One of the most controversial topics surrounding the issue of breastfeeding is what a woman should do if she finds herself unable to nurse her baby. An even more prickly subject is whether learning how to make homemade baby formula is a good idea.
I myself nursed all three of my children for an extended period of time. The first two were nursed for two years and the third for three and a half years. I practiced parent led weaning for the first 2 children as I did not want to be nursing and pregnant at the same time. For my third and youngest child, I simply allowed her to wean herself whenever she chose.
I’ve often considered what I would have done should I have found myself unable to nurse. Certainly commercial formulas are not a good option as these highly processed powders are loaded with rancid vegetable oils and denatured proteins. Even the organic baby formulas on the market should be avoided for this reason.
Is Homemade Formula Superior to Donor Breastmilk?
What about homemade baby formula made with milk, kefir, or yogurt from grassfed cows or free roaming, foraging goats? Would this formula be superior to human breastmilk from a donor milk bank?
To me, most folks’ opinion on this issue basically boils down to whether they feel that human breastmilk is suitable for an infant regardless of the diet of the Mother. I am of the persuasion that the breastfeeding Mother’s diet is critical to the nutrient density of her breastmilk. I wrote about this in an article commenting on the news story about a vegan Mother whose breastfed baby died.
Nutrient starved Mother = nutrient poor breastmilk
Science is backing this up. Published 2019 research found that the diversity of beneficial probiotics varies greatly from woman to woman perhaps due to dietary factors.
Color and Creamline of Breastmilk Varies Based on Diet
I know from personal experience how my diet affected the color and thickness of my breastmilk. With my first child, I ate everything organic but did not consume many traditional fats or sacred foods. My breastmilk was white with little cream on the top. My baby was also hungry all the time and wanted to nurse frequently. He also spit up a lot which I now know was my consumption of pasteurized organic dairy and improperly prepared grains during that time.
With my next 2 children, my breastmilk went from white to beige and had considerably more fat simply by adding lots of butter, cream, egg yolks, grassfed meat, and fish eggs to my diet. As an added bonus, my children were satisfied more quickly and stayed full much longer between feedings. They also never spit up unless I ate out at a restaurant or had consumed some low quality, non-Traditionally prepared food for whatever reason.
I sure wish I had frozen a few ounces of that breastmilk before and after my Real Food conversion. A picture would have been worth a thousand words!
Few Breastfeeding Women Follow a Real Food, Traditional Diet
Because the vast majority of women do not follow a Real Food, Traditional diet and because I so clearly observed the difference in my own breastmilk when I made the change myself, I would have chosen to make a homemade baby formula with raw milk from grassfed cows instead of seeking donor breastmilk.
To me, it would have been way too risky and far too likely that the donor breastmilk would have come from Moms drinking coffee or diet drinks, eating fast food, taking over the counter prescription drugs and the like. At least with grassfed cows, you know what they are eating and that they aren’t taking any drugs!
Holder Method of Pasteurization
Then there’s also the huge problem that many donor milk banks pasteurize the breastmilk!
And, no, the “Holder method of pasteurization” used by breastmilk banks is just as damaging as conventional pasteurization at dairy plants.
Yes, the Holder method is not as high (62.5ºC/144.5ºF) as flash pasteurization (71ºC/160ºF or higher), but all the enzymes and probiotics are still destroyed at 48ºC/118ºF, so don’t buy that line frequently spouted by donor bank advocates.
I give my opinion on this topic with one caveat.
If I could have found a few Moms that I knew who were eating a Real Food diet, I definitely would have accepted their breastmilk donations for my child if necessary.
But, from a donor milk bank, this information is 100% unknown. And, with Real Food Moms in the minority, using donor milk is just not worth the risk.
What about you? Would you have chosen homemade formula or a donor breastmilk bank? Why or why not?
Milk banks are not the answer. Societal change is. Mothers need to be encouraged to breastfeed, but this won’t happen unless the MEDICAL system decides that breastmilk is truly better than breastmilk. There is so much misinformation out there. I got crappy advice from the lactation consultants at the hospital, even. A friend of my sister’s had preemie twins by c-section and was then told that she wouldn’t be able to produce enough for them! Now she has preemie twins and PPD.
I offered my stored milk to 2 local friends who were having problems nursing. (After offering advice and help). Both of them turned it down- canned formula is so much more societally acceptable than someone else’s pumped milk, after all. I ended up donating it to milkshare, and I would do that again.
