Every news article or video on Baby Formula has a disclaimer inserted into it telling parents to not make their own baby formula. They say, ”Just don’t do it”. There’s good reason for this, because if you do, because of something you read in the news, on a blog or saw on the news (YouTube) and your baby gets sick or worse, dies; you can sue for wrongful death of your baby.
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I am a certified risk manager meaning I took the class and I passed the test and I have worked in healthcare long enough to apply for a risk management license. I am not a licensed risk manager. I don’t need it for my job. I am not giving advice here, I am telling you what the risks are. I am not advising you what to do. I am analyzing the baby formula shortage from a risk management point of view. The one point of risk management that stood out to me was when the professor stated there is no wiggle room when a baby dies by accident, unfortunate occurrence or anything at all. Just open your check book and settle. You won’t win in court. This is the main reason, no one suggests anyone should make their own baby formula. I concur. Here’s why.
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Did you know that approximately 30 million Americans were rarely if ever given infant formula? I’m willing to bet real money Joe Biden is among those who got home made formula. I know I didn’t get commercial grade infant formula, it was homemade for me. Neither did my 1 brother and 2 sisters. My younger brother got a quasi prepared formula half way to his sippy cup stage and canned stuff after that until he was allowed to try cow’s milk. There’s probably an additional 100-160 million Americans who did not drink infant formula according to today’s standards and they are thriving just fine. The majority of people will do fine with homemade baby formula, but figuring out which babies won’t is the risk no one wants to take. The stakes are too high.
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Canned, prepared baby formula was introduced in the 1920’s but it didn’t really take market hold until the 1960s, maybe in some areas as late as the 1980s. I remember baby sitting only to be flummoxed on how to prepare a bottle with the powder, every other family had bottles already set up in the fridge. There is probably another 100-160 million people living in the U.S. who only got prepared baby formula some of the time and certainly not for the first 2 years of life.
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So, why the freak out over home made baby formula? After some reading and research it’s probably because 1. Commercially prepared baby formula is most like human breast milk. 2. Parents think they know more than they do, 3. People don’t run their kitchens like a commercial kitchen — super clean, no touch techniques like I was taught to do for baby formula, 4. People are not as careful making baby bottles as was done years gone by — the no touch technique, 5. Parents are not as knowledgeable about nutrition as they need to be, 6. Parents are not taught how to assess their baby’s health properly, 7. Parents will skimp on the recipe if they are short on the ingredients and no one knows how often this happens, 8. [This is the big one] Pediatricians are against anyone making their own baby formula (see paragraph 1). No doctor wants to bet their economic stability on a parent following baby formula preparations, nutrition and general baby health assessment instructions — they’ll get sued, and lose. That’s why news stations, reporters and bloggers, including me, are saying it’s too much risk to make your own baby formula. I’m writing about why that is true. See paragraph 1.
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How we feed infants has gone though many stages and I found this article written in 2003 which gives a good history of how to feed an infant over the last 200 years. It’s a good read and the first reference is where the recipe posted here came from. This is mostly the same recipe WHO recommends in emergencies, only. I wrote a comment earlier this week about making baby formula being a lost skill. I called my sister to get a reminder of how it was done. She rattled off a recipe similar to the one listed in this article. The caveat is that people made their own baby formula when the infant mortality rate was higher. Lots went wrong with this recipe. Good nutrition had a lot to do with the higher infant mortality rate. Compliance with the recipe also contributed to the higher infant mortality rate. People would stretch the evaporated milk with more water. They would use regular milk instead of evaporated milk. In short, they didn’t follow the recipe. When they didn’t, there was a real risk their baby would not thrive.
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The article states:
If you are a "mature" pediatrician, one older than 40 years or so, there is a good chance that, if you were not breastfed as an infant, you were fed a formula created by mixing 13 oz of evaporated milk with 19 oz of water and two tablespoons of either corn syrup or table sugar. Every day, parents prepared a day's worth of this formula, transferred it to bottles that they had sterilized in a pan of boiling water, and stored it in a refrigerator until used. In addition to formula, infants received supplemental vitamins and iron.1
This article was written 19 years ago, so, peds older than 60 or so is the correct age for today. The recipe my Mom and older sister used was different. Mom used evaporated soy milk or powdered soy milk, my sister used evaporated goat milk and her friends used evaporated cow milk. We all used distilled water because it was safer. My Mom and sister used 2 Tbsp. of black strap molasses (it has iron, calcium, B6 and magnesium). Sometimes regular molasses, sometimes Dark corn syrup if the baby was constipated and sometimes brown sugar. NEVER HONEY, I forget why, but no; probably due to uncontrollable micro-organisms. My mother didn’t breast feed any of us, we all were fed her homemade formula. Again, millions upon millions survived this method of feeding babies.
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Both of my sisters breast fed until their babies were 18 months to almost 2 years. I bombed out around 8 months, I used store bought formula for 4 months and soy milk with molasses or dark corn syrup for her 2nd year. Toddler nutrition is a lot more flexible. The formula changed according to the baby’s needs which were determined by the baby’s weight, dirty diapers and the baby’s overall mood and healthy/unhealthy appearance. My daughter didn’t get cow’s milk until after she was 2. She had an allergy to cow’s milk if it got on her skin. She could drink milk, but a milk mustache would give her a skin a rash mustache. She got more soy and goat milk products than cow’s milk until she got older. An interesting side note in in the 1960s strawberries were not supposed to be introduced to a child’s diet until they were 2 years old. Today, that’s what doctor’s say about peanut butter, despite Israeli babies eating a lot of peanuts early on with no greater incidence rate of peanut allergies. Israel has an almond based formula that a lot of people are excited about.
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The problem with making your own baby formula is:
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This recipe must be done correctly every time, including the first time. There is not much running room if you feed a 2 week old baby the wrong food. Breast is best for a reason, it’s exactly what the baby needs. All formulas after that are not as good. The older the infant, the more slide there is, but the slide is in single digit grams, not ounces. An ounce is about 28.34 grams. There is no wiggle room from birth to ….gee, no expert wants to go there for a reason, see paragraph 1. Doctors want babies on formula for their 1st year. After that they recommend phasing out to full fat cow’s milk or a fortified soy milk for the baby’s 2nd year. There aren’t many suggesting goat milk any more.
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Another issue:
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These recipes don’t work for all babies and they are missing the vitamins commercial grade formulas have. It will work fine for millions of babies, but there will be a hundreds of thousands where it won’t. Commercial baby formulas have greater variety and can cater to special needs. No one can accurately predict which babies can thrive on home made and which ones will get sick or die is unknown. It is unethical to run a study to determine which group is which; however, there are studies that stat commercially prepared formula is better. There are records that show the commercially prepared formulas AFTER BREAST FEEDING, are effective.
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For the record:
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Feeding babies anything other than Mom’s breast milk is chancy and parents don’t always know if their baby can’t tolerate a formula until they taken a bottle or two, ...or 12. Commercial baby formulas have come a long way with so many different varieties to suit different baby needs. There’s regular cow milk based, soy, lactose-free, soy with fiber, rice starch, nut based, no nuts allowed, kosher, not kosher, halal. The reason we are in this fix is because breast feeding really cramps Mom’s career. Mom is best. Mom is mostly too busy to breast feed for 2 freakin’ years! People in poverty have to go back to work at 6 weeks or earlier if they can get medical clearance to do so. Their employers don’t have breast milk pump breaks. Even if the employer does allow pump breaks, a woman who takes advantage of it is better off if she finds another job as soon as the baby is weaned because those pump breaks are used against her when she attempts to advance her career. Our society is built on Mom going to the store, buying a can of powder and mixing it with water.
