Why You Should Never Make Your Own Infant Formula
When you’re cooking for yourself, it’s never a bad idea to experiment. Even if you mess up the recipe completely, you can probably still eat it and not die. Now imagine that one homemade recipe was literally the only food you were allowed to eat for six months. The stakes are a little higher now, aren’t they?
Adults ate less than ideal food without serious health problems; we addressed this question in this post on can you get scurvy without eating anything other than ramen . But when you’re talking about a baby—a tiny human whose only job is to double in size within the first five months of life—the proper nutrition he gets really makes a difference.
Or, to quote the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP):
The first year of life is a key time for the growth of your child’s brain and body. If your child doesn’t get enough of the important components of infant formula—even for days or weeks—it can have long-term consequences on his ability to grow strong and do well in school. Lack of these nutrients can lead to serious health problems and even death.
The Food and Drug Administration recently sent out a notice noting that they had recently received reports of infants needing hospitalization due to low blood calcium levels from homemade formula.
The FDA approves store-bought infant formula, requiring that ready-made formula be tested for nutritional content (to make sure the nutrients in the ingredients actually went through the manufacturing process) and that infant formula manufacturers demonstrate that their products promote healthy growth in babies. children. The FDA doesn’t do the same for homemade formula recipes.
So if you’ve seen a recipe shared on social media that someone says was once used by their grandmother… well, no one has actually confirmed that this recipe is healthy or suitable for your child. A 2020 review of homemade formula recipes from blogs found that many contain harmful or inappropriate ingredients, and in many cases their instructions do not provide enough information for people to handle the mixture safely (for example, recommendations on how to long time it is stored). in the fridge).
Why is it so hard to create a good formula?
The formula provides nutrition equivalent to what a baby receives from human breast milk. Breast milk is nutritionally very different from cow’s or goat’s milk or other dairy products or substitutes. Cow’s milk has too much protein and not enough iron or vitamin C. Goat’s milk has too much protein, potassium and chloride, and not enough folic acid. Babies develop vitamin deficiencies, electrolyte imbalances, and other health problems due to the consumption of animal milk and homemade formula.
The AAP details some of these differences here and notes that a baby older than 6 months can get some cow’s milk as a temporary measure if you can’t find enough formula. Young children do need breast milk or commercial formula.
Older formula recipes usually included a few ingredients from the grocery store, such as cow’s milk and corn syrup, which likely contained some nutrients compared to crude human milk, but that doesn’t mean they were good or even necessarily good enough. . Do you know if your grandmother’s recipe contains a safe amount of, say, selenium ? I didn’t think so.
Now, should the FDA approve formula recipes, perhaps testing and distributing a suitable recipe that people could use to make formula at home? It would be cool, honestly! (Assuming, of course, that the formula can be made from commonly available ingredients. It may not be possible.) But there simply isn’t a good, proven recipe at the moment. Instead of creating your own formula, we have safe formula deficiency suggestions here , including doctor-approved temporary solutions. And if you’re desperate enough to make your own formula, please contact your child’s pediatrician to discuss your options.