When was formula for infant feeding developed

By the 18th century, people began to realise that human milk was best for babies — hooray — so they set about formulating something that would have similar properties. In a gent named Gale Borden added sugar to the newly invented evaporated milk another popular feeding choice for babies , canned it and marketed it as condensed milk. This soon became a popular breastmilk alternative for babies.

Public Domain, Link. In a chemist named Justus von Liebig created, patented, and marketed one of the first baby formulas. It was initially made in a liquid form and then he developed a powdered form that would keep for longer.

There were now 27 patented types of infant food and most of them were fatty, sugary and inappropriate for babies due to very few nutrients. During the midth century glass bottles began to be used with the first baby feeding bottles, created in France. They were very elaborate, featuring a cork nipple and ivory pins were used as air inlets to help regulate the flow of milk. A competitive market saw improvements to both feeding vessels and the nutritional value of formula pretty quickly, thank goodness.

This has resulted in babies getting sick or even dying right into this century. The rubber nipple had now been developed and home refrigeration had improved enough to ensure more babies were drinking formula more safely.

By the s a much less gross rubber nipple had been invented and formula was finally an acceptable alternative to breast milk. There is, of course, the breast-pump option. But for some, it's more of an effort than formula. Studies show that the less time mothers have off work, the less likely they are to persevere with breastfeeding.

That's hardly surprising. There's just one problem. Evolution has had thousands of generations to optimise the recipe for breast milk. And formula doesn't quite match it, especially in the developing world, where clean water and sterilised equipment is not always available.

A series of articles published by the medical journal the Lancet in lists the risks. Formula-fed infants get sick more often than breastfed children, leading to costs for medical treatment, and parents taking time off work.

It's thought that nearly half of all diarrhoea episodes and a third of all respiratory infections could be prevented by breastfeeding. That, combined with the risk of using formula in less than ideal circumstances, can even lead to deaths. According to the Lancet's analysis of more than 1, studies , breastfeeding could prevent about , child deaths a year. Justus von Liebig wanted to save lives. He would be horrified. Of course, in rich countries, contaminated milk and water are far less of a concern.

Again, according to the Lancet, there is evidence that breastfed babies grow up with slightly higher IQs - about three points, when you control as best you can for other factors. What might be the benefit of making a whole generation of children just that little bit more clever?

That's several times the value of the global formula market. Consequently, many governments try to promote breastfeeding. But nobody makes a quick profit from that. Selling formula, on the other hand, can be lucrative. The tiny pill which gave birth to an economic revolution.

TV dinners: The hidden cost of the processed food revolution. How Ikea's Billy bookcase took over the world. Grace Hopper's compiler: Computing's hidden hero. Which have you seen more of recently: public service announcements about breastfeeding, or formula ads? Liebig himself never claimed that his Soluble Food for Babies was better than breast milk: he simply said he'd made it as nutritionally similar as possible. But he quickly inspired imitators who weren't so scrupulous.

By the s, adverts for formula routinely portrayed it as state-of-the-art. Meanwhile, paediatricians were starting to notice higher rates of scurvy and rickets among the offspring of mothers whom the advertising swayed. The controversy peaked in , when the campaigning group War on Want published a pamphlet called The Baby Killer about how Nestle marked and sold infant formula in Africa.

Nestle boycotts lasted years. But the WHO code is not hard law, and many campaigners argue that it is still widely flouted. What if there was a way to get the best of all worlds: equal career breaks for mothers and fathers, and breast milk for infants, without the faff of breast pumps?

Perhaps there is - if you don't mind taking market forces to their logical conclusion. In Utah, there's a company called Ambrosia Labs. Its business model? Pay mothers around the world to express breast milk, screen it for quality, and sell it on to American mothers. But that could come down with scale - and maybe formula could be taxed, to fund a breast-milk market subsidy. Doctors offered complicated instructions for homemade artificial feeding formulas well into the s.

Better choices finally came. Similac, first sold as a powder in , and Enfamil, introduced in , are artificial infant foods we still use today. When these formulas are mixed at home with clean water and bottles, artificially fed babies usually grow up just fine. Although it has taken hundreds of years, at least in the United States and in other developed countries, babies now have food that is sweet and clean.

Melissa M. Nasea was the history collections librarian at Laupus Health Sciences Library. Lepore, Jill. Resources about the history of infant nutrition from multiple libraries WorldCat. In the nineteenth century, infants were commonly breast-fed; by the middle of the twentieth century, women typically bottle-fed their babies on the advice of their doctors. In this book, Rima D. As infant feeding became the keystone of the emerging specialty of pediatrics in the twentieth century, the manufacture of infant food became a lucrative industry.

More and more mothers reported difficulty in nursing their babies. While physicians were establishing themselves and the scientific. Do these nurses in the s breastfeed these babies?

If so, I learnt that when a woman is pregnant then the body starts producing milk for the baby in this case how can an old woman past the age of reproduction produce milk for a baby? Women can lactate without pregnancy! I'm an adoptive mother, who breastfed. I had to supplement with formula, but produced a significant amount of milk, just by having the baby suckle a lot. These days, adoptive mothers usually use a good breast pump and the medication, domperidone, which increases the amount of milk they produce, but the vast majority of moms will produce a significant amount, from suckling a baby, alone.

This has been done throughout history. Post-menopausal women can do it, too.