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The Big Problem is doing it correctly
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You have to do it in a super clean way. I set the water heater to 140 degrees to make sure our dishwasher was hot enough to clean the baby bottles. My mother and both of my sisters boiled their baby bottles. I, being the youngest, had it easier. Today most dishwashers heat the water to 140, so you can keep the water heater at 120. All of us made double batches to have a 2 day supply, so we did this every other day, not daily. You wash your hands first with soap and rinse well and dry them with a freshly laundered towel or a paper towel. You need to clean the counter top or table with hot, 10% bleach water with a freshly laundered and dryer dried sponge or towel and dry it single swipe style before preparing the formula. (Single swipe is where you take a paper towel and go from one side of the counter to the other and discard it. Take another paper towel and do another swipe and discard it. Continue until dry. My Mom had 8 white, kitchen towels for this task — the bleach water destroyed them over the course of each baby.) You use a freshly cleaned bowl (preferably a giant, 2 qt. measuring cup bowl with a spout — fresh out of the dishwasher) and a freshly washed measuring spoon and mixing spoon (not wood). You need to boil or send the can opener through the dishwasher too, before using it to open the evaporated cow/goat milk, every single time. Soy milk comes with a cap, no can opener needed these days. You have to open the milk and pour it in the bowl without touching it. Learning how to open and pour molasses into the spoon without touching the inside of the cap, the molasses or the rim of the molasses jar and resisting using your finger to get the measured amount from the spoon into the bowl takes some time to master and it gets glopped around the bowl fairly easily, so you end up washing your hands a couple times during the process. You have to use clean bowls to hold the bottles and nipples to one side a clean plate in the center for holding the bottle while filling/capping it and a rack on the other side or in the back to take the assembled bottles. You refrigerate the bottles within 30 minutes of making the formula. My Mom used to scrub the can opener with a brush and boil it in a different pot from the baby bottles. This process is a pain in the neck. It takes time to do. No doctor or news outlet or blogger wants to trust people to be this clean making their own baby formula — the risk is too great, see paragraph 1.
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Another problem with making your own baby formula is:
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When you make your own formula, you need to give the baby liquid vitamins to compensate for what is missing in evaporated milk, black strap molasses and distilled water. The risk is that the nutrients can get out of balance and the baby gets sick and then it can snowball. Babies don’t have much body weight in the first place so corrections have to be figured out fast and implemented fast. That’s why it’s safer to use commercially prepared baby formula, the nutrients are by law, have to meet nutrition specifications. The homemade stuff is missing out on a lot of nutrients babies need. You have to use a basic infant multivitamin to make this work.
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Another consideration:
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You can feed your baby homemade formula for weeks and months, but when they get sick, you will seek physician care. One of the questions they will ask is what the baby is fed. Once you state you make your own formula; that will be the reason the baby is sick. They won’t look much further. You will be parent shamed and it will go downhill from there.
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Most importantly
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You have to pay close attention to your baby’s intake and the number of wet and the quality (dry, wet, loose, green, brown) of the poopy diapers — which quite frankly, grosses people out. You also need to know how much your baby weighs down to the ounce or gram and most people don’t have a baby scale. My Mom kept a book and wrote down my brother’s weight before every bath. Before, because wet babies weigh more. She also noted his firsts — first roll over, smile, word. My sisters both weighed their babies every couple of days. I weighed my baby every couple of days, too. I don’t know as parents do that today.
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It is true babies can die from home made baby formula and you can probably see where the failures occurred. Contamination is way too easy to have happen. Bacteria on the bottle or nipples, the spoon, the bowl. The molasses jar cap or rim got contaminated. The can opener wasn’t clean enough. The bottles are left at room temperature too long. The list goes on. This is a lost skill that no professional is going to encourage people to regain.
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OK, back to the baby formula recall. 4 babies got sick from bacteria. 2 died. The commercial kitchens where the formula was made had risks and 1/3rd of the baby formula supply has been shut down since 2/17/22. That’s before the start of the UK/RU war. If a commercial kitchen can’t stop a bacterial contamination, can we risk a home kitchen to succeed? See paragraph 1.
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Trump made some bad decisions about spiking the WHO breast feeding resolution and then he made a bad deal about which brands of formula can be made available to WIC participants, which feeds about half the babies in the U.S. That winner was Abbott, the recalled brand. The solutions to it are largely out of parents’ hands. It is possible that some pediatricians will allow some babies to phase onto regular milk a few weeks early, depending upon the baby’s health status. Don’t bet on that, see paragraph 1.
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