will be to the distinct advantage of the race in every respect.
Proprietary foods to which fresh cow's milk is added, are not foods at
all,--they depend upon the milk so far as any nutritional value is
concerned; and it would be far safer to modify at home a good milk than
to buy a proprietary food, the analysis of which cannot be depended
upon. The credit for the fat, healthy babies we see advertised does not
belong to the manufacturers, but to the cow whose milk you add to the
manufacturer's sugar.
The proprietary beef foods are also valueless as infant foods. In
certain illnesses, when we want a mild stimulant, a teaspoonful or two
in hot water may have a certain value, but that is all. The beef juice
of home manufacture is much more valuable.
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HUMAN AND COW'S MILK.--The composition of cow's milk
is as follows:
Fat (represented by cream) 4%
Sugar 4%
Proteids (represented by curd) 4%
The composition of an average human breast milk is as follows:
Fat 4%
Sugar 7%
Proteids 1-1/2%
It will be observed from a comparison of the above tables that cow's
milk is much richer in proteids (the substances which form with water
the curd of sour milk) than is human milk. If one remembers that cow's
milk is manufactured by nature primarily for the feeding of calves, not
for babies, and that the stomach of a calf is intended to exist
exclusively on vegetable products, and that nature is preparing it for
this purpose, and feeds it a food when young that will enable it to grow
so as to be adapted for that purpose, one can understand that the
problem of the modification of cow's milk to suit the stomach of a baby
is not by any means a simple matter. Since the proteids are so much in
excess in cow's milk, we must dilute cow's milk with twice its bulk or
more of water to render it fit food for a new born baby. If we dilute
cow's milk to this extent to get the proteid percentage right, we
immediately disarrange the percentage of the cream or fat. We overcome
this difficulty by taking the cream from the top of the bottle and
diluting it because it is richer in fat and does not need so much
dilution. This is the explanation of the so-called "top-milk feeding."
The percentage of sugar represents another problem. The percentage of
sugar in cow's milk compared with the sugar in human milk is deficient,
so we add milk-sugar to
|