Formula Treatments?

Where simple spitting up needs an anti-regurgitation cure

It is important for health care workers to remember the vulnerability of new mothers with respect to wanting the best for their babies.

The very sales pitch of the infant formula companies that entices new mothers with promises of "just like mother's milk" and "cognitive and physical development just like breastfed babies" also pitch the cure-all for the common infant behaviours such as crying spells, colic, waking spells during the night, various stool consistencies, mild skin rashes and the common spitting up of milk after a feed. For the most part these are normal aspects of a baby's early life, which they soon grow out of.

It isn't enough that formula be perceived as an equal substitute for mother's milk, the objectives of the seductive advertising not only creates these behaviours as being "problems" and then plunges ahead to promise to elevate these very perceived problems. Combined with suggestive expressions _ and sprinkled with the spiritual language of "thankful" and "trust", who wouldn't want this for their baby?

Lactose intolerance, for example, is a very rare occurrence among babies, yet is made to seem common, concerns about cow's milk intolerance are promoted with the push for soy-based formulas, readily available on supermarket shelves. Suggestions of anti-allergy formulas show diagrams of protein molecules as if they had passed through a food processor _ simply passed off as the cure for the very product that likely caused the problem in the first place.

Regurgitation (or "simple reflux") is present in about 40 per cent of infants and often the result of abundance of breastmilk in relation to the small size of an infant's stomach. Or when babies playfully come on and off the breast air may be swallowed and when the bubble bursts a little milk might also make its way out. Even this is made to be a "problem". Mead Johnson has come up with the instant fix of AR formula clinched with the medicalized jargon of "anti-reflux" or "anti-regurgitation."

This starch thickened formula needed only to prove that it did not hamper infant growth to show that it was "acceptable" to set the stage for the massive advertising campaign that followed. First we were told that thickened formulas were recommended by 80% of physicians. Hmmm. Followed by more shelf talkers promising to solve spitting problems with a $2 off incentive, followed by paid for anti-regurgitation articles in medical trade mags, followed by direct advertisements in parenting magazines, followed by brochures creating anxiety about, "regurgitation" and offering the "only one formula offers a clinically proven solution."

Ellen Desjardins, Nutritionist with Waterloo Region Community Health Department states: as breastfeeding advocates we need to help parents understand the range of normal behaviours in infants _ what they can expect, and how they can cope without resorting to experimentation with different formulas. We must constantly fight the illusion that breastmilk is somehow inadequate, when it is in fact the solution."

How do these products get approved when they contain ingredients that infants under the age of 4 months are unable to digest? We asked Health Canada why there is no age limit on the use of formulas containing starch since formulas are self-selected and their use could potentially include new born and young infants. "We saw no problem in a 30 per cent level of starch replacement." was the response.

Thanks to notes from Eleanor Desjardins and excerpts from the Toronto Breastfeeding Network News, The Growing Variety of Baby Formulas: a strategy to counteract breastfeeding, Issue 19, January 2000

See also Enfalac ARGGG…
INFACT Canada Newsletter Summer 1998, page 5.