I was appalled by the amount of sugar in the soy formula, and looked up in Ruth Lawrence's book what it is in human milk. Here are her figures, rounded by me:
lactose: 7 percent
protein: 1 percent
fat: 4 percent
But that's *by percent of total volume*.
Then I went to the Isomil site, and got these figures *by percent of total calories*, also rounded by me:
sugars: 40 percent
protein: 10 percent
fat: 50 percent
How to relate the two? Well first I multiplied the Lawrence figures by number of calories (Or Calories? kilocalories? I forget. Any dietician among us can give a brief tutorial on *that*) by 4 per unit for sugar, 4 for protein, 9 for fat. (That's the number of calories or Calories or kilocalories we get from each gram of each substance - I know that one.)
It became:
lactose: 28 percent
protein: 4 percent
fat: 36 percent
Hmm... but that adds up to only 68. Ah! The rest of the *volume* is without calories and isn't part of the discussion. So let's just use the total of 68 as the total total. Then the percent *by calorie*, which is the same way they show it in the formula, is:
lactose: 28/68, or 41 percent
protein: 4/68, or 6 percent
fat: 36/68, or 53 percent
Blush. Not so very far off the formula figures. So their real sugar sin, which we already recognize, is that it's totally the wrong sugars, not that the percentage is so wildly different from the percentage in human milk. At least that's if I've done the math right. I don't pretend to be anything close to a mathematician.
Anyway, an interesting exercise in trying to take our varied figures from varied sources and make them speak the same language (ooh, it always comes back to language, doesn't it?).
Diane Wiessinger, MS, IBCLC Ithaca, NY USA
www.wiessinger.baka.com
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