So your baby is approaching a year, the point past which you’ve been told it’s okay to start introducing cow’s milk or another alternative milk into your baby’s diet. Maybe you’ve been told you should wean at one year. You certainly don’t have to, and there are countless reasons to continue breastfeeding into the second year. But that’s a subject for another TOTD. Today, we talk about alternative milks.
As you may be aware, the World Health Organization recommends that this be the choices in milks for a mother to feed her infant. They are ranked in order of priority:
1. Breastmilk from the mother’s breast.
2. The mother’s breastmilk, which has been expressed and is then given to the baby in a syringe, bottle, or cup.
3. Expressed milk from another breastfeeding mother.
4. Commercial infant formula.
You may be wondering where other commercially-available alternative milks fall in this classification. If you’ve done your research on the contents of commercial infant formula, you may assume that cow’s milk, soy, almond, rice, coconut or other alternative milks fall somewhere between 3 and 4. Surely these milks are safer for babies and toddlers, right?
Unfortunately, this is simply not the case. If your child is under the age of one, and you have exhausted every attempt to provide your baby with breastmilk from your breasts or from other breastfeeding mother, formula is the WHO’s preferred alternative. You are not better off supplementing with an alternative milk. Any alternative milk, be it formula or almond milk, is going to fall significantly short of breastmilk, particularly in the child’s first two years of life. Let’s look at some of the fundamental complaints about infant formula:
• It is highly processed
• It is full of sweeteners and fillers to make it more drinkable
• It is heavily fortified beyond what the natural ingredients support
• Its nutritional content is deeply inferior to breastmilk
All of this can be said about almost any commercially-available alternative milk. The alternative milks that provide a composition similar to breastmilk are usually in the form of raw animal milks. However, these are usually expensive, unavailable in many parts of the country, and pose risks to infants and toddlers who have a milk protein allergy, which is a common problem. And, all the new alternative milks that are all the rage are really no better than formula. Some have protein but no fat, some have fat but no protein. Some have hardly any protein or fat or calcium.
That’s OK, you might be thinking. Apples don’t have a lot of fat or protein or calcium, either, but they’re part of a healthy diet. And that is true. If all you want is to pour a little coconut milk over your toddler’s cornflakes, you’re probably fine. Once a baby begins eating table foods in earnest (usually sometime after 12 months), the breastmilk vs formula debate becomes much more nuanced. The issue is quantity. If you ate an apple a day, you might be a very healthy person. But the healthiness of your apple consumption would change dramatically if half of your diet, day in and day out, consisted solely of apples.
When you are considering an alternate milk for your toddler so you can stop pumping or to simply have an alternative, aim to keep the supplementation at a minimum. None of the new alternate milks have nutrition adequate enough to make up half a toddler’s diet.
