OUR BABIES

Dominion, Volume 10, Issue 3053, 14 April 1917, Page 5

OUR BABIES

IB? HTGEIA.I

Published under the auspices of the Koyal • New Zealand Society for the Health of Women and Children. "It is wiser to put up a fence at tho top of a precipice than to maintain an • ambulance at the bottom." FOOD CONSTITUENTS. I explained last week that all foods are made up of three essential nutritive elements, etc.: 1. Sugar or staroh. 2. Pat or oil. 3. Proteid or albuminous matter. The only perfect food for the baby is human milk—the ideal standard which should never be lost sight of. Composition of Human Milk. In lOOoz. of human milk there are on the average: Sugar Tor,. Fat 4oz. Proteid ......; ljoz. Salts.' sr.. under ioz. Water 87{oz. Total ;.....'• lOOoz. Question: What part do the sugar, fat, and proteid play? Answer: Boughly 6peaking, one is not far from the truth in saying^Sugar provides the main working power. Fat is burned in the body as it is burned in the stove to provide beat. •' Proteid is the building of . fleshforming; material, and serves for growth, and the repair of waste due to the wear and tear of the bodily organs. Question: Is it important to 6tick to Nature's proportions in baby-feeding ?- Answer: Most important. Thus Nature puts 10 times as much, fat or oil into whale's milk as she does into human-milk, because the cold sea water 6teals heat from the baby whale 10 times as actively as the air steals the heat from the human baby in its dry, warm wrappings. Whale's milk is almost half oil. .Again, as wo showed last week, cow's milk has • nearly three time? as much proteid (or flesh-forming material). as "mother's milk," because the calf 'has to grow three times as quickly as the baby. A large proportion of babies grow up with damaged bodies and feeble constitutions through their mothers going contrary to the' laws of Nature in the food supplied, especially during the first two years of life.

.Question: But suppose a mother cannot suckle her babj, and. ia forced to resort to artificial feeding (say at the third or riiUi month), can she prepare a suitable food from cow's milk? Answer: Yes, as I explained last week, this can easily be done by reducing the proteid to'a third and adding the proper proportion of sugar of milk. These are the two main points to attend to in making what we know as humanised milk—in other words, cow's milk modified so as to render it a suitable food for nourishing and building the human baby.

Question: But several people have told me that sugar of milk varies in strength —that one sample may be double as strong as another, and that if you get: a strong sample you ought to use only half as niuoh as you would of a weak one. 6utely this is very puzzling and confusing. How are we mothers to know what to do?

Answer: How, indeed! The people are puzzle-headed who talk such silly nonsense. Sugar of milk is sugar of milk, just as water is water or lead is lead. An ounce of one sample of sugar, of milk contains just as muck food as asi, ounce of any other sample. ■

Question: Then'my informants must have been wrong, or else possible they may have come aoross samples of sugar of milk adulterated with cane sugar for cheapness. Cane sugar is really double as strong as milk sugar, is it not?

Answer: I don't think you will over came across sugar o£ milk adulterated with cane sugar. But oven if this"were 'Borah ounce of the one would tfave practically the same "food value" as ran", ounce, of 'the other, though cane sugar is very much sweeter than milk sugar. But "sweetness" has nothing whatever to do with nourishing or building properties. A tiny particle of saccharine has as much sweetening power as a spoonful of cane sugar, aud from that point of view it might be said that saccharine was about MOO times stronger than sugar. . Yet saccliurine has no nourishing or bodybuilding properties whatever. Saccharine is not a foodstuif at all.

Question: Ton have mentioned that cane sugar has about the same "food value" as sugar of .milk. If this is the case, would, it not be a' reasonable economy, especially in war time, to use cano sugar instead of milk sugar in preparing humanised milk? ' Answer: Certainly riot. Castor oil and kerosene might have similar

"heating values," yet you could not substitute the one for the other as an illnTnina.nt, without specially adapting the lamp. Nature lias designed milk sugar for the special needs of the baby, and cane sugar is apt to disagree and upset the digestive processes in infancy, causing fermentation, colic, and diarrhoea.