MOTHER’S MILK – Part 1

FROM THE SUBSTACK OF “A MIDWESTERN DOCTOR” TITLED: THE FORGOTTEN SIDE OF MEDICINE

Story at a Glance:

•The infant formula industry has almost 100 billion dollars in annual sales. This was accomplished by unscrupulous marketing that trained doctors and parents to discard breastfeeding and tricked them into believing infant formula is “safe and effective.”

•Infant formula is full of corn syrup and seed oils, which cause metabolic dysfunction and excessive weight gain. Remarkably, that weight gain has been normalized, making it possible to diagnose normal children as “underweight” and thereby push formula on them.

•Infant formula is full of seed oils due to a 1980 law based on a 1963 study that concluded their fats were essential for development and hence must be in all formula. Since then, a mountain of evidence has emerged showing they’re actually harmful, but nonetheless, the 1980 formula requirements were never updated. RFK Jr. is thus the first H.H.S. Secretary ever to attempt to address this colossal mistake.

•In contrast, breastmilk (alongside a healthy maternal diet) is one of the most nutritious substances an infant can consume, providing a myriad of benefits including developing the infant’s brain, gut, and immune system, decreasing many serious diseases, enhancing the critical mother-child bond, and reducing the mother’s risk of many severe illnesses (e.g., cancer).

• Before the introduction of infant formula, mothers would often supplement their children’s diets with animal milks. If raw, these milks can yield significant benefits to children, while in contrast, when pasteurized, they have many issues (e.g., they frequently create allergies).

•This article will review the critical points one must know to provide the most healthy nourishment for their child, how to navigate breastfeeding difficulties, and where to obtain the healthiest milk and infant formula.

Three years ago, a nationwide infant formula shortage shook America, and before long led to fights at grocery stores and stories like this flooding the media:

At the time, significant outrage was directed at the FDA since the shortage was due to pre-existing COVID-19 supply chain shortages exacerbated by a major recall by one of the leading formula producers (as at least two infants had recently died from contaminated formula, and the FDA had found the responsible bacteria at a major infant formula plant) which was then further exacerbated by a wave of panic buying that emptied many grocery stores.

This then led to many people pointing out it was ridiculous the FDA was willing to pull America’s formula supply over a relatively small production issue, but simultaneously was unwilling to do anything about the mRNA vaccines despite the fact the contamination in them and the deaths they were causing were orders of magnitude greater than anything which could possibly be attributed to the suspect infant formula lines.

As I watched this unfold, my thoughts were a bit different. Could there possibly be another way to feed your infants? Perhaps one that you could do at home that did not rely upon an unstable supply chain. I thus looked into how the homesteading and alternative health communities were addressing this dilemma and came across things like this:

I thus took the events of 2022 as a remarkable testament to just how effectively the formula industry had convinced mothers they needed to do anything besides breastfeed their children. At the same time however, I was hopeful these events would catalyze a public shift on this issue, so since then, I’ve gradually tried to put out the key points needed to understand what’s gone awry with infant formula and facilitate that change.

In turn, RFK Jr. recently announced an FDA initiative to make America’s infant formula healthy again (e.g., conducting a comprehensive review of its nutritional content, testing formula for heavy metals, and objectively assessing the health issues that arise from being formula fed). I believe that for “Operation Stork Speed” to succeed, it’s critical to understand the context of what’s happened with infant formula.

Note: in addition to heavy metals (and other harmful chemicals), infant formula has also repeatedly been found to be contaminated with aluminum, something which is quite problematic due to its adverse effects on the physiologic zeta potential (which the nervous system is very sensitive to disruptions of).

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