world of work look like where the default creature did feed its children? Problematically, maybe it would look something like this But just as problematically It also looks like that In both cases I suggest something is wrong But here to rescue everything is the new man Now as I said traditional masculinity Women are subordinate men are the primary provider and protector Martial virtual virtues predominate and there is very little involvement with child rearing The second way feminist new man that started in the 70s and progress into the 80s women equal partners men and women share roles Emotional virtues predominate and substantial involvement with child rearing, which is of course all good However, it can be manipulated Where it is good it allows men to escape the strictures of patriarchal roles however People can exploit it and this is a very famous Athena poster from the late 70s Which in any generation before that in the 20th century would have been quite scandalous New man is ripe for commercial exploitation As we can see from this recent website And it starts right from the beginning men are now predominantly Involved in childbirth male partners now attend births routinely. This is unprecedented in our species history with very unbivalent results I'd like to think I was a help Women report worrying about their partner rather than focusing on birth and this early stress can actually lead to an Important disruption in early bonding that leads to successful feeding and the new man can be irritatingly Helpful he feels left out of the feeding bond He wants to muscle into the mother-child dyad Pressures her to pump so he can have a go wants to help with the night feeds. We need to get our old life back, honey Dad helps with the night feeds as there is less stimulation at night production is down regulated as production is down regulated Man swoops in to help even more as man swoops into his final decision that the child needs industrial assistance His wife may be defective, but dad has saved the day And so we look at the tale of noble Sir Blonde de Blanc Sir Blonde de Blanc does nip out on his charger at three in the morning to the night shop for formula that he might Give his wife a break. Huzzah for Sir Blonde de Blanc He saved the day and night Verily rescue with he his poor feeble damsel in distress from her womenly decrepitude and incompetence Oh, what model of a heroic new man out though noble Sir Blonde de Blanc the moral of the tale is that Men often offer to do night feeds to the exclusion of many other useful tasks that you would be more suited for And then he's lauded by his peers as a result. What a noble new man He is women do not experience similar adulation when they feed their babies at night, of course They're just women. They're not noble Blonde de Blanc and Here is our ex-prime minister David Cameron showing what a good new man does dad feeding is now a status symbol and You better let him have a go So he's feeding his infant and then he's feeding somebody else's infant over there as well It's just you know, that's that's the symbol for nurturing By the way as it happens in reality few artificially fed sheep survive to adulthood and farmers tried desperate to get used to adopt and nurse orphaned or ejected lambs, but we don't talk about that because that's cute that lamb will probably die soon ha ha Now is in some respects new man just the old man in disguise and Maybe he's just a greedy aversion of the old man You see old man was terrible but at least through his disgust and belittling of them He allowed women their unique space in birth and feeding Now the new man wants to have a go He wants to diminish the unique capabilities of womanhood as a mere lifestyle choice and he complains if the bonding isn't on his terms early on Maybe some new men are just solipsistic appropriators So how do we fix this? Well, actually it's easy first We need to destroy the patriarchal hegemony then we need to destroy predatory consumerist capitalism Then reverse the social and economic ravages of 10,000 years of our culture Reprivilege that which is uniquely women without marginalizing trans people and finally hooray boobies now rule. That's that's it So I hope we can get on with that now that seriously What we actually have to do is we have to challenge the default bottle feeding is considered the default civilized option Whatever the breast is best narrative is breastfeeding is the fraught other the barely attainable premium option Men and women need to challenge this From big ways to little ways there was an app that I was using to learn different languages and the symbol for Family words was a bottle. This is just so ubiquitous in our culture We need to find new models a fatherhood Nurturing the mother and infant as a dyad. We need to treat them as one There are plenty of chores that men can do not just helping to feed the baby You know if a man does every single other chore in the house and just leaves his partner to feed the baby That's plenty to be getting on with Also babies are not capable of bonding properly with more than one individual in the early weeks and then sometimes worry about this But we're not missing out in some essential imprinting at that point Also do not make a decision at three in the morning to be so blonde to blonde 3 a.m. Is not the time to make such life changing decisions Instead we really need to educate ourselves on normal ancestral feeding behavior babies do not surprisingly respond to military schedules We should talk to friends with children and learn from both the good and the bad. They're a very useful resource for that We shouldn't assume that our partner is fundamentally broken just because she's tired or has moments of doubt We shouldn't assume that the baby is in severe trouble just because of some early feeding issues And whilst we should take sensible medical advice We must not be swayed by emotional blackmail that quote there was something that was told to my Friend when the baby was like half a percentile of the graph you were supposed to be He'll need to be tube-fed if you don't give him formula now And how do you respond to that? Of course that's nonsense If you must feed someone feed your partner not your infant Your partner had confidence in her body to feed her baby for nine months Why is the baby's birth cause to lose this confidence? reminder of her strength and primal primal abilities because Remember the number one reason for choosing formula feeding is the mother's perception of the father's attitude And again successful breastfeeding is consistently correlated with male partner support So when we find new models of fatherhood, we can act as counselors and cheerleaders as a help mate not a bottle filler We can advocate and role model for breastfeeding support amongst our peers And where we have influential positions in a workplace Let's consider being radically child friendly and it's really difficult to think about that in our society with such rigid notions of what it is To be in the labor force, but maybe we can find our inner akka And my wife said that I had to add this line by all means have one, but don't be a dick We need to accept our secondary role in the fourth trimester with grace because our time will come Thank you very much So suggesting that obstetricians should provide good advice and should model for women to do good breastfeeding The problem is Frankly, there's no money in it And There are some horrible terms in the united kingdom for women in particular who try to encourage breastfeeding They call breast nazis. They call the breast starpo and so on And when my wife is called this when she's doing