Monday, October 6, 2008

9.8 Baby formula

By now, 53,000 babies in China have been sickened by melamine-tainted milk and 4 have already died (left: a baby holding a can of Sanlu powdered milk). And milk products from China are now banned in many countries around the World.

Ideally, there should not be any melamine in any food anywhere. Unfortunately, melamine is ubiquitous. Chances are the favorite plastic dish/cup of yours or the counter top in your kitchen was made in part from melamine. The upper safety limit in food set by both the EU and the US is now 2.5 ppm (or 2.5 mg/kg). For babies, 1 ppm in China [in Taiwan, the upper limit for powder milk for babies is at a far more stringent 0.05 ppm]. In the US, the tolerable daily intake is set, for now, at 0.63 mg/kg body weight/day.

Let's do some simple math: Assuming you weigh 50 kg, the daily melamine limit is then 0.63 x 50 = 31.5 mg. Then even if you consume 31.5/2.5 = 12.6 kg of milk powder everyday, it is still "safe". And for a 12-month-old baby weighing 10 kg at the 1 ppm limit, it'll be a 1 kg consumption per day - still quite a lot of milk. Unfortunately, the melamine content in Sanlu powdered milk putatively was as high as a mind-boggling 2,560 ppm. So forget the math, the stuff is highly toxic all right.

The most logical alternative to powdered cow milk is of course mother's milk. While this may not always be possible, for those making the switch, more about milk and the eyes:

The following are extracted from an interesting article by Hoffman et al: "Maturation of visual acuity is accelerated in breast-fed term infants fed baby food containing DHA-enriched egg yolk". J Nutr 134:2307-2313, 2004:

The authors divided 6-month-old breast-feeding babies into two groups: (1) the DHA group that received each day, one jar of baby food (113 g) containing egg yolk enriched with 115 mg/100 g DHA (docosahexaenoic acid) and (2) the same but no DHA (i.e., the control group).

Both groups continued to breast-feed for a mean of 9 months. In the control group, the red cell DHA levels decreased significantly between 6 and 12 months (from 3.8 to 3.0 g/100 g total fatty acids), whereas in the DHA group, the levels increased from 4.1 to 5.5 g/100 g.

VEP (visually evoked response) acuity at 6 months was 0.49 logMAR (minimum angle of resolution) which improved to 0.29 logMAR by 12 months in the control group. In the DHA group, VEP acuity was 0.48 logMAR at 6 months and which matured to 0.14 logMAR at 12 months. In other words, 1.5 lines (on the eye chart) better visual acuity than the controls. So an adequate dietary supply of DHA throughout the first year of life maybe necessary for visual maturation. The stereo-acuity on the other hand was not affected by DHA.

Interestingly, DHA concentration in human milk varies from as little as 0.1% of total fatty acids in women on Western diets to as much as 1.4% in Inuit women in North America and 2.78% in Chinese women from a fishing village, both of the latter consumed large amounts of marine animal foods.

Hmm... So the old-wives' tale of "fish is brain food", by way of DHA, is quite profound and is actually scientifically accurate! [We don't need to repeat that the brain is the extension of the eyes, do we.]


10 comments:

new illuminati said...

Mother's milk is the only suitable 'formula' for a human baby. If anyone tells you otherwise they're utterly ignorant - or the lackeys of some heartless corporation.
Caring mothers who have to work express and store their milk for their babies where possible; wetnurses are always second best, but better than any chemical formular.
Never give infants soy-based formulae - ever!

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Anonymous said...

Didn't you hear that it was a deliberate thing to do? China thought by poisoning the future generation that nobody would oppose their communism ways.

It was an attempt at world domination by China.

Wally Banners said...

super article. how did you get your info is China publishing the truth in some hardcopy format?

EyeDoc said...

So far only babies in China are affected.

Actually, the info on tainted milk is widely available in China. It maybe out of necessity - to quickly resolve a public health issue.

Robert said...

It makes me ILL when I hear of the baby forumula companies pushing their wares in countries where they survived for centuries without it.

It is beyond me how these people sleep at night. In the face of all the research, there is no way they can possibly claim ignorance. It's just plain unethical.

Martin MY said...

I won'te mention Nestle

EyeDoc said...

It is indeed strange to see mother's milk give way to packaged cow's milk, even in rural areas of China. This trend is now beginning to reverse - a ray of hope of sorts.

Melamine (with additional fillers) was sold as "protein powder". Among the arrested, one criminal alone has sold 60 tons of the stuff to dairy farmers in Hebei Province.

Four lives are now lost with thousands of others suffering from kidney ailments. In a country with a one-child-only policy, the anguish of the parents is beyond imagination.

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