6.       BABY'S HEALTH.

If your baby is healthy, this is a blessing for you as a mother. A healthy baby is easy to care for; a sick baby is a constant worry. The best way to keep your baby healthy is to give it the perfect food that God has planned. Cow's milk is a perfect food - but only for cows! It was never intended for human babies!

The cow is a big animal with four stomachs. It weighs about 90 lbs. at birth and in only two years it is a whopping 2,000 lbs. This is not the kind of food that is required for the human baby who weighs about 6 - 8 lbs. at birth and is only 100 - 200 lbs. twenty years later!

The baby uses 100 per cent protein from the mother's milk. Less than 50 percent can be absorbed from cow's milk or formula so that baby has to take twice as much, which is extra work on the kidneys. Nursing mothers should not take any notice of the large amounts of milk that their bottle feeding counterparts give their babies.

Nor should they expect them to be as big and fat! They are not meant to be! They are humans, not calves! And they don't want to establish unnecessary fat cells for overweight problems later in life. Of course, many breastfed babies will become fat and roly-poly, which we love in babies. Don’t worry; breast milk will not lay down fat cells for the future.

Breast milk contains up to 10 times more essential vitamins than cow's milk. This difference is reduced when cow's milk is diluted and reduced further when the formula is heated. The immunity that breast milk affords lasts long after the child is weaned. Breastfed babies do not suffer from constipation as breast milk forms a soft curd in the baby's stomach. Sucking on the breast will promote optimum facial development for which your child will bless you later in life.

Here are some other interesting facts for you, although to write them all we would need to do a separate manual.

* "The risk of acute gastrointestinal illness in infants receiving formula was six times greater than in infants receiving breast milk and 2.5 times greater than in infants receiving cow milk." J.S. Koopman, M.D. MPH.

* "Insufficient breastfeeding of genetically susceptible newborn infants may lead to beta-cell infection, beta-cell destruction, and insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (IDDM) later in life. K. Borch-Johnson.

* "Children who were artificially fed or breastfed for only six months or less were at increased risk for developing cancer before age 15. The risk for artificially fed children was one to eight times that of long-term breastfed children, and the risk for short-term breast feeders was 1 - 9 times that of long-term breast feeders. M.K. Davis. Infant feeding and childhood cancer. Lancet, 1988.

* "Whole cow's milk should not be fed to infants during the first year of life because of its association with hidden gastrointestinal bleeding, iron deficiency anemia, and cow's milk allergy. The consumption of whole milk after the first year of life should be discouraged because of its potential role in a variety of disorders including atherosclerosis, recurrent abdominal pain of childhood, cataracts, milk-borne infections, and juvenile delinquency. Frank Oski, M.D. writing in the journal of the American Academy of Paediatrics.

* Recent news from London says, "Researchers say thousands of bottle-fed babies risk long-term brain and bone damage from aluminum in milk powders. Surveys showed the powders often contained more than 100 times the aluminum in breast milk. Aluminum interferes with the production of enzymes vital to brain activity. There were also fears that high doses could accelerate mental decline in old age."

We would need a whole book to list the advantages of breastfeeding for the baby, but apart from the physical health of the baby, studies reveal that it also results in increased intelligence. In Britain 300 premature babies were studied - 193 were breastfed, 107 were fed formula. Eight years later they were tested and the breastfed children scored eight points higher in their test scores than the formula fed babies.