What's the big deal with home made formula?  I   found my baby book a few years ago.  The doctor gave my mother the recipe for my formula.  It had only two ingredients:  Carnation evaporated milk and Karo corn syrup.  It made me strong enough to withstand monthly bouts with croup and bronchitis until age five (I remember the steamy bathrooms and my mother sterilizing the syringe for my penicillin shot), PCOS/hyperinsulinemia ( (diagnosed at age 21), and more recently,  Type II diabetes.  Oh yes, I also experience more bouts with bronchitis now.  My mother told me that at age 6 months, I have not gained much weight because I could not tolerate the cow's milk, so she altered the formula to goat's milk.  Much better!  At age 27 I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer.  Precurser's included drinking goat's milk in the 1950's when the milk came from goats in the North west, who ate grass that had been "radiated" by fallout from the bomb testings in the Southwest part of the US, with the fall out blown into the Northwest.  However, I am now 56, so the formula(s) must have worked --- I'm still here!   Seriously, now,  my older brother was breastfed.  At three months, he was crying a lot for a couple of days.  My mother's uncle, a physician, told her to express some milk.  She described it at looking thin, "like dirty dishwater".  He told her that she did not have good milk (even though my brother, from photos, looked "gobby fat".  So, she weaned and put him on "home made" formula.  Now, we know that she had expressed a bit of  foremilk, and this was the basis of the evaluation.  My brother was likely undergoing a growth spurt, thus the crying.  How often I wished Dr. Uncle had not gotten involved.  All my sibling and myself would have been breastfed, I believe, if he hadn't.  The brother older than me, and younger than the older brother died of cancer at age 49 -- thymus carcinoid.  Since the thymus glad is smaller than normal in formula fed people, I wonder if he would have developed this type of cancer as an adult had he been breastfed.  Women need to know the identified risks of formula feeding!  I now have a handout for mothers to submit to their insurance companies to try to get the cost of a breast pump reimbursed  (for those returning to work or school).   All class members will get the form, which lists the known risks of formula feeding for mother and for baby.  I plan to give this out in childbirth and breastfeeding classes for mothers "who are thinking about breastfeeding and might want to see if their insurance company will reimburse for the pump" (some have -- thus the idea of the letter).  Direct, but less "confrontive" education for the moms and dads, and education for the insurance companies . . . all while performing a service to help them save money.  I submitted it to my director a couple of weeks ago, and so far, no negative feedback.  I hope to be able to start distributing it soon.  Homemade or not, formula is an inferior, life altering, infant food, and all expectant women need to be informed.

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