So when I was a young mom, I was very into all the natural parenting stuff. I nursed my babies full-term when few nursed very much at all. And it got me very interested in a lot of cultural questions. I struggled to understand: "We have this ideal food for infants, which in most cases we can make ourselves for free, yet the majority of us are choosing to use a very expensive and objectively substandard substitute. Why is anyone choosing this unless they need to (as some do)?" Again, not saying there aren't instances when formula needs to be used, but why are people who have a choice to make so commonly making this particular choice? Some years later, I noticed something odd in a breastfeeding group online. There wasn't any such thing when I had my babies, but there is now, and I was in a local one because my daughter was at that time expecting a baby, and I have a connection to one of the women who started the group. Anyway, I began to notice that when there isn't a myth handy, people will make one up, especially when you start treating everybody's opinion as equally valid. Whereas I was told that experts said we could increase our supply by nursing more frequently, drinking to thirst and eating a normal healthy diet, the moms now are saying you can increase your supply by drinking blue Gatordade. (It had to be blue.) They also believed oatmeal cookies would increase your supply. These two things are complete nonsense. Plain water and any halfway decent diet works just fine. You cannot increase your milk supply with blue Gatorade. WE KNOW EXACTLY HOW TO INCREASE YOUR MILK SUPPLY, and mostly it has to do with nursing frequency and if that doesn't work you might have a problem that you can't fix, like insufficient glandular tissue etc., but instead of doing the things we know from hundreds' of years experience as well as basic knowledge of how the female body works, we are making up shit. And then I realized we do this with everything. Even people who have college educations -- people you'd think would be able to think critically. They can't. People get together, make shit up, and convince each other they know what they're talking about. Experts are not trusted. Why trust a published study done by medical professionals when you can trust your friend Claire? Claire has no medical training but she heard that blue Gatorade will work. Claire has also only a vague idea of what's in the Constitution or how laws are made or what various politicians have actually said and done, but she did see something on Facebook. Thus, our country is a mess.