breastfeeding counseling, she says Do you think there's a lot of money in promoting this? Do you think that we're all rolling in our breast milk gold here? Who do you where do you think the moneyed interests are? Who do you think really Have the money to promote these interests if you look in a midwives magazine Every third page is for formula Despite the lip service This is a very skewed battle, which is why I think A top-down approach probably won't work I don't think you are going to be able to change the minds of this generation's obstetricians because they see Birth as a fraught military medicalized adventure that they need to control and titrate very carefully And they are not going to leave it to the messy uncertain biological process that breastfeeding is It's much easier to To measure exactly the amount of formula it is Titrated into the baby Allow the baby to drink it and then weigh the baby's diaper an hour later to make sure it all came out This is literally people are told to weigh their diapers to see how much it goes completely Crazy and that's not a society that's going to Be friendly to breastfeeding one of the things that has come as a surprise to every single person I know who's had a child who does breastfeed Is that because we're so used to the clock We're so used to military apportionment I can't believe it that baby just stayed on for hours and hours or half fall asleep and wake up again Half fall asleep and wake up again and whinge of it and then go back on it just never stopped Yeah, they do that we're calorie mammals And that seems to come as a surprise came as a surprise to us as well Which is why we're giving that hysterical sheet of stop start stop start and I wrote my program people are told to expect them to fit into the schedule as if they are part of the military and I think until women Uh are allowed to rebuild Their own culture that models to the next generation of women. We're going to be lost here I'm fortunate in my family that my wife was able to model to my Brother's wife and that's my brother over there with his daughter Jessica And she then took it as natural to breastfeed Jessica Modelled to my other brother's wife who's here today who fed her son as well And our daughters in respect have now seen their mothers just sit around and do it as if it's nothing in the world I think that's far more powerful than an obstetrician who gives a woman a leaflet um again, I think perhaps Males and that was represented by male culture, which even if they are female obstetricians are Need to step back and stop interfering quite as much Are there any other questions? Sure. I'll repeat it Thank you It's it's true and um it's a Very fraught issue, but again, I don't want to Make women feel guilty about Either being forced to or making the choice to that's not what we're about. It's like bullying Um people who are obese or diabetics or whatever it does. It doesn't work. That's not what we're here about now as it happened Uh, my wife was in labor for about four and a half days And it wasn't progressing and eventually, uh, I think my daughter was kind of Reloged in a weird position and then they were worried that she was Dropping oxygen so they gave her an emergency c-section and she was very grateful for that because um, you know after four and a half days and Things being put on my daughter's head to measure her oxygen saturation and things going beep Uh, she wanted it to end and and she was a and at that while while my wife was being sewn up, um, judith Attached latched on to me during skin to skin and was very annoyed that I let her down and couldn't provide her with anything so It was an important Representation of my role for the first few weeks from that point. So I think we also mustn't um Make women feel desperate and guilty if because that's why I don't want to demonize completely industry and agriculture and so on because for women who need it uh Caesarean sections are lifesavers. It's just that you're right in certain societies They're there because the obstetrician has an appointment on the golf course and needs it to happen more quickly And that is the area that we need to focus on Yes, which is ridiculous No, and that's and some people do some people say oh, well, it's just women are not strong anymore or whatever But then you say well, hold on. That's the same question with recipe. Oh, yeah. Well, you know most women's Supply fails really 90 come around 1 u.k We're not that different as a species between continents Any other questions or comments? Sure When I look and it's obviously very difficult to look and especially because we can't go back in a time machine But what we do is we try and piece together as much evidence as we have from writings About early cultures and from artifacts from early cultures and things like that as well as traditions that are passed down through Religious and tribal law and so on and what hunter-gatherers do today and what we tend to find is that Males are not involved in Birth rituals. They are actively kicked out. They are told this is not a place for you go away Uh, and they're not involved in Getting themselves mixed into the initial Inception of breastfeeding But they are much more involved than we thought in other parts of nurturing and modeling and so on and the akatribe For example, we'll always sue the child It's it's a taboo in the akatribe For example that a baby should cry a baby should never cry. It doesn't matter whose baby it is If in the unlikely event that the baby is out of somebody's arms It doesn't matter if you're a male or a female you pick up that baby. You put it to your breast And so that's the sort of and of course there are some Societies and tribes where the the men probably won't speak to their children until they're five years old And there are others like the akur are involved right from the beginning, but what's really common is Except in modern western society men are not involved in birth Right at that point and they're not involved in initiation of feeding that's considered a right and indeed a privilege of The woman and her female Society around her who will come in involved there. There is a Namibian society where A woman an anthropologist went and interviewed various women there and said yeah, you know sometimes It is a bit difficult and you know your nipples do get sore So they said how did it help you? Well, I've got this grandmother and this aunt and this extended family I've got about 20 people who come in and help me and make sure I don't have any other tasks to do and Teach me how to do it properly and give them tricks of the trade and so on And that's just expected and happens naturally if you're at home And you've got your husband over there who's a bit annoyed because he's got to go back to work And he's sleep deprived and you're just there and maybe if you're lucky your mother will come and visit you Once every two days. It's a very different story It works post-menopause. Yes the all the oldest woman who had a child through Either there was an adopted woman in India and she adopted a child I think she was in her 70s and she breastfed the child Women who Are have never lactated even if they are menopausal if there is enough simulation Can engender it the actual the default position is actually lactation There are hormones that are constantly stopping you from lactating basically So if you do anything that lessens the Anti-prolactin or whatever it's called then you kind of start lactating as you Expect that's the design to make it much more of a robust process I'm told I have to stop now. So if there's any other questions, uh, we can talk about it outside. Thank you