Which type of formula is best?

September 23, 2006

This article reminds me of when lactating mothers ask me which is the best type

of infant formula to use. I usually compare infant formula and breast milk to

being akin to meal replacement shakes and real food as a means of explaining

how nutritionaly paltry formula is by comparisson. Having said that however,

I'm wondering if anyone knows what to look out for in an infant formula if one

had to chose one. Here (in Australia) you can get them which are casein

dominant, whey dominant, the goiats milk one, soy based ones, then most oif

them have added nucleotides and arachadonic acid, and most have some kinf of

fish oil to povide DHA, but only one INFANT formula I can find has a

probiotic, though most todler formulas do have a probiotic. Does anyone have

any advice on what to look out for in a better infant formula?

" Ortiz, R.D. " wrote:

Babies Motor Better with Breast Milk

Janet Raloff http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20060923/food.asp

Physicians have been advocating for years that breast milk is the best food

for infants. Not only does it have the nutrition that babies need, but it also

provides some antibodies and growth factors that speed maturation of the infant

gut, thereby fending off disease. Now, a team of scientists in Britain offers

strong evidence of another benefit. Mother's milk boosts early neurological

development.

Social epidemiologist J. of University College London and her

colleagues were aware of studies that had suggested neurological benefits from

breastfeeding. However, notes , those earlier analyses tended to be small

and done in special populations-such as preemies. They also failed to rule out

many factors that might account for differences in a child's developmental

skills. Among such possible confounders: race, parent's education, family

income, parenting attitudes, depression in the mother, characteristics of

childcare, or the baby's overall health.

and her coauthors had access to information on such features for the

families of 18,000 infants from throughout the United Kingdom. The scientists

also had motor-development data from in-home interviews with the families of

those children when each baby was between 8 and 11 months old. The data were

collected as part of the still-ongoing Millennium Cohort Study begun in 2000.

Among these children, 9 percent exhibited gross motor delays, which means

being late in reaching such major milestones as sitting up, proficient

crawling, or standing. Six percent also showed delays in fine-motor

coordination-such as clapping hands, transferring an object from one hand to

another, or efficiently using the thumb and forefinger like pincers to pick

things up. Only 1 percent of the infants showed both types of delays, the

scientists report in the September Pediatrics.

When the researchers began their work, they were skeptical of a link between

breastfeeding and motor skills. " Although we thought we'd initially see some

kind of effect, we had expected to be able to later explain it all away when we

[adjusted for] covariants, " such as a family's income or mother's mental

health, says.

To the researchers' surprise, notes, children " were about 50 percent

less likely to have a [developmental] delay if they had prolonged, exclusive

breastfeeding when compared to those who were never breastfed. " They defined

breastfeeding as prolonged when it had lasted at least 4 months. Even babies

receiving mother's milk for a short while-2 months or less-were 30 percent less

likely to have a developmental delay than those who received solely infant

formula, beginning right after birth.

A child's motor coordination was compared against others of the same age in

months and categorized as exhibiting a developmental delay if he or she lagged

behind 90 percent of the other infants that age.

The link between delays and being formula fed was robust, told Science

News Online. " We put everything including the kitchen sink in there in terms of

adjusting for explanatory factors, " she says, and the link between the

developmental delay and lack of breastfeeding " was not attenuated at all. "

By contrast, a roughly 30 percent delay in the fine-motor coordination that

the team initially calculated for the formula-fed babies disappeared after such

adjustment for possible confounding factors.

The Institute of Medicine of the National Academies in Washington, D.C.

encourages 4 to 6 months of exclusive breastfeeding (see Honey, Let's Shrink

the Kids). Current recommendations in the United Kingdom for infant feeding

call for " 6 months of exclusive breastfeeding, in line with World Health

Organization recommendations, " 's group notes.

In practice, breastfeeding rates are low. In the new study, which considered

a representative cross-section of the UK population, 34 percent of the infants

were never breastfed, and only 3.5 percent were still breastfed at 4 months.

The average period that babies were breastfed was 4 weeks.

" I'm not a breastfeeding evangelist in any way, shape, or form, " says ,

herself a mother of three. " If breastfeeding works for the mother-infant pair,

fine-because it's almost a universal good. " However, she recognizes that some

children refuse breastfeeding, and in other instances, a mother can't nurse her

baby for any of various reasons.

's group would now like to know how long breastfeeding's neurological

advantage persists. The team has just received data on motor skills for the

same children, collected when each youngster was about 3 years old. The

researchers plan to sift through it to see whether breastfeeding had conferred

any coordination benefits or other neurological advantages on these

preschoolers.

References:

Sacker, A., M.A. Quigley, and Y.J. . 2006. Breastfeeding and

developmental delay: Findings from the Millennium Cohort Study. Pediatrics

118(September):e682-e689. Available at

http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/full/118/3/e682.

Sign In

Which type of formula is best?

Recommended Posts

Guest guest

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Join the conversation

Activity