Baby milk firms to drop nutrition claims

[Nip]

here

I guess those who bf this is a good thing, but i didnt bf and this now makes me feel like cack!

hipp does, but it didn't have the (possibly useful) fish oils. and hipp are giving away lots of free samples in developing countries too, so they are also bastards.

...but the smell doesn't make me want to gag.

somewhere I have a link to a formula taste test..

I think the problem with formula manufacturer claims is that NOBODY knows what effect these additives have on babies' growth and development.

Some of them sound like a good thing "because they're in breastmilk" - but eg fish oil derivatives aren't in breastmilk in a derived from fish oil form, so to claim that they do the same thing as whatever is in breastmilk is a bit of a leap, I think.

And people who say "Oh, but if they don't put that info on the box, we'll never know which one's best!" - really? Since when did the marketers of any product tell you the whole truth about it, warts and all?

I'm all for informed choice. I would welcome a study of the contents of formula and their effects compared with each other and with breastmilk. I suspect that formula manufacturers are reticent about doing it though.

ah, here is is...

Aitch, \link{www.ibfan.org/english/pdfs/btr04.pdf \this} PDF from the International Baby Food Action Network is a few years old but goes into how ethically the major formula mfrs market their products.

okay will have a look. but tbh when i was choosing, i just wanted the one i thought was 'best' and didn't really give a shit about the ethics. but the point is that unless an independent science bod goes through them all and reviews their contents then we will never know.

by which i mean 'thanks mrsb!'

no worries - I found it looking for that taste test link and thought it might be mildly interesting rather than affecting a decision one way or the other.

When I couldn't BF DD1 I chose SMA as thats what my mum gave me. I remember because she kept an empty tin for years with all my hair bobbles and clips in it.

Used C&G with dd2 as SMA really didn't agree with her.

Desperatly want to BF with this baby but not sure how I will cope with being a single mum of two younguns and a newborn, but thats a whole other thread.

I notice they didn't taste breast milk

one of the comments at the bottom did though - comapred it to to cream cheese frosting ...

mmmm, i loved the taste of my bm. i used to spill the stuff everywhere while pumping so had ample opportunity to taste it. cream frosting it about right. good luck, megandsophsmum, i hope you manage to BF this time, but at least you know for certain that it is just one of the ways that we can be a good parent.

I BF both my DD's and loved it. I was gutted when I had to stop (the first time when I went back to work, the 2nd time I went from producing too much milk and donating to the hospital to not producing anywhere near enough!) Neither of my daughters would take EBM from the bottle, something to do with an extra enzyme in my milk.

I think that most people agree that breast is best, but mothers should not be made to feel guilty if for whatever reason they weren't able to BF and some of the comments on here are very negative towards formula.

If for whatever reason you don't BF you need an alternative, can anyone think of another apart from formula?

Once again there seems to be one group of mums against another (BF vs formula, SAHM vs working mums etc etc), I think we'd all be far better off if we all accepted each others differences and worked together for improving things for us all

Mishw I think that watered-down cows' goats/sheeps milk has been used as an alternative to formula in the past ie when there was no such thing as formula and a baby's mother had no milk or had indeed expired in childbirth. But I'm not sure that the success rate (ie infants remaining alive) was quite as high as with formula.

ANd my DS was fed on formula and survived quite unharmed. Thing is, not every woman can BF. I couldn't. And it's not necessarily because we're thick, lazy, obsessed with our lovely figures or desparate to get back to our careers. If you've HIV+ for instance, BF is strongly contra-indicated. I just couldn't produce anything like enough milk for DS though I managed to give him about a mouthful a day for a month.

MInd you, those follow-on milks in the little cartons and packets are great if (like us) you spend a lot of time camping or going out in the evening with LOs - you don't need to keep the packs refrigerated and, once your LO is past about 6 months and a rinse under a hot tap will keep a drinking cup reasonably clean, it makes things a lot easier.

