Baby Formula
Is There Reason to Panic?
It’s pretty easy to get scared these days. The news seems to be a constant source of doom and gloom – end of the world messaging that hits us from every level. If it’s not the parade of health threats coming towards us it’s inflation, war and now food shortages. Starting with the inability to find baby formula.
Is this, perhaps, a hidden blessing?
The baby formula manufacturing market is owned by three major companies. These manufacturing facilities are tightly regulated and subsidized by the government. From what I’ve learned it seems easier to win the lottery than it is to produce and sell a healthier alternative baby formula.
Yet, the news has convinced many that a shortage of this manufactured product will most surely result in the starvation of many children. Is starvation an inevitable result or, can we use this situation as an opportunity to learn about healthy nutrition? It is true that it takes more time to make your own healthy baby formula at home – but that is also true for healthy eating in general. Making food to eat for your family from fresh, organic and whole foods takes more time but overall, will save you money and make you healthier.
I think we’ve been sold a bill of goods from the food manufacturers. I remember back in the day when Hamburger Helper came out on the market. The message in the TV ads was all about having “no time to cook.” It was pervasive and effective and told us that there was really no time in the day for thinking about and putting together a healthy meal for the family. This messaging was followed up with solution to our newly registered problem and in steps the friendly little “helper.” A box filled with flavorings (mostly sodium and MSG) and an abundance of preservatives and all you needed to do was add some meat. Voila! Dinner in 10 minutes.
That message has permeated our lives and to our detriment. Handing over something as important as your nutrition to a food manufacturer is like asking the proverbial fox to guard the hen house. But worse, they convinced so many to believe they do not have the time nor the skills to feed themselves! The act of feeding your family or yourself is truly an act of love. There are some people in other cultures that won’t allow anyone else to even touch the food they give to their family – even to the point of picking and gathering it themselves . Why? So that only hands that love the people who eat the food, touch the food. It is an energetic intention of protection.
You can make healthy formula for your baby. You have the power and resources to feed your infant a formula that is good, clean and full of the nutrients that a baby needs to thrive – especially to grow their brains! You don’t have to be a biologist or a food scientist to understand how important energy and nutrients are to a growing body. In an excerpt from an article on the nutritional content of breast milk from the Weston A Price Foundation website it states:
“Fat and cholesterol are very important components in human milk. In fact, the milk from a healthy mother has about 50 to 60 percent of its energy (kilocalories) as fat.1 The cholesterol in human milk supplies an infant with close to six times the amount most adults consume from their food.”1
Remarkably, some manufactured formulas have taken fat/cholesterol out of the product altogether. I find that kind of odd.
To learn more about making your own Baby Formula as well as to understand the importance of this topic, I recommend you go here: https://www.westonaprice.org/podcast/make-your-own-baby-formula/ This resource is guaranteed to shine a light of understanding on this topic not covered in the news today.
I’ll close with a clinical case study. This experience was not with “baby formula” per se – but illustrates the power of whole food nutrition for the body’s ability to heal.
Several years a go a mother called me and told me the story of her 30 year old son that had been severely injured in an accident that left him in a coma for several months. When he came out of the coma it was discovered that his brain injury caused him to be unable to speak. His communication was to squeeze her hand and/or blink. His body was weak and atrophied. The standard protocol for this situation was a feeding tube using the manufactured formulas recommend by the medical establishment and fully paid for by the insurance company. She did as she was told and kept him on this type of “nutrition” for 4 years – with no improvement and a steady decline in the small amount of movement and strength he had.
When she called me I told her that I had no experience with this type of situation but by the end of the conversation I was committed that I would do as much investigation as I could to try and help. I found a few resources that discussed the use of real food for feeding tubes and how to make your own formulas. I admit – it felt intimidating and there were “dire” warnings put out by the professionals on the drastic consequences of clogging a tube. I don’t doubt that a clogged tube is a situation to be avoided – but I also found out it can be extremely rare if you’re thorough in following directions.
I recommended some of the sites I’d found and working together we chose a few recipes for her to try, modifying them to his food intolerances at the time. She jumped in with both feet as she felt at that point she had nothing to lose.
I didn’t hear from her for about a month. When I received her call she sounded like a different person. Her voice was lighter and had a much different quality – she even laughed a few times.
She told me that she started feeding her son the whole foods recipes she learned about for the feeding tube and amazing things started to happen. He began to turn his head toward her when she came into the room. He was able to move his hands to indicate yes and no to her. But the thing that really blew her away was the day she was changing his bedding after his bath and he lifted his body up at the hips so that she could remove the sheets. She was floored!
The point of this story is that whole, unadulterated foods have much more than just good flavor – they’re packed with nutrients and co-factors that are lost or defected through manufacturing processes. The addition of sugars as an energy source rather than fats is a big mistake and though it may keep a person alive – they will not thrive.
Baby Formula, Elder Formula and Feeding Formula all have the same purpose – they are made for members of the population that cannot feed themselves. If it is our responsibility to help someone survive and thrive, isn’t it worth our time to do it right?
