Human Fail

Posted Wed, 08/04/2010 - 19:36 by Melissa

Doesn't anyone else notice that as major nutritional breakthroughs are made, modifications are quietly made to various "functional foods." Most baby formulas say something: "Now with essential DHA!"  If it's so essential, what does that mean for the millions of babies that received formula before its importance was known? 

Nutritionism is human arrogance at its worst, but Americans are more than happy to pile their carts with its fruits: margarine, baby formulas, energy bars, meal replacement shakes, vitamin water...

When really, we haven't even begun to understand how digestion or food works. Humans in the future will laugh at food science textbooks from 2010.

The latest discovery in missing ingredients is that breast milk sugars are not just feeding babies. In fact, some of them are indigestible to babies, but they are feeding something just as important— a baby's internal ecosystem of digestive bacteria. These sugars were once thought to be useless...I don't suppose they are included in current formulas, but I suspect they will be added now that they know about them. Too late for the babies who received formulas in the past...what other important things will they discover in the future? What are babies missing because of nutritionism? 

An excellent blog that explores the role of gut bacteria, which humans are just sorting out, is Cooling Inflammation. Lately Dr. Ayers has had several great posts on how getting a poor start on gut bacteria sets us up for autoimmune diseases.

The money quote from the NYTimes article is:

Such findings have made the three researchers keenly aware that every component of milk probably has a special role. “It’s all there for a purpose, though we’re still figuring out what that purpose is,” Dr. Mills said. “So for God’s sake, please breast-feed.”

Another study that has been in the news regarding gut bacteria is also interesting. The tagline reads:"High-fiber, low-fat diets cultivate healthier intestinal microbes, study suggests." Sorry, that's not what the study suggests. It shows that one traditional culture eating a very low-fat high-fiber diet has different and more diverse gut flora...than modern Italians. Not really a fair comparison! Let's wait until they study the gut flora of traditional cultures eating higher-fat diets or modern cultures eating higher-fiber before we pronounce high-fat low-fiber diets the factor here. Fiber probably matters, but this much better article points out that African children are also eating "dirtier" food in general- including insects!

Comments

Here's a blog post from a few

by Paul - 08/06/2010 - 21:20

Here's a blog post from a few days ago, jist is breast feeding is important, but we need to take a more paleolithic approach.
http://paleoparenting.blogspot.com/2010/08/mandatory-breastfeeding.html

I also came across this piece

by Franklin Mason - 08/05/2010 - 08:38

I also came across this piece recently: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17908-evening-breast-milk-means-a-...

Seems that break milk made at night puts a baby to sleep.

Of course, the issues here are wider that just the diet decisions we make for ourselves and our children. Many more Moms are in the workforce than in past decades, and given that we are in a deep and lasting recession, most folks are afraid to take off work. This makes breast feeding quite difficult, and many Moms quite understandably just give up on it.

“Real knowledge is to know

by John Sifferman - 08/05/2010 - 07:46

“Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.” Confucius

You bring up an important point, Melissa. Science is almost always playing catch-up, especially in the health industry. Too many discoveries are made after the fact, and after the consequences. Knowledge comparing the effects of breastfeeding against formula is only the tip of the iceberg. There's an entire submerged continent of knowledge that we just don't know about human health. Yet, in our culture, we are coerced into making decisions on things which we know very little about, and we hope that there are no negative consequences.

If you look at the overall quality of human-invented foods, then it makes me wonder why anyone would believe infant formula is any better. Breastfeeding just makes sense, and we shouldn't need science to confirm this.

I forget where I heard about

by Aaron Curl - 08/05/2010 - 04:59

I forget where I heard about the pendulum theory. It goes from one extreme to the other. We are at an extreme end right now, I believe the pendulum is about to start going the other way because in my 36 years I have never seen so many "frankenfoods " as there are right now. Soon people will realize that we have always had what we needed all along.....it was right in front of us. I truly don't understand why modern man makes things so hard, when in reality it's so easy to be fit and eat good food.

Hi Melissa, I'm a nurse in a

by Lori - 08/04/2010 - 21:12

Hi Melissa,

I'm a nurse in a neonatal intensive care unit, working with premature babies.

The beneficial sugars in breastmilk that I think you are talking about are called oligosacharides, also known as prebiotics. And, they too, have been recently added to some infant formulas. However, research has discovered nearly 1000 different kinds of these oligosaccharides. Only two or three different types are in these new baby formulas. Again, as you mentioned, we don't know how all of these 1000 components work in conjunction with each other, and we will never be able to create a perfect formula that matches the qualities of human breastmilk, so just breastfeed! And we desperately need more breastmilk banks in this country so that babies whose mothers cannot breastfeed for whatever reason can still safely have breastmilk.

I wish there were more milk

by Jennifer - 08/05/2010 - 06:26

I wish there were more milk banks across the country. When I was nursing my son I wanted to donate milk but couldn't find a bank nearby that didn't have a million hoops to jump through. I would have gladly pumped an extra time a day to produce extra milk. I ended up throwing out milk that I had frozen because my son wouldn't take a bottle. Hopefully someday donating breast milk will be as common place as donating blood.

Great post. Just another

by JP - 08/04/2010 - 20:18

Great post. Just another proof that breastfeeding is really important!

Talking about scientific foods (infant formulas), as I did my groceries the other day, I noticed that they started to sell (processed) OMEGA 3 ham. I remember pollan warning us that the omega 3 hot dog was coming too... Indeed, people of the future will laugh.