·   Increased occurrence of allergies ranging from dietary, skin or respiratory
·   Increased incidence of ear infections normally requiring treatment with antibiotics. In chronic cases, "glue ear" can result, causing deafness and requiring a surgical remedy
·   Increased risk of tooth decay due to the artificial sugars used in the lactose base
·   Malnutrition or illness resulting from incorrect dilution rates or home additives
·   Increased risk of immune disorders
·  Increased risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS)
·   Artificially fed babies are 10 times more likely to need hospitalisation in the first year of life in comparison to breastfed babies.

   A woman's breast milk is a product unique to her own and her baby's system which alters from day to day, even from feed to feed. As the mother's body responds to her daily diet her environment and her lifestyle, it adjusts the composition of her milk accordingly, supplying just what the child needs at that time and helping him to keep in tune with her. Who knows what subtle variations there may be, for example, between morning and evening breast milk, cold weather and warm weather breast milk, and in what ways these changes may affect a child's behaviour and its growth?
   For those mothers who may be sold on the benefits of breast milk, but who are not always of the mind to give their baby the breast, expressing their milk and feeding it to the baby via a bottle is seen as a good compromise between providing them with the most natural and nutritious food and the convenience of a bottle. This practice is often presented on the premise that it gives the mother a much needed break from all that time of being "tied to the baby". She can then get other people (partner, siblings, grandparents, babysitters, day carers), to hold the bottle whilst she "does other things she wants to". But by reducing the feed to one of purely substance input, and by frequently transferring the act of feeding to someone else, she is undervaluing the importance of her presence to the child, and ignoring that intimate "feeding" of her love and time to the child.
   The way in which a woman's body reacts to the suckling child also affects what he receives during each feed. Therefore a "live feed" is always better than a "stored one". Storing and reheating breast milk may well seem convenient at times but, just as with other natural foods, such methods only serve to degrade the quality of the product.

   A true story I once heard was of a woman who regularly expressed her milk and froze it in ice trays, then packed the little blocks in freezer bags for later use. One night her husband was cooking dinner and, upon serving it up, commented on how he used a couple of those "chicken stock cubes you had stored in the freezer bags"!
   Whilst initially funny, this story is incredibly sad in so far as how little that mother under-stood about her milk, and how she assumed that, a few weeks or months later, those reheated, mixed up blocks of expressed breast milk would be of much use to her child - who by then would have grown somewhat more and be in need of totally different breast milk.
   In expressing breast milk for later feeding, the situation also arises that if that milk is not "fresh" - that is going immediately from the breast to the baby - the longer it waits to be consumed, the greater will be the reduction in prana (or lifeforce) available to the baby. More than just the nutritional chemicals, mother's milk contains her own lifeforce too.
   Expressing is frequently depicted as being simple and easy. Most baby books have pictures of expressing machines with advice on how to express, store and use your "extra supply" of milk. For myself and for most women I have known, (I did try it a couple of times with my first baby), the expressing of breast milk was found to be more trouble than it was worth - even by the most prolific providers. Whilst the let-down mechanism usually allows milk to flow effortlessly when your baby is at your breast, this same response is not always present when a plastic and metal machine is doing the sucking. If the expressing doesn't flow well and only a little milk is gained, augmentation with formula would then be needed. On the other hand, excessive expression gradually increases milk supply, thus the need to express may become more than you want it to be or out of proportion to what the baby needs. Engorged breasts which are not fully emptied after a feed run the risk of developing mastitis. (See "Problems Encountered when Breastfeeding" on page 352".
   Bottle feeding, whatever it contains, is funda-mentally an unnatural thing to do and seems to me to defeat the purpose of having ready made teats attached to the source of the milk. There are a whole range of downsides to bottle feeding.

·  As well as depriving the child of the best possible nutrition (even with expressed breast milk), bottle feeding deprives them of the element of intimacy and comfort which a mother