To ask what people did before formula?

[Annabelleinapickle]

There's always a BF/FF debate but genuinely what did we do before formula existed? It worked fine then, people produced milk? Personally I think it's all the devices, unhealthy crap invented that has made our bodies less able.

My sister was born in 1960 and had cow & gate because my mother was ill and given drugs considered incompatible with breast feeding. National dried was available on milk tokens from the baby clinic but she considered it inferior. I am 3 years older and was breastfed to six months and then weaned onto cows milk in a cup on the advice of the Doctor as Mum was already getting quite ill and they thought it was too tiring for her. (Rheumatoid arthritis).

Asked my mum what formula was available when I was a baby in the 70's and she said loads but she chose Milupa Aptamil. She remembers my uncle having Cow and Gate in the 50's.

This is an interesting read OP and anyone else who is interested
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2684040/

My gran started being a doctor in the east end of London during the 40s. She ended up specialising in obstetrics. She said babies died more often. They were classed as failing to thrive, or died from pneumonia type things. But it was often malnourishment if the mums couldn't breastfeed.
She said it was really sad and she felt really helpless when it happened.

I wish she was still here, I want to know what she'd make of call the midwife.

Yes, it was SMA in the 60s for those who did not breastfeed. I was breastfed at least to start but I remember SMA being around.

Iv'e some very old books upstairs from different periods on child care which I bought about 30 years ago when I had my first baby and they are fascinating in showing how attitudes have changed over the years although a good lot of them have always said wisely that breastfeeding is best .

A lactation consultant in Australia just posted this on my FB feed. It's an early breastfeeding promotion leaflet (pre 1930's surely?) which shows the faff and expense involved in using home made formula at that time. There are some very puzzling things on that list.

The comment on the bottom of the poster gives a different perspective on the "my mum was fed on condensed milk/gravy/potato water, and she lived to 80" comments.

Looking at Mrs Beetons Book of Household Management, 1861.

It advises that until a new mother's milk comes in the baby should be put to the breast no more than once every six hours, and sweetened boiled cows milk with extra sugar should be given to supplement in the mean time.

Just shows how long professional advice has been screwing up breastfeeding for mothers...,

Victoria doctors thought collussum was bad for the baby, they advised women not to give it to them.

Not just screwing up breastfeeding but responsible for many deaths as well....

Commercial infant formula was invented in the 1860s, although issues like availability, quality control, and clean water - or lack of all of the same - would have caused problems.

I was raised on tinned evaporated milk in the 70s, and even despite a milk intolerance seem to have managed. Goats milk, cows milk, wet nurses (and in the 18th century even the middle class in England used wet nurses) and very early weaning would have all been employed. Nursing would have been no guarantee for poor children anyway, because their mothers were half starved and often didn't produce enough milk.

Autocorrect cholostrum.

Or, rather, colostrum.
Just in case someone was wondering.

Starving doesn't preclude producing milk. Have you seen that heartbreaking photo from baby milk action of the poor Indian mother who was told she wouldn't have enough milk for twins? She is thin in the photo. The breastfed twin looks like a normal healthy baby. The hand reared twin is literally withering away :(

There was also a study done on a Russian work camp where women were kept in starvation conditions. Their babies thrived until they were taken off the breast.

Starving women usually die and their babies don't thrive. How ridiculous to suggest otherwise. The body does prioritise breastfeeding, but when the mother is close to death the baby will be close to death.

"Starving women usually die"

I think historically many cultures have gone through periods of food scarcity where people would struggle to maintain their calorie intake. Severe famine resulting in many deaths - surely this is rarer?

There are plenty of starving mothers and babies in Africa. The babies are as skeletal as their poor mothers.

I do think many babies passed away.

MIL says she weaned DH at 4 weeks!!! DH is 40 so it wasn't really that long ago. Was that what was normal practice with 'hungry' babies?

I do however think its easier to breastfeed now than it was decades ago...

Don't shout me down all at once...

So, now we understand breastfeeding better e.g. we know that you don't 'run out' of milk. We are aware of cluster feeding and how milk production works so there may be a few days (running into weeks for me) that the baby feeds lots and your supply is being established and this increases during growth spurts.

