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Benefits of Cup Feeding Over Bottle Feeding is Only 1st 3 Months in Maintaining Breast Feeding

Breast milk is the best food for babies. It provides exactly the right balance of nutrients, adapting to your baby’s changing requirements. Breast milk helps strengthen the infant’s resistance to infection and disease. Not breast-feeding is associated with a higher risk of the child developing many short-term health problems and chronic conditions, including ear and lower respiratory tract infections, gastrointestinal problems, Type 1 diabetes, leukemia, and other childhood cancers. Breast-feeding also has health benefits for the mother, the most impressive of which is a greatly reduced incidence of breast cancer. Some studies show that women who breast-feed two years or more have half the rate of breast cancer than women who do not breast-feed. For premature infants, or infants with conditions such as Down syndrome, the anti-infective properties of breast milk are especially beneficial.Some modern practices are also harmful. Bottle-feeding, pacifiers, and separation of the mother from her baby should be discouraged.

To enhance breastfeeding practices, the World Health Organization discourages pacifiers and bottle-feeding.Supplemental feedings, regardless of method (cup or bottle), had a detrimental effect on breastfeeding duration. There were no differences in cup versus bottle groups for breastfeeding duration.There was no advantage to cupfeeding for providing supplements to the general population of healthy breastfed infants, but it may have benefitted mother–infant dyads who required multiple supplements or were delivered by cesarean. Pacifier use in the neonatal period was detrimental to exclusive and overall breastfeeding. These findings support recommendations to avoid exposing breastfed infants to artificial nipples in the neonatal period.

A few mothers actually are unable to produce enough milk. This situation can be caused by hormonal imbalances in the mother, or the baby's failure to latch on properly after birth and stimulate the breasts to produce milk.Orthodontic teats, which are generally slightly longer, are closer to the nipple. Some mothers supplement feed with a small syringe or flexible cup to reduce the risk of artificial nipple preference.

An insufficiency of milk can also be caused by supplementing breastfeeding with bottle-feeding. The baby must develop different techniques for extracting milk from human and rubber nipples. Once a baby learns how to get milk from a bottle, he or she is often unwilling to keep up the technique needed for getting a human nipple to express milk. But no rubber nipple can replicate the elasticity and functions of the human nipple. Without the continual stimulation of a baby's suckling, breast milk production will fall.

Do not give your baby any routine bottles during the first 4 to 6 weeks after birth because this is when you establish your milk supply. Good breast milk production depends on frequent emptying of your breasts. Extra bottles take away from sucking time on the breast. If your baby is not gaining weight well, see your health care provider or a lactation nurse.Cup feeding versus bottle feeding in babies born by cesarean is less likely to shorten breast-feeding duration.

Most infant formula is made with cow's milk that has been altered to closely resemble breast milk. The alteration gives the formula the right amount of carbohydrates and the right percentages of protein and fat. The alteration also makes the formula easier to digest. Remember that regular cow's milk isn't a substitute for infant formula. Pasteurized goat's milk and evaporated milk aren't either.

After your baby is 6 weeks old and nursing is well established, you may want to offer your baby a bottle of pumped milk or 1 ounce of formula once a day so that he can get used to a bottle and the artificial nipple. Once your baby accepts bottle feedings, you can occasionally leave your baby with a sitter and go out for the evening or return to work outside the home. You can use pumped breast milk that has been refrigerated or frozen. If you stop breast-feeding after 9 months of age, you may be able to go directly to cup feeding.

Babies should be breastfed exclusively until six months (180 days) of age. If unable to feed directly from the mother’s breast, the baby should be fed breast milk from a cup. (If the baby is unable to swallow, breast milk can be provided by means of an infant-feeding tube.) After six months of age, any liquids given should be fed by cup rather than by bottle. Feeding-bottles with artificial nipples and pacifiers (teats or dummies) may cause nipple confusion and infants may refuse to breastfeed after their use . Feeding-bottles are more difficult to keep clean than cups, and the ingestion of pathogens can lead to illness and even death. Pacifiers can also easily become contaminated and cause illness.

For preterm newborns unable to breastfeed, cup feeding confers no benefit over other methods of supplying nutrition and may increase their hospital stay, according a review conducted by Australian researchers.

In a study published in The Cochrane Library, Anndrea Flint of the Royal Women's Hospital, Brisbane, and colleagues report that bottles and a nasogastric tube, which is inserted through the nose into the stomach, have traditionally been used in such circumstances. However, cup feeding has recently become popular.

It has been argued that cup feeding only requires infants to "lap" the milk and then coordinate swallowing and breathing, which they can accomplish before they are able to coordinate sucking, swallowing and breathing, the authors explain.

Conversely, others have reported that cup feeding is awkward at first and, if an improper technique is used, the infant is at risk of inhaling liquid into the lungs, which may result in a serious condition called aspiration pneumonia.

To investigate further, the team identified four studies that initially involved 472 preterm infants, born at 29 to 35 weeks gestation. The babies were randomly assigned to supplemental bottle or cup feeding.

Cup feeding initially showed an apparent advantage -- three of the studies indicated that cup-fed infants were significantly more likely to be exclusively breast-fed at hospital discharge. Nevertheless, by 3 to 6 months, there was no longer a difference between these infants and others.

One study also showed that cup-fed infants had a 10-day longer hospital stay than did bottle-fed babies.

Commenting on the findings, Flint told Reuters Health that she and her colleagues, "cannot recommend cup feeding over bottle feeding as a supplement because it confers no benefit in maintaining breast-feeding beyond 3 months."

Moreover, the delay in hospital discharge caused the parents and nursing staff difficulty and they were discomfort with cup feeding.

Cup feedings are needed as substitutes for breast or bottle feedings regardless of the age at which weaning occurs. The longer the infant goes without using a cup, the less willing he will be to try it. Starting daily cup feedings by 5 or 6 months of age is a natural way to keep breast or bottle feedings from becoming overly important.

In some countries, babies who can't nurse are taught to drink from a cup from the get-go — even the tiniest infants can learn to do it. There are some advantages to this method: There's no chance of nipple confusion, you won't be tempted to prop your baby up with a bottle (sucking on a bottle at nap time or bedtime can lead to tooth decay), and you'll never have to break a bottle habit. Of course, helping your baby drink from a cup is time-consuming; unless you use a cup with a spill-proof top (commonly known as sippy cups) or a built-in straw, you'll have to help her drink and be prepared for the inevitable mess. Daycare providers may not be comfortable with this arrangement.

Cup-feeding has been suggested because the equipment is simple, inexpensive and easy to keep clean. There are also suggestions that infants who learn to lap milk from a cup will still be able to learn to breast feed in the future, while infants who learn to feed from a bottle often do not manage to switch to the breast. On the other hand, parents often find that cup feeding is very slow and difficult to manage.

Many of the same principles of introducing your baby to a bottle hold true for the cup. Have your child get used to a cup at an early age (but not until breastfeeding has been well established), and introduce it gradually — one feeding a day. If you are going back to work, start a few weeks before you actually head off to the office; your child needs time to get used to this new feeding method.

French gauge feeding tubes and syringes are needed for feeding expressed breast milk or formula milk. Other tools such as droppers, syringes and teaspoons have been used instead of a cup.Cup-feeding presents a few advantages over bottle-feeding since it does not interfere with suckling at the breast; a cup is easily cleaned with soap and water, if boiling is not possible, and enables the baby to control his own intake. At first, the mother may prefer to take the baby out of the kangaroo position.

Spoon-feeding takes longer than cup-feeding and spillage can be substantial. Feeding with syringes and droppers is not faster than cup-feeding. Moreover,syringes and droppers are more difficult to clean and more expensive.