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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

Son of hope
In a video aimed at turning young thugs into Christians, serial killer David Berkowitz confesses, "I was a real jerk."
By Cintra Wilson
[07/16/99]

Hot Flash
Nazi family values
Chewing the fat with a white-supremacist mom and her 6-year-old daughter at an Idaho barbecue.
By Amy Benfer
[07/15/99]

Time For One Thing
Silence
Quality time may be overrated -- unless it's with yourself.
By Karen Grigsby Bates
[07/13/99]

Stay-home economics
One mom crunches the numbers on the assumption that quitting work is cheaper than paying for life as a working parent.
By Phaedra Hise
[07/13/99]

You can halve it all
You can get your husband to do his share if you demand it -- or threaten divorce.
By Jennifer Bingham Hull
[07/12/99]

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Dr. Linda Shaw, M.D., FAAP, is a practicing pediatrician in Altoona, Penn. who says that she sees "plenty of babies with formula problems ... Just a few months ago, I had a formula-fed infant I had to admit to the hospital for failure to thrive. I have also cared for infants with cow's milk protein allergies leading to gross rectal bleeding. I've seen lots of infants hospitalized with gastroenteritis or RSV [Respiratory Syncytial Virus, the single most common cause of lung infections in infants] that was worse because they weren't getting the maternal antibodies found in breast milk," says Shaw.

Catherine Bargar, RN, IBCLC is a lactation consultant in private practice in Ithaca, N.Y. She says that in her previous positions as Obstetrics Discharge Coordinator at an Ithaca hospital and as a staff member with a local office of the Women Infants and Children (WIC) supplemental nutrition program for low-income families, she saw "many babies who experienced significant negative health effects from formula." In some instances, these illnesses were actually due to improper formula-feeding, such as patients preparing formula with water from unclean wells, leading to babies with severe diarrhea requiring hospitalization. In many other cases, however, the problems Bargar observed were directly attributable to the risks inherent in any formula feeding.

"I saw countless babies suffering through numerous unsuccessful formula changes in an attempt to find one that the baby could tolerate. Details varied somewhat as to which formula had what negative effect, but the story was always the same: The mom had stopped breast-feeding or never even started and tried formula Brand X. The baby then vomited, got serious rashes, failed to gain weight appropriately, developed asthma, etc. They then switched formula numerous times with varying negative health effects and ended up with a sickly baby or toddler," recalls Bargar. "These children ended up on expensive and only marginally-tolerated formula. Often these babies were diagnosed with gastric esophageal reflux following expensive testing. This scenario was one I encountered at least daily."

Although commercial infant formulas are better than synthetic human milk substitutes of the past, the simple fact is that they can never duplicate the living, anti-infective and unique hormonal properties of real breast milk. "It has become increasingly apparent that infant formula can never duplicate human milk," wrote John D. Benson, Ph.D., and Mark L. Masor, Ph.D., in the March 1994 issue of the medical journal Endocrine Regulations. "Human milk contains living cells, hormones, active enzymes, immunoglobulins and compounds with unique structures that cannot be replicated in infant formula." Benson and Masor, both researchers for infant formula manufacturing giant Abbott Labs, went on to note that they believe that creating an infant formula that replicates human milk would be impossible.

This may come as a surprise to parents who see and hear frequent advertisements from infant formula companies touting their products as "a miracle" and "most like breast milk." In fact, formula manufacturers have no idea exactly how close their product is to breast milk because new ingredients and properties of breast milk are discovered every year. And even among those elements of human milk of which science is already aware, today's infant formula still doesn't measure up. Breast milk contains hundreds of known ingredients and elements which have not been -- or cannot be -- added to infant formula at this time.

"Modern formulas are only superficially similar to breast milk. Every correction of a deficiency in formulas is advertised as an advance. Fundamentally they are inexact copies based on outdated and incomplete knowledge of what breast milk is. Formulas contain no antibodies, no living cells, no enzymes, no hormones. They contain much more aluminum, manganese, cadmium and iron than breast milk. They contain significantly more protein than breast milk. The proteins and fats are fundamentally different from those in breast milk," says Dr. Jack Newman, a Canadian pediatrician who has been a UNICEF infant nutrition consultant in Africa, and has published articles on the subject of breast-feeding in Scientific American and several medical journals

Dr. Martha Neuringer, a research associate professor of clinical nutrition at Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland was quoted in 1994 by New York Times science writer Natalie Angier as saying that, "Human milk is an incredibly complicated substance. It contains proteins we haven't even identified yet, much less know the function of."

In the June 1999 issue of Discover Magazine, it was reported that Swedish and British immunologists working with a grant from the American Cancer Society have discovered that one identified protein in breast milk, alpha-lactalbumin, literally destroys every cancer cell with which it comes into contact. According to lead scientist Catharina Svanborg, her team pursued this exciting research in an attempt to determine why "the relative risk of childhood lymphoma is nine times higher in bottle-fed infants, and the risk for carcinoma is also elevated."

"This [alpha-lactalbumin] is a substance that kills lots of tumor cells, every cancer we test it against. Lung cancer, throat cancer, kidney cancer, colon cancer, bladder cancer, lymphoma, leukemia, and pneumococcus bacteria too," explained Svanborg in Discover.

Next page | Are formula-fed babies at risk to be both poisoned and dumber?