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?
Last edited by M Levac : Wed, May-24-17 at 06:27.
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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!
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.
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