Dear all:

Lara Hopkins explanation of the risks of vitamin D and vitamin A on heavy doses of liver were excellent.  I must not have woken up completely because those are two nutrients that I should never forget having been grilled to death over vitamin D for my doctoral dissertation and worked for so many years on vitamin A deficiency in developing areas.  Despite that background, my first thought was how disruptive it would be for the gut to be flooded with a huge amount of iron, the plethora of cow-based products, and how many studies show that even highly educated parents don't mix powdered formula properly.  I appreciate the references Lara provided.  

I actually received some old references from one of my professors at Cornell on goat's milk as well as mixing problems.  Turns out it that all the stuff on goat's milk being better was merely based on the goat herders (or do we call them farmers?) pushing a marketing blitz that had all the same problems of misleading information as the marketing of cow's milk. The only difference is that there are fewer goat herders than dairy farmers (don't know why we call them farmers and not herders).  So it explains why a substance no closer to human milk than cows milk has a little cache as an "alternative" because they couldn't compete with the bigger advertiser. 

As for homemade formulas, they were initially all homemade.  My mother passed away before my son was born, but my aunts filled me in on the process. It was like a giant chemistry experiment.  They were given mixing instructions and sterilization instructions to make up 6 equal bottles (back in the day these were glass) with evaporated milk, Karo corn syrup and some mixture of vitamins and minerals).  Everything had to be boiled for 20 minutes, heated in a pan on the stove to a specific temperature and we were to be fed exactly four ounces.  We were held upright for 30 minutes following that (mostly screaming and writhing and vomiting).  Then we of course were hungry before the four hours were up so they felt guilty, but held us anyway until it was time for our next feed.

My youngest aunt may have had a washer and drying.  My mother and my oldest aunt had small washers that often broke down and hung all the clothes out to dry.  I still prefer the smell of clothes that have dried in the sun -- having lived in many developing areas where that is how they dry the clothes --- then iron them to kill bugs.  They had pails where they soaked our diapers. I'm not sure what they put the soaking pails.  There were no sterilizers.  

Literally tears came to my eyes when I listened to my younger aunt described how it felt for her to do all this work.  I KNOW she would have breastfed all her boys until they self weaned had she had but the slightest encouragement.  She still feels the loss to this day.


Best regards, Susan Burger

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