If I was not able to nurse, I would search for a donor who was eating a reasonably healthy diet before I would make a homemade formula. I would do a homemade formula over pasteurized donor milk, but I think that even if the mom wasn’t “living” a WAPF diet, I would prefer her milk over the milk of another species. Some of the ingredients could be added to breastmilk the same that they are added to the formula, after all.
How interesting. I always wondered why my friends’ frozen milk was white and mine was yellow. They even commented about it! I wondered if I was doing something wrong with my diet. Now I know! 🙂 I know even more about eating real food now, so hopefully the next babe will have even more benefits.
On an unrelated topic. We do NFP, and I’m wondering if you have any thoughts/experience with the Shettles method, or changing your body PH with diet for a desired gender. A friend of mine tried it and it didn’t work.
Hi KatB, I did not use the body PH thing but I did use the method where relations are timed to when ovulation occurs (the closer to ovulation the more likely a boy . the further away more likely a girl).
It worked for us! 🙂
Sarah, I also wanted to mention that after receiving milk from over twelve donors, I can say that sometimes the color and amount of the cream in the milk is not indicative of the mother’s diet. One friend of mine that eats an amazing NT diet produced thinner looking milk, and her baby is slim (tho this wasn’t the case with another NT friend that produced thicker milk). Another friend is a vegetarian (with a lousy low-fat diet at that) and made beige-ish thick milk with lots of cream; her daughter was one of the chunkiest babies I’ve ever seen. I also received super high-fat milk from a donor who ate an average diet. So it just varies.
This is a very interesting topic with tons of comments! Wow!!! I have a friend who ate a horrible diet during her pregnancy and still eats a pretty bad diet. I don’t think I would want her milk or if I got it, I would supplement with my own homemade baby food. I have other friends with better diets, and I would use their milk, but I’d still make my own formula. Diet is so important.
Thanks for this blog. It’s very interesting!!!
you may not be aware, but there is a way to get human milk without it being pasteurized and know what the donor mother is eating. You can go to facebook and find a human milk for human babies chapter in your area. If you need human milk you can post that you have a need and if someone offers you her milk you can interview her regarding her lifestyle and eating habits before you accept her milk.
First of all, banked donor milk costs approximately $100/day to feed a newborn infant. This is not a practical solution for most mothers who simply cannot nurse their babies for whatever reason. Banked donor milk is used almost exclusively in this country for preemies on a short term basis and there has been study after study conducted showing that this ‘inferior quality’ banked milk not only keeps preemies alive who otherwise die, but their IQ is measurably higher even when they are 5 years old than preemies not given human milk in those initial weeks.
Secondly, unless something has changed, milk cannot be donated from just anyone who feels the urge. As others have mentioned, donations are only accepted from people who aren’t taking medications, have no major health deficiencies or anomalies and whose blood and milk is tested monthly to make sure they are in compliance. I’m not aware that milk in this country is being pasteurized, but I’m really no longer ‘in the know’ on this topic.
As someone else here commented, the number one reason women aren’t able to breastfeed in this country is a lack of information. Furthermore, we’ve been listening to people tell us for over 150 years that ‘inferior’ quality human milk isn’t as good as superior quality substitutions and every kind of testing method we know how to employ today has proven the exact opposite every single time; and that’s using human milk from women who are anywhere from completely malnourished to those our modern society, with all it’s mixed up ideas, considers examples of great health. I’ve never heard of anyone who claims that the nutrition of the mother is inconsequential to the quality of her milk. What I have heard is that even a mother who is literally starving to death produces a higher quality ‘food’ for her infant than the highest quality of substitute known to man. Please keep in mind that when women were first told that human milk substitutes were superior because of their superior quality ingredients, those substitutions didn’t come in a powder form that you added water to. They came in the form of a nice little recipe of what a mother could put together at home…very similar to Sally’s recipe no doubt…and milk producing livestock wasn’t typically fed grain and they lived in the back pasture or the neighbor’s back pasture.
The first thing used as ‘proof’ of human milk substitution’s vast superiority to human milk was the fact that babies gain weight faster on human milk substitutes. This was true 150 years ago and it’s still true today; which means babies on them are typically described as “fat and healthy” looking. 150 years ago, this was because these milk substitutes were largely based on milk from cows and goats. A calf or goat kid is born with a fully developed brain in a very tiny (compared to his parent), fully developed body. Cow and goat milk is designed to build a body…muscle and fat production, in other words.
