Baby Formula…….the newest “CRISIS” of the day…

Well the MSM has found it’s latest crisis of the day to scare the bejusus (I always wanted to use that word! BTW it’s probably an exclamation originally attributed to the Irish!) out of every young Mom along with the rest of us. They LOVE that we envision these Moms roaming the countryside in search of food for their starving infants…….and they actually ARE! Maybe it would help if they realized how simple baby formula actually is. You could make it yourself but alas that’s just another lost survival skill while we put ourselves at the mercy of a corrupt government that LOVES controlling everything from gas to actual contrived food shortages.

But I digress. On to “A Concise History of Infant Formula” provided from the journal Contemporary Pediatrics. You can find the link here: https://www.contemporarypediatrics.com/view/concise-history-infant-formula-twists-and-turns-included From that article I learned the following:

• —There is a good chance that, if you were not breastfed as an infant, you were fed a formula created by mixing 13 oz of evaporated milk with 19 oz of water and two tablespoons of either corn syrup or table sugar.
• Every day, parents prepared a day’s worth of this formula, transferred it to bottles that they had sterilized in a pan of boiling water, and stored it in a refrigerator until used. In addition to formula, infants received supplemental vitamins and iron.
• The practice of feeding human babies milk from animals, called dry nursing, began to flourish in the 19th century. During the 18th century “wet nurses” were regularly employed to add additional nutrition for convenience or if Mom didn’t produce enough milk of her own. I doubt anyone wants that job today considering they don’t want to work at all!
• After an infant was weaned from breast milk or cow’s milk he or she was given an infant food called pap, which consisted of boiled milk or water thickened with baked wheat flour and, sometimes, egg yolk. A more elaborate infant food, called panada, was made from bread, flour, and cereals cooked in a milk- or water-based broth. Imagine that……actually COOKING something for your child to eat!!
• By 1860, a German chemist, Justus von Leibig, developed the first commercial baby food, a powdered formula made from wheat flour, cow’s milk, malt flour, and potassium bicarbonate. The formula, which was added to heated cow’s milk, soon became popular in Europe. Leibig’s Soluble Infant Food was the first commercial baby food in the US, selling in groceries for $1 a bottle in 1869. That would be about $24/bottle with Biden’s 8.5% inflation rate!! YIKES!
• In the 1870s, Nestle’s Infant Food, made with malt, cow’s milk, sugar, and wheat flour, became available in the US, selling for $.50 a bottle. In contrast to Leibig’s Food, Nestle’s formula was diluted with water only, requiring no cow’s milk to prepare, and thus was the first complete artificial formula available in this country.
• By 1897 the Sears catalogue was selling no fewer than eight brands of commercial infant foods, including Horlick’s Malted food ($.75 per bottle), Mellin’s Infant Food ($.75 per bottle), and Ridge’s Food for Infants ($.65 per bottle).⁴ Despite their widespread availability, these proprietary formulas realized only modest sales in the late 19th century because they were expensive in comparison to cow’s milk. Most mothers continued to breastfeed their infants.

So through the 1800’s the formulas changed a little here and there. Supplements were added and more and more moms decided not to breastfeed. In the early 20th century scientists toyed with the carbohydrate component of infant formula trying to make it more like that of breast milk.  E. Mead Johnson, the founder of the Mead Johnson company, produced a cow’s milk additive called Dextri-Maltose. Dextri-Maltose was introduced at the 1912 meeting of the American Medical Association (AMA) and was sold only by physicians to mothers. Clearly this was big business and literally hundreds of different formulations were developed. But even still most parents were using a home made formula using EVAPORATED milk.

It was not until the 1950s that commercial formulas began to slowly gain acceptance at the same time as the Baby Boom. From the above article: “During the 1960s, commercial formulas grew in popularity, and by the mid-1970s they had all but replaced evaporated milk formulas as the “standard” for infant nutrition. During this time, the percentage of women who breastfed their newborn reached an all-time low (25%), in part because of the ease of use and low cost of commercial formula and a belief that formulas were “medically approved” to provide optimal nutrition for young infants”

And so here we are. Crisis # 2463 since the arrival of climate change, errant asteroids, pandemics, mandates, solar flares and the mysterious disappearance of cat food from grocery shelves!

So can you MAKE YOUR OWN BABY FORMULA??? Obviously. Generation upon generation somehow made it to adulthood never having tasted Similac, Neo-Mull-Soy or Cho Free (made by a company with the creepy name Syntex???) Trust me…..your kids will be better off without their introduction to maybe the most PROCESSED food on the planet!! First a caution. You’ll read COUNTLESS articles telling you “how dangerous” making your own food for your child can be!! Articles like this one: “Why Doctors Don’t Recommend Homemade Baby Formula” published in the New York Slimes this week. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/11/well/homemade-baby-formula.html Why all the fear mongering? They say “With homemade formula recipes, there’s no quality control to ensure the formula is safe or that it has the appropriate nutritional balance for the baby.” Give me a break……these are the same people telling you drugs from Canada might not be safe while 98% of prescription meds are coming from that bastion of “quality control”……CHINA!!

If you Google “homemade infant formula” you’ll find dozens of recipes that sound pretty healthy to me. Just like the rest of the food you make for your family you can easily find quality ingredients that will easily get you Moms and Babies through this latest “crisis” Read through them. Here’s an example from the blog Nourishing Joy https://nourishingjoy.com/homemade-infant-formula/#recipe Here’s a quick list of the ingredients for this one:

Ingredients

• 8 ounces clean water at body-temperature
• 2 scoops (28 g) powdered goat milk
• ½ teaspoon nutritional yeast (for the B vitamins and folic acid)
• 1 teaspoon brown rice syrup (for the carbohydrates)
• 2 teaspoons blackstrap molassas (for the iron and the sugar)
• ½ teaspoon cod liver oil (for Vitamins A & D and balanced omegas), (once a day)
• Vitamin D drops – amount according to brand, optional (once a day)

Your baby will be FINE. Don’t let the “experts” scare you. Take a deep breath and ignore the fear mongerers. We’re SMARTER than they are!

Thanks for reading and remember…..Enjoy Yourself…..It’s later than you think!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFxjnUPRwx4