Food, as I have mentioned in past posts, is one of our most fraught choices in the present climate. Most of us are eating foods created by the industrial agriculture corporations, with little governmental oversight here in the States and less transparency of what is in these foods. The majority of doctors are clueless (or worse, misinformed) about what constitutes healthy eating as many of them have had almost no training in nutrition! So that leaves us on our own about the best choices to make about what to eat.

For my family, with a newborn in our home, the question of what to eat has become particularly important! My daughter is breast feeding, but she goes back to work shortly and needs to supplement the baby’s diet with formula. I have been eating a mainly organic low carb & high fat diet for the past three months (more on that in a future post) so we have organic produce and pasture raised meat & eggs in the house, but the question of what to get for formula has been more challenging.

We bought a supposedly organic formula as our first choice, and upon checking the ingredients, found that corn syrup was the first (and therefore main) ingredient, so that went back to the store! Next we went for HIIP, a cow’s milk formulation for newborns, which is imported from Europe where the governmental oversight is more rigorous than here in the U.S.

Unfortunately the baby began to fuss and to have reflux, so we switched to a goat’s milk formula, which she tolerated better. However, it was not specifically for newborns, so our pediatrician sent us home from our doctor’s visit with a corporate popular brand which was designed to help reflux in newborns and had, yet again, corn syrup as the main ingredient! She also suggested that if the baby continues to have reflux, we should give her antacid medication ranitidine, so much easier than struggling to find the best nutrition (sic).

Now, just to be clear, I trust this pediatrician to give the baby medicine and her shots. I am not an anti vaxxer. The science has shown that vaccines do not cause autism. However, there seems to be a strong correlation between the increase of autism in children and the increased use of glyphosate (Monsanto’s Roundup) in our food supply, which is why getting an organic formula is so important! https://www.drperlmutter.com/gmo-and-autism/

We are also in the middle of an epidemic of childhood diabetes and obesity, and I can’t help but wonder why a pediatrician would encourage parents to use a formula in which corn syrup is the first ingredient?! Of course, as Dr. Robert Lustig has written and shown, sugar acts as a natural pain killer, so it would make sense to put it in baby formula to help “relax” a fussy baby, wouldn’t it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxyxcTZccsE&t=1637s

Anyway, we came home from the pediatrician’s still without a good idea about what to feed the baby. We needed to find some reliable information so I, of course, went on the internet, which brings me to our basic problem in trying to get accurate information: whom can we trust and what information is unbiased by the profit motive?

You can think of information as a continuum: at one end is the corporate media that supports corporate agriculture, pharmaceuticals, mainstream nutritionists, etc. Any information from this source is going to be hopelessly simplified and distorted. At the other end of the spectrum are the single issue groups using emotion, morality, and shallow correlation to support their ideas about what is healthy (and what is not). Vegans, Seventh Day Adventists, Paleo dieters, etc. would be my examples.

Somewhere in the middle are the folks I find more trustworthy: Functional Medicine doctors (Dr. Atkins, Dr. Hyman, Dr. Perlmutter, et al) and the citizen scientists and journalists who have done the heavy lifting of learning the new theories or resurrecting forgotten useful ones, and reading all the papers on the relevant clinical trials unbiased by corporate money. In this group belongs Ivor Cummings, Gary Taube, and Nina Teicholz.

So with these criteria in mind, I found a resource that inspires confidence. It is Dr. Bridget Young’s  https://babyformulaexpert.com/ Dr. Young is a specialist in baby nutrition who gives parents the information and tools to make their own informed decisions. She explains things like what is the difference between whey and casein and why the percentage of each is important; and which are the healthiest added fats and why (good discussion about palm oil). She does make recommendations, but with the caveat that parents should do their own research and check with their own pediatrician before deciding, though Dr. Young provides summaries for harried new parents!

We chose an organic formula after studying her site, and baby seems to be having less reflux (fingers crossed!) drinking it!

The take away, for me, is that if we want to make better choices about our children’s health and especially their food, we will need to understand the science behind eating, and what our options for healthy food are in this difficult time!