New fruit juice guidelines, big change for babies.
 

ABC News:



CBS story:

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/fruit-j...=CNM-00-10aac3a

American Acad. of Pediatrics policy statement:

http://pediatrics.aappublications.o.../peds.2017-0967

Jebus. I'm a guy, got no kids, but still, I got something to say about this. Under 6 months - mother's milk, nothing else will do, nothing else even comes close. Endof.

It's not for me to decide for any mother, but this means if I ever decide to make kids, Ima do it with a woman who decides exactly that too.

As a side note, this invariably means that a mother would have to make sure she eats so that she is as healthy as can be so that her baby's food is as good as it can be - mother's milk, see?

I mean, we know about carbs, we know about generational epigenetics, we know about the first few months and years of a kid's growth, we know all about hyperglycemia and growth hormone, we know all about fat and fat solubles, and all that and more. Mother's milk is like the thing on top of all of it so we make healthy human adults.

Still not my place, just saying that's how I see it.

Yeah, I'm with Martin. Do people actually give *FRUIT JUICE* to babies under 6 months old??? :eek: Why would anyone do that? Breast milk was what my son got at the age, supplemented with a little rice baby cereal per my then pediatrician. Never would have thought about giving him fruit juice!

Martin, Nice to have your say as a guy, ;) but the reality is in last CDC report, the rate of exclusively breastfeeding at 6 months is 22%. 20% of babies are never breastfeed for a variety of reason; adoption, illness, single moms who have to work, etc. 25 years ago pediatricians advised to add cereals and water flavored with apple juice before 6 months. And how many children age 1-6 now have no more than 4 ounces of juice? I agree with you, but this guideline may come as a shock to many not steeped in the "fruit is nature's candy" LC world.

In order to explain why this isn't as easy as it may seem I would have to get into the realm of health care policy, at least in the US, and that could lead to the kind of discussions that are not allowed on this forum. So I'll just say that the kinds of supports that could make this a reality for most women just don't exist and some of the ones that do exist might just disappear in the very near future.

Jean

According to the "Health Ranger" it gets worse:http://www.naturalnews.com/030550_s...dvertising.html

I saw a program about this in the Appalachia Mountain where the children all had decayed teeth because they were being fed Mountain Dew in baby bottles.
http://www.naturalnews.com/043535_M...Appalachia.html

I think it's not as bleak as it sounds. I mean, this is a support group for low-carb, right? There's all kinds of people here, many are mothers and fathers, they've had to deal with that at some point. Experience matters. I can hardly imagine it's a new problem. I just did a quick search for best alternatives for mother's milk, there's tons of info. No need to go into policy, common sense will do just fine. I think it's about as easy as that.

My point is simply that some women and families lack conditions, social, economic, educational and emotional, that are conducive to breast feeding, particularly extended breast feeding. Aspects of health policy can help address some of these issues.

Jean

Yeah, I certainly appreciate the extent of difficulties a mother can face, I'm a child of such a mother myself. I'm with you on that point, Jean.

But what if there was a simple, one-size-fits-all, cheap, easy, some effort required, solution to all of those situations regardless of specifics, as a best alternative to mother's milk?

Broth. Some kind of meat broth.

I seem to remember I took part in a similar discussion years ago. Not sure which way I was leaning then, but I probably didn't change my mind much. Anyways, if there is such a thing, broth is probably it. Recently, I've been making pork stew (or braise) with onions, butter or lard, salt, some spice mix. Well, there's broth in there, but there's no bone, so it's just meat broth. Dunno why the hangup on "bone" broth, now I figure it's poor man's meat broth, you know, the leftovers from the meat stews and steaks and all that.

The debate is dominated by mimicry, how best to emulate mother's milk nutritive content. Well, for sure fruit juice is way at the bottom of any such list, ya? However, there's another aspect to consider, it's the effect rather than nutritive content. OK, so it goes like this. Mother's milk is best, not because of its nutritive content, but because of its effect. Therefore, best alternative to mother's milk should reproduce the effect regardless of pretty much any other aspect. Fruit juice is very unlikely to reproduce the effect, understandable since it lacks a whole bunch of things for that, like fat and fat solubles for things like brain and bone growth for example, let alone protein or anything else.

Traditional populations have no clue about nutritive content, they can't possibly know how to mix and match based on that metric. Yet, they obviously figured it out cuz it's highly unlikely that they never faced this situation. This would be the Weston A. Price Foundation type of solution. These guys advocate bone broth and I'm all for it 100%. But just from looking at the ingredients list gives me a headache, it's too complicated to be considered a one-size-fits-all.

Then we got a bunch of other solutions from all over the place - cow's milk, goat milk, any other animal's milk, man-made formula, anything else we can think of. It's obvious that problem has been looked at in deep detail and a whole lot of people have been thinking up all kinds of solutions.

It's gotta be simple, in fact it's got to emulate how mother's milk is made - as a by-product of something else, mother's diet in this case. She eats, no intentional conscious effort is ever put into milk production, it's all automatic. So basically the one-size-fits-all solution is to go straight for mother's diet. Think of a way where her diet produces this by-product that will fit the requirements for her infant. Let's call things what they are - leftovers. Not in a way that needs complicated stuff like bone broth or anything like that. No, direct straight up leftovers is what's used to feed the kid, with as little additional processing and preparation as possible. Pork stew, there's broth right in the pot, just dig in, put in bottle, that's it for that. In effect, kid eats exactly what mother eats.

Back to fruit juice. This would be like a mother who eats only fruits, then gives the juice to her kid. Is that diet adequate for the mother? Yeah, that's pretty much the question we gotta ask here.

Aha!, I remember one point I brought up back then. The popular argument is that it's mother's milk that should be emulated as closely as possible. Instead, I argued that mother's milk itself is evolution's way to emulate the actual adequate diet for the kid - mother's own diet. So, instead of going for a milk copy, we go for a mother's diet copy. Nothing closer to a copy than the original - mother's diet itself - no need to copy anything, it's right there in the pot. See? So I guess I'm sticking to my guns as it were. Does that make any sense?

My two oldest kids may have dabbled with juice. I don't really remember. The rest of them have pretty much only had it at parties as juice has been banned from my house for years and years. Milk or water. I didn't have the inside track on nutrition. I don't want the mess. Juice is just too sticky when it spills. My youngest is 10 now, but when the Cub Scouts were trying to give him some leftover juice boxes after a camping trip, he shook his head and said, "My mom doesn't believe in them." :lol: