I looked in Medline for infant formulas today to see if I could find the answer to a question someone asked me. Just to add to that discussion last week about formulas and other concoctions... In Croatia where "commercially prepared constituents" for infant feeding are not available they compared their own concoction to "a semi-elemental formula" in a group of sick infants. Their modular formula [MF] was based on boiled minced chicken meat, sunflower oil emulsion, sucrose & corn flour with added vitamins & minerals. When both were compared in a group of18 infants with severe chronic diarrhea, the diarrhea was shorter and the nutritional recovery earlier with their own formula and 2 babies on the semi-elemental f. didn't recover until switched to the other! one study reported no difference in levels in infants = to or > 6 months when they compared iron -fortified vs. NO iron formula folks are trying to add things like maltodextrin to formula as well as long-chain fatty acids - sounds like malted milk balls maybe they have something there a long-term study showed that a significant numbers of children now desired more salt on everything after having consumed formula in which salt was mistakenly missing cow's milk based formulas still have too much lead in them in Europe over the past century protein sources that have been explored for infant feeding are soya [1992] , ass's milk [1992], soya/beef hydrolysate [1993], casein hydrolysate [1989], almonds [1923], poppy seeds[1930] , cereals [1942], taro [1942] that supplementation of Long-chain polysat. based on egg lipids & fish oil seemed to induce early postnatal decrease of alpha tocopherols/total lipid ratios in erythrocyte membranes of LBWI that adding ribonucleotides to "regular" formula for preterm infants did not positively effect their RBC status nor their LCPUFAs So, they can try to add & change formulas but it's still hit or miss and fraught will all kinds of problems and they've got a long, long way to get where they can never go - until they get all those cows cloned that they've started genetically altering to produce milk more like human milk (which is prohibitively expensive anyway) and even then.... I still like Chris's statement: "It seems as if every new recipe for breast milk replacer (or formula or whatever you want to call the stuff) gets flogged as "Closer than ever to mother's milk." Well, if you start in Philadelphia and go to Pittsburgh, you're "closer than ever" to Honolulu, but does it really make that much difference?" Mardrey Swenson