Newborn human beings are born in what one expert said is what would be considered a pre-gestational stage for most mammals. Our bodies are not only not fully developed (which is why we don’t walk within minutes of birth), but our brains are even less developed than our bodies compared to how they should be for an adult human developed to his/her full potential. Human milk is designed to build a human brain. On human milk, the body develops very slowly compared to how quickly the brain grows (and we’re literally talking brain weight gain/growth here, in addition to other forms of brain development) and puts on a very lean muscle mass rather than the typical chubbiness associated with human milk substitutes which have historically been based on milks that build bodies, not brains. In measuring IQ development of children fed various human milk substitutes and human milk, without the addition of the act of nursing (which also increases intelligence), children on human milk show an average higher IQ regardless of what diet the mother is on or the quality of the milk substitute.
Yes, if I had to choose between two kinds of milk substitutions, then the obvious answer would be that the highest quality of ingredients would be the deciding factor between them, but there is no way in this world that I would feed an infant pasteurized milk of any kind (including human) or non-human milk. Yes, milk shares and wet nurses are the way to go and I would definitely vet my source(s) carefully, but human milk grows brains and I would choose a ‘low’ quality human milk source designed to grow my baby’s brain to it’s fullest potential over any imitation any day.
I should add, I would think that we’d all agree that just because the body looks fat and healthy doesn’t necessarily mean that it really is. 😉
I had a breast reduction during college, back when I thought formula was comparable to breast milk. When I was pregnant with my first child, I desperately wanted to breastfeed and did every preparation to that end. I read Defining Your Own Success (for breastfeeding after breast surgery) by Diana West, ordered tons of herbs, bought an SNS system, rented a hospital-grade pump, and stockpiled donated breast milk from friends. After Sophia was born, even with the help of all these things–I was only able to produce about 8% of her needs. I was devastated and really had to grieve such a major loss.
I fed her at the breast with a Lact-aid system exclusively for six weeks with my own milk, my own pumped milk, and donated milk from trusted friends. While we were out of town, my Lact-aid malfunctioned and I had to use bottles; after that Sophia wouldn’t take the Lact-aid. In some ways, that was a relief because the system was so taxing.
Until she was seven months old, she was able to have at least half donated milk (from friends and strangers off MilkShare.com), and I supplemented with Nature’s Only organic dairy formula, which I’d read was the only formula on the market without the Martek DHASCO and ARASCO additive. I’d heard about the homemade formula, but I just didn’t feel able to do it yet during my really rough postpartum period. But I never felt good about the Nature’s Only, and it constipated her.
Receiving donated milk from Milkshare.com was a great blessing, and I will always be so thankful for those donors contributions to our baby. But it was also stressful not REALLY knowing their history or having complete disclosure of their health. You can ask for blood work, but most donors don’t have it and you hate to inconvenience them when you know they could easily give the milk to someone else. Of course they are feeding their own baby, but it’s just a little risky. Also, a lot of times the donated milk is foremilk and lacks fat.
I started making homemade formula for Sophia at seven months, and she is thriving on it. It takes about 20 minutes to make it each night, but I’ve learned to enjoy it, and I have great peace of mind feeding it to her. Her stools resemble breast-milk stools now, which indicates to me that her gut is handling this formula wonderfully. What a relief!
If we are blessed with another child, I think I will only accept donated breast milk from close friends, and I will supplement with the homemade formula. Of course I will go to hell and back again to give the baby whatever measly amount I’m able to produce, because I know that milk is made specifically for that baby’s needs.
Honestly, reading all these comments is really hard for me, because women get so catty about breastfeeding. I wish people would be more sensitive to those of us who are heartbroken that we cannot provide for our babies and go to great lengths to give them the best we can. Stop reiterating the obvious; we know breast is best already. Sometimes it’s not an option. In addition, by the time Sophia was past 6 months, I felt a little greedy taking donor milk when there were a lot of younger, more fragile babies that needed it more.
Thanks for your article, Sarah.
Milkshare.com ROCKS!!!!!!! Love it and am sooooo grateful to the awesome moms who donated thier milk. There is NO way to express how thankful I am to all the moms who donated to us. My son was adopted and almost exclusively fed donor milk.
I have good quality breastmilk and my babies have thrived on it, doubling their birth weight around ten weeks. A friend is a lactation consultant who works at a donor milk bank and she actually asked me for donor milk for a premie baby that was struggling to survive. She felt this child’s best chance was my milk because of diet and health and she jokingly called “breastCREAM”. But while I did pump for another woman’s baby, I have never gone through the official process of going through the bank. The milk is processed and I believe damaged. It is a difficult question, which milk is more damaged?
I nursed all 4 of my kids until the weaned. I loved this period in my life. I would choose donor milk. Sarah, it is really interesting about baby’s spitting up because I too ate pasteurized dairy.
Did anyone’s breast milk spit up smell?
I would choose the homemade formula for the reasons cited above. However