Milk powder is a real miracle

The baby was only two weeks old and was hungry. Elizabeth Hanson tried to breastfeed, but she didn’t have enough milk. She was frightened and saw her daughter lose her weight and small bones sticking out of her skin.

In the United States, in modern times, most parents can rely on multiple safe and healthy options for breastfeeding their babies: breast milk or infant formula.That is, unless they are experiencing the current impact Insufficient milk powderAs do thousands of families across the United States.

However, in 1724, Elizabeth Hanson could not rely on infant formula when the milk was dry. Her story shows the nightmare reality that her family faced before the development of modern commercial prescriptions in the mid-20th century.

Read: We weren’t good at feeding babies

Hanson, a British settler from New Hampshire, was captured with his baby by a Native American Wabanaki assailant from her home during the Dummer’s War. She was indignant at her trials, exhausted, traumatized, and lost her milk supply. When she was able to get it, she gave her baby soup. When there was no other food, she warmed the water in her mouth and drip it onto her breasts for her baby to suck. But the baby was hungry.Hanson Related later Her fear that the child “liked more”[ly] Dying rather than living. “

An older woman, one of her prisoners, noticed Hanson’s struggle. The woman showed Hanson a baby food Wabanaki recipe. She makes walnut milk and simmers it in fine corn meal. This food was “growing and starting to look good” and “very nourishing the baby”.

I’m a history scholar who has fed infants and children in early America, and my research is full of stories about hungry babies like this. Hanson and the Wabanaki woman who saved her baby’s life lived in a time when many non-breastfeeding babies died. In the 18th century, as in our time, some parents and babies who gave birth had difficulty breastfeeding. The milk supply was delayed, the nipples cracked and torn, the tubes became clogged, and abscesses and mastitis became established (and were fatal before the invention of antibiotics). That is, if the mother did not die at birth. Infants were not caught due to premature babies, ankyloglossia, cleft palate, or other physiological problems.

Social factors can also interfere with breastfeeding. The slave owner forced the enslaved woman back into the field shortly after birth. The poor mother returned to work because she needed a salary. In addition, many cultures were aware of the partial contraceptive effects of breastfeeding or had a taboo on the sexual activity of nurses.Historians including Paula Trekel When Richard Follette A husband or slave who wanted a woman to return to fertility explains to her child that she may deny breasts.

If the parent who gave birth was unable to breastfeed for some reason, the family looked for another source of milk. In the 17th and 18th centuries, most women spent decades pregnant or breastfeeding. That is, friends, neighbors, or relatives generally cared for each other’s children. Wealthy people could afford to buy a nanny, either a slave or a paid servant, who breastfed another’s child under the most tragic circumstances. This is well documented by historians. Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, Marissa C. RhodesWhen Janet Golden.. Some nurses were available because the baby had already died, while others cared for the children of slaves and clients at their own expense. Many were hungry.

Parents who couldn’t afford a nanny turned to another baby food. In early modern Europe and early America, caregivers mixed animal milk, water, or soup with other grains, such as flour, bread, or a wabanaki blend of nut milk and corn masara.

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Such foods would have provided hydration and calories, but these benefits can come at terrible costs. If spoiled or contaminated with pathogens in the days prior to modern food safety standards, alternative baby foods can be fatal. Even at best, they were rarely nutritionally sufficient for their children. The experience of a baby Hanson raised on a different diet was an exception, not a rule.

As America’s food supply became industrialized in the late 19th century, new crops of milk substitutes became available. Their ad promised a plump and happy baby. Such products were essential for increasing the number of women working in household chores and Gilded Age factories, and there was no worker protection or nursing room (anyway, pump technology was very rudimentary at the time. ). However, the plump babies on the label, nevertheless, such foods were not always more nutritionally complete than their homemade ancestors of the last century.

Next, there was the problem of milk. It was not pasteurized, refrigerated, sometimes aged, and shipped in open containers that were easily contaminated.At the turn of the 20th century, according to Jacqueline Wolf Don’t Kill Babies: 19th and 20th Century Public Health and Breastfeeding Decline, Public health officials in Chicago estimated that bottle-fed babies are 15 times more likely to die than breast-fed babies. Nearly 13% of all babies born in the United States died before their first birthday.

As Wolf states, in response to the infant feeding crisis, public health officials spent the first decades of the 20th century purifying the milk supply. Pediatricians have advised on complex “scientific” approaches to breastfeeding, such as breastfeeding that is planned to disrupt breastfeeding. These innovations have led more parents to feed bottles instead of increasing breastfeeding rates. By the late 1960s, historians Amy Bentley, In the United States, only 20 to 25 percent of babies start breastfeeding. The rest are consumed formulas, whether home-mixed from ingredients such as condensed milk or corn syrup, or in the form of premixes marketed in the 1950s.

Only in the 1960s and 1970s did the counterculture movement begin to bring breastfeeding back into fashion. The “breast is the best” debate, taken up by medical and public health authorities, has had a major impact on infant breastfeeding policies in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Some studies He opposed widespread claims about the health benefits of breastfeeding children.

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Today, in the United States, 84% of babies start breastfeeding at birth, but only 25.8% continue breastfeeding until 6 months of age. As recommended by the CDC.. Breastfeeding disparities reflect the high breastfeeding rates of wealthy white women and the large racial and class disparities.

The United States can and should do much more to support new parents. Policies such as paid family leave allow more parents to breastfeed and continue breastfeeding longer. But even if the country has the best social support system in the world, some families will still need or want to use the formula.

The history of infant formula before modern infant formula should warn us that a lack of infant formula, as seen on social media, will drive more parents to breastfeed. The past gives us a harsh warning: without a safe and nutritionally complete alternative to breast milk, babies will die.

Insufficient milk powder is not a breastfeeding victory. This is a disaster for families who just want to feed their children, like historical families.