Reflux & Rice Cereal

I read the winter issue of Parenting magazine this week and was really happy to see the following snippet in their brief article about reflux/GERD:

"Leading experts no longer recommend thickening bottles with rice cereal, especially for regular spitup. One reason: A new study in Pediatrics found that this can lead to overfeeding, which only makes spitup worse."

I was SO glad to see this in mainstream print. Breastfeeding advocates have known this information for some time, but in my experience many doctors still recommend thickening feeds. I even talked with a mother who had been told to pump and exclusively bottle feed because her baby "had" to have rice cereal in every feed and there was no way to get the rice cereal into her breasts so it would have to be fed by bottle. I did suggest that as a compromise maybe they could feed the cereal to the baby by spoon before or after nursing, rather than pump and mix the cereal into the expressed milk. These kinds of situations make me want to tear my hair out in frustration and dismay :( So, I'm glad to see it in readily available public print that rice cereal additions DO NOT help.