From the moment you have a baby and start to breastfeed, there's one question you're constantly asked – when are you going to give up? "Give up?" I'd repeat, genuinely startled, with an infant at my breast. "What are you talking about? I've hardly started yet."

Breastfeeding is not just a way of nourishing your baby (though it is undoubtedly the very best way to do that). It's also about a relationship, it's about security, and it's about loving.

What's more, when and how it starts is far more important than when and how it stops – study after study, over many decades, has found that it is overwhelmingly best for babies to be breastfed, that the sooner after birth it begins the better and the higher the chances of success, and that the more support a new mother has in the early days, the more likely she will be to establish breastfeeding.

But no: instead of concentrating our efforts on how to help new mothers to get breastfeeding going, we fret endlessly over the far less important question of when it should end. The media is obsessed with stories about women who breastfeed until their babies are five and six (who are in a tiny minority) rather than focusing on the far more important issue of how to get it working in the first place.

So this report seems to me like more of the same: a bunch of so-called experts have got together and decided that we should not, after all, be breastfeeding exclusively for six months.

Their evidence sounds like nothing new (it has long been known that breastfed babies don't get as much iron as there is in formula milk, but the usual view is that the iron in breast milk is easier for a baby to absorb than the iron in formula), and one study from Sweden on coeliac disease sounds, to put it mildly, fairly flimsy.

The truth is that stories like this affect the most important thing a breastfeeding mother has, which is confidence that her milk can nourish her baby. As a society, we have been chipping away at that confidence since the middle of the 20th century, believing that what comes out of a bottle has to be better than what comes out of a breast.

What a tragedy that is: if breast milk was invented today, it would be the most valuable patent of all time. Nothing on earth has the potential to transform a generation's health as much as breast milk, yet we undermine it simply because no one stands to make a profit and the budgets to defend it are minuscule. Breastfeeding works: the only thing we have to fix is our belief in it.

For the record, I breastfed four babies exclusively for six months. They're all healthy, none has been a fussy eater in the long term, none has ever been anaemic, and none has an allergy. Breastfeeding works. It just doesn't have a big budget to promote itself, and as a society we've forgotten that the very best is sometimes what nature gives us for free.