Dear Heather:
I understand and appreciate much of your rationale for individual teaching of bottle feeding.  Nevertheless, I have trouble with some of your analogies.

First, I actually NEVER recommend making powdered formula.  It has nothing to recommend it in terms of benefits over liquid ready to feed and it has many more risks.  When there is an option between one item with no known benefits and with high risks than an already risk product - the choice is clear - use the product with the lower risks.  The only possible reason I can think of for choosing powder over liquid ready to feed would be if there was no liquid ready to feed available at all.  

I know that there are procedures to minimize bacterial growth from a product that has no guarantee of being sterile.  Yet the other risk factor that has been clearly documented in the literature and buried somewhere on my computer, is that even highly educated parents do not mix the formula properly.  This means that infants are often being given too high a concentration of solutes and often being given too low a concentration of nutrients, depending on how it was mixed at that feeding.  Too high a solute load is hard on the kidneys, too few calories can slow growth.  Now, since babies are resilient -- you may not see the cumulative damage that doesn't manifest in hospitalizations.  Heck, people don't really even notice the more than 20% increase in infant death attributable to formula because infant death is relatively rare and it is too painful for most people to contemplate that what they choose to feed their infants may really have been the cause of that death that was attributed to a respiratory infection, diarrhea or perhaps necrotising enterocolitis.  And no health care practitioner is going to make that link and share it with a grieving parent.

Basically, the argument that powdered formula is cheap is bogus.  It is cheap to feed your baby water mixed with flour like one of the caregivers I met when my son was little.  She was firmly convinced that this really helped her son grow and will never be dissuaded otherwise.  In some areas of the world, parents are so poor that you can understand why they water down formula, yet no one thinks this is appropriate.  Truly, I do not understand why anyone would ever recommend the stuff.

Now, we do have the one exception to this situation which is the premature infants and their need for certain minerals that they did not get from the womb where the only PRODUCT happens to be powdered.  Personally, I think we should demand that this become a liquid fortifier.  Why isn't it liquid and not powder when it is being given to the most vulnerable infants.


As for the analogy of watching something before doing it, I have to disagree that this is a good analogy for defending individual education for feeding from an artificial device.  It may not be enough - but it actually is better than no education at all.  When driver's education was part of the curriculum in every high school in California we watched videos on safety.  These video were excellent in teaching how to watch for random events that could seemingly come out of nowhere if you weren't paying attention.   This not only reinforced defensive driving, but reinforced my father's constant muttering about being aware of what you can prevent.  He was an engineer was in charge of road building in Marin County and was constantly on the lookout for the preventable events.  Politicians of all persuasions drove him nuts when they wouldn't heed his warning.  Over the years he was always proven right.  I see a huge difference in my husband's driving and my own.  He was never taught defensive driving.  I credit those early videos. 

As a visual learner, I actually also am finding that I need videos for jiu jitsu.  First, I thought it was like learning how to play chess in comparison to kick boxing style Martial Arts.  Now I think it is more like origami.  In any case, I NEED the videos to understand the moves AS WELL AS the physical practice.  The physical practice alone is not enough.

Sincerely, 
Susan Burger

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