My reasons for choosing C&G were as follows:

DH insisted we keep a carton in just in case things didn't work out. Under duress I agreed and chose the organic C&G because the HIPP organic one was in individual sachets which I didn't want.

When it became clear we were going to have to use the formula, and significant quantities of it, I decided I couldn't afford to keep buying organic. I stuck with C&G because it was the same brand and because it contained probiotics. DS never had hard, smelly poo on C&G - it hardly changed from when he was fully breastfed.

Re the follow-on milk thing. I'm still using regular formula for my 7 month old DS, but having read here that follow-on milk is cheaper I might be swayed into buying that. My only problem is I don't want to overload him with extra vitamins and "stuff" as he's getting plenty already. There will always be a case for follow-on milk, even though it's much more expensive than cows milk, because we can't give cows milk in any quantity until our LOs are a year old. If anyone would like to point me to research that says cows milk is fine as a main drink for a 7.5 month old I will gladly ditch the formula, regular or follow on.

Madamez - anything and everything has been used in the past as an alternative to breastmilk. I asked my HV about this as I'd got it into my head that my DS would have died fifty or a hundred years ago. She said she knew of cases where babies were fed on condensed milk, for example.

the thing is tho, should mums who decide not to bf coz they want their bodies back after 9m or they arent comfortable with bf be villified for the choices that they make?

I don't know if it's been mentioned on this thread, goat's milk based formulas are no longer to be sold in the UK (or Europe) for children under 1.
goat's milk formula banned

do you think they're being vilified, lissie? i really don't. and i am still fairly prickly about my inability to bf exclusively.

to a point yes, i ff not through choice but coz i was too ill after ds's birth. but my SIL chose not to bf and was made to feel v guilty by mums at under 1's, mws, hvs....

like you aitch, i am v sensitive about my inability to bf but SIL was treated quite badly by the hvs/mws coz she made a choice based on her own needs

Condensed milk was used until quite recently - an MN thread about what our mothers fed us turned up a few 70s children who had had it.

Thing is, it's important that manufacturers are stopped from misleading people. Added prebiotics (fibre, basically, AFAIK), omega3s or whatever don't make formula mik anything like breast. It's wrong to say 'closest to bm'. It would be fab if there was some proper independent research showing exactly what is in different brands and how that is digested by your average baby - what the eventual outcome is. But oddly enough formula manufacturers not terribly keen for anyone to do it.

Someone did do a study in Italy, I think (would have to go and search Pubmed) but obv. brands are different there and even the same brand name may have different formulation.

hhmmmm. i must admit that coming from the situation i was in i do find it difficult to see why someont wouldn't at least give it a go.
as i understand it, we'll still be getting the ingredients on the side of the pack, it's just the flim-flammery of the marketing that's going. i don't really see how the absence of that would have affected my choice in buying the milk cos it was all such a shock anyway. in some respects, knowing that you're not going to bf would give you the opportunity to look at the packs in advance and really make the best decision, iykwim?

tbh, i envy SIL for being able to make that choice. i wish to god id bf. but i couldnt. it just seems like mums who want to bf but cant are sort of ok.... but theres no mention of mums who choose not to. i didnt even buy bottles or sterilisers before i came home! dh had to run to tesco and buy the lot. and i STILL feel guilty about it. and while its great that bf is being promoted and given positive press etc, i feel that its to the detriment of ffmums who are made to feel bad enough as it is.

am i making sense?

I think that if I had to give one of my babies an altenative to breastmilk I would want to look into making the formula myself, as was common in the 1950s.
This would involve the highest grade organic cows milk from Dorset with some raw cane sugar and the little prebiotic drops you can get, and some vitamins too. Not sure exactly what the recipe would be, but like with weaning you don't always go for the most convenient cheapest type if you can make your own better.

I don't know. At least by saying "closest to breastmilk" they are acknowledging that breastmilk is the ideal.

I'm also still pretty raw about having to formula feed in the end, and I was horrified at first that I had to go down that route. But the way I see it formula saved my little boy's life. So to see it written and talked about as something really dreadful just doesn't sit right with me.