We also have fabulous pumps now so we can truss ourselves up like daisy the cow. I used my pump to express milk which I gave to my daughter in a bottle because she was too sleepy to feed. This was essential as she was premature and I wanted to breastfeed her.

Overall I believe formula has its place but with modern methods (e.g. expressing) there are fewer reasons now why babies can't be given at least some breast milk daily and for longer. If that makes sense.

For example a hungry baby could have mostly formula feeds but maybe 2 breast feeds per day (expressed or direct from breast)

My method of expressing did allow me to work back to breastfeeding but there was an f'ing great dollop of determination and a fantastic but very strict midwife who advised skin-to-skin for half an hour 3-4 times daily until I established feeding. (I only did ever do twice daily but we still got there and are still feeding well at 6 months plus some weaning foods).

This statement, like many things is not black and white...

I am quite surprised at the number of people who have said they were raised on evaporate and condensed milk or cow/ goat milk as late as the 70s I was born in in the mid sixties and I was given SMA. I don't ever remember a time when baby formula was not available.

When my mother was young, in the late 30s, a local Traveller woman whose baby had weaned used to help breastfeed the twins born to a neighbouring farm wife. I suspect women used to help each other out like this quite a lot, certainly in rural areas. The farmer's wife used to cook a big pot of stew and spuds for the Traveller woman's family in exchange.

My exH was born in the early 60s in the US in a very prosperous family and was fed reconstituted Carnation evaporated milk with sugar added. Plus orange juice to deal with the constipation, right from the tender age of a week. All of his siblings had the same fate. I was astonished to learn this because I clearly remembered my cousins having powdered formula (Cow & Gate) in the late 60s in Ireland, and it wasn't a new thing then. My sisters had a goat's milk formula (mid and late 60s).

The word formula came from an actual formula afaik, a ratio of Carnation/evaporated milk to water and sugar,that women were supposed to follow depending on age and weight of the baby. I bought a few older cookbooks in the US and in the back of them all was a chapter on 'formulas'.

EvaDelectorskaya -- think about it a bit.
How many fair skinned women are there in Ireland? How many thousands of years have fair skinned women lived in Ireland and breastfed? At one point before the Famine of 1845-47 the island supported approximately 7-8 million people, all of whom were breastfed as babies.
Modern Ireland has a notoriously anti-breastfeeding culture.

"There are plenty of starving mothers and babies in Africa. The babies are as skeletal as their poor mothers"

I think aid workers are advised to be very cautious about distributing formula in disaster situations, as once the help has disappeared they don't want to leave an impoverished family reliant on a product they can't afford to buy or prepare safely. I read something about mothers being fed donated infant formula so they could regain their strength to feed their babies themselves (I suppose ill babies would be given emergency treatment at the time)!

tippytappy the reasons I was told for feeding carnation/cows milk instead of formula was cost.
I don't judge, because even in the 70's there was still an awful lot of poverty about in the UK, and many women didn't have control over their own money.

Okay yes obviously if the mother is literally starving, her baby is unlikely to do well without another milk source.

I was responding to this comment: "Nursing would have been no guarantee for poor children anyway, because their mothers were half starved and often didn't produce enough milk."

Poor diet doesn't affect supply, is the point I was trying to make. Clearly death of the mother would have.

Formula is one of the biggest killers of babies in the third world as the mothers could breastfeed but t hink they will be "modern" and bottle feed yet have no facilities to sterilise so the baies die of cholera etc We dont' obviously have the same issue in the West. in fact we have the opposite problem - 60% of us are fat and we don't have anything like enough intermittent fasting!

Eustace I do kind of agree...

that's why the WHO recommend EBF until 6 months. Its not as necessary in the developed world where we have access to clean water.

Hence the caveat in the developed world (NICE guidelines) to also look for signs the baby is ready to be weaned.

"I was responding to this comment: "Nursing would have been no guarantee for poor children anyway, because their mothers were half starved and often didn't produce enough milk.""
Wandered away from this thread for a while.

Sorry, poor word choice on my part. I shouldn't have said "half starved" I should have said "starving". There were poor people starving to death in what we think of as First World countries well into the 20th century. In a famine situation children usually die first, women last.