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Big news in America over the past three weeks has been a shortage of infant formula shortage.
Yet, once upon a time, since the beginning of time, a mother would breast feed her newborn child. And if she couldn’t, or died, a wet nurse, a woman who breastfeeds another woman’s child, was the common substitute.
That was true up till 1865 when Justus Von Liebig’s invented baby formula which was made of cow’s milk, wheat, malt flour and potassium bicarbonate.
By the 1930s and 1940s, a dense powdered formula hit the store shelves. Because it lacked what an infant needed, hospitals and doctors would also write out instructions for making baby formula at home… which were heavy on sugar and low on vitamins and minerals, those recipes would never be given to newborns today, as noted by MY Organic Company.
They also note that baby formula recipes that were very popular in the 1950s and 1960s included Carnation evaporated milk. And, as more women entered the workforce, the less they breastfeed their children.
Since then, they report, the standards have gotten much higher… but apparently, not high enough.
Mother’s Milk
A new study out of Oxford University shows that parents who breastfeed their children for longer periods have children who are smarter than those who are not breastfed at all.
The study was released as the United States struggles with its supply of baby formula due to supply chain issues. The study was published in the journal PLOS One, Study Finds reported.
The Oxford study included 7,000 children born between 2000 and 2002 and kept track of them until they reached the age of 14. These researchers looked into verbal cognitive scores at ages five, seven, 11 and 14, and inquired about the duration of any breastfeeding by the mother, the report said.
The studies showed that the children who were breastfed for the longest did better in the verbal and spatial cognitive tests than those children who were not breastfed.
The study found that women in the U.K. who are more educated and wealthier tend to breastfeed their children more than women who are from lower-income backgrounds.
“These differences could explain why babies who breastfeed for longer do better in cognitive assessments,” the researchers wrote. “However, in our study, we found that even after taking these differences into account, children breastfed for longer scored higher in cognitive measures up to age 14, in comparison to children who were not breastfed. This difference may seem small for an individual child but could be important at the population level.”
The baby formula shortage in the U.S. continues to worsen. For the week ending May 22, the out-of-stock rate for baby formula rose to 70 percent across the U.S., according to retail data firm Datasembly.
The national out-of-stock rate for baby formula stood at 45 percent the previous week.
The U.S. military hauled hundreds of thousands of pounds of baby formula in part of “Operation Fly Formula” from Europe to America.
“Our team is working around the clock to get safe formula to everyone who needs it,” Biden tweeted. Tom Vilsack, the Agriculture Secretary, said one recent flight that contained 70,000 pounds of formula would feed 9,000 babies and 18,000 toddlers for a week.
Nada Sanders, a professor of supply chain management at Northeastern University’s D’Amore-McKim School of Business, told The Hill that these formula shipments seem to be simply a gesture and that “the only way it could possibly have any meaning is if it is actually the beginning of a number of shipments that would be coming.”
She said 170,000 pounds of formula is “nothing” to quell current demand and the military would need to facilitate “many more” of the flights.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the best source of nutrition for infants is their own mother’s milk as they grow. Mothers share antibodies with their babies and breastfeeding can have health benefits for the mother.
Studies suggest that breastfeeding for the mother helps reduce her risk of breast and ovarian cancer, type 2 diabetes, and high blood pressure.
The Root reported that black mothers are still less likely to breastfeed their babies than any other racial group. The CDC reports that just over 75 percent of Black infants are ever breastfed compared with 85 percent of whites, the report said.