I’ll be continuing my research on endocrine disrupters on posting on that soon. As well, I’ve been doing a lot of reading on the omega 3-omega 6 balance and how animals who have been fed soybeans and corn as their food source tend to harbor as much as 1/40 ratios of omega 6 to omega 3. I wonder if exposing our infants to commercially produced dairy in infant formula is such a great thing, even organic infant formulas. Soy formulas are no better and associated with many developmental disturbances from early onset of puberty in girls to disturbances in puberty for boys. Having just become an aunt and studying nutrition, I’ve become increasingly more interested in the formula versus breastfeeding debate. Having learned all about the environmental contaminants that are being passed on to our children through breast milk and looking into the components of baby formulas, especially soy formula and reading about all the health risks and side effects especially that soy based formulas have, I wonder what is a mother to do.
The reality is, despite mothers best intentions, some mothers cannot breast feed and some babies simply cannot tolerate breast milk. I’ve been working with pregnant and new moms for a while now in my nutrition and private cheffing practice. What the moms eat directly affects the babies’ gas level and ability to tolerate the milk. Some do just fine and babies thrive nicely, some don’t, babies throw up, they are miserable with gas, they have all kinds of issues and some babies just won’t take to the breast, some moms don’t produce enough milk.
Organic baby formula is expensive. Soy based formulas have corn syrup solids as the first ingredient. According to some sources, ready to eat baby formulas may be stored in metal or plastic containers containing toxic substances such as bisphenol-A (BPA) can leach from the lining of metal cans and lids.
So if you can’t breastfeed or you need to supplement what choices do you have if you don’t want to use a commerically prepared over-processed cow dairy based formula or worse a corn-syrup based soy formula? I am still researching the issues here and what the state of these formulas are, but I hesitate to think anything in powdered form is “healthy”. The drying process may activate the cholesterol in milk to the sticky form. The proteins although “more digestible” become less bioavailable to the body. Synthetic vitamins that are cooked up in a lab and added in proper proportion are also not quite recognized and bioavailable to the body either. But, Meredith, how can you possibly make such assertions. 60 years or more of research approved by the FDA has proven that commercially prepared infant formulas are safer and as nutritionally equivalent if not superior to breastmilk? Well, if you believe and take everything the FDA says as gospel we wouldn’t have had to wait 10 years for COX 2 inhibitors to be pulled off the market and many of the other issues that came out of longer term market studies such as liver toxicity of certain drugs etc etc.
Its impossible to know what is in our food and what our food is doing to us, but I’m a skeptic, not an expert and nothing I say here is fact, its opinion. But in my opinion, I like to look into and expose facts and alternatives, give you some food for thought. And I hope I do.
I came across a few articles that mentioned human breast milk banks such as HMBANA. From an examination of their map, they appear to serve just about every major city in the United States. I’m thinking this must cost a small fortune, but then I think about all the other things we spend money on and consider what is more important, whether a child is properly nourished and develops properly or has a playstation? I know that comment is hard to digest, and I have difficult issues when it comes to money as well. Just where do I cut corners and where do I spend just a little more. For myself, its usually on food. Its so hard to make these choices: the organic fruit, organic meat, grass fed beef, wild fish or the bananas on the street, the macaroni and cheese that is $1.29 for the box and will feed me for 4 meals or a family of four, chicken legs on sale etc. etc. These are extremely difficult choices, but ones to consider. However, from carefully reviewing the HMBANA site, it appears regular people need a prescription for donor milk and donor milk is pasteurized frozen and refrozen as well as undergoes quite a bit of processing. It does not appear that just a regular person can get donor milk and sometimes it needs to go through a hospital. It appears for the most part that donated milk tends to go to critically ill babies in NICUs rather than to places where just regular people can purchase it. I’m planning on calling a milk bank on Monday to find out if this is the case and stay tuned to the next blog post for the outcome of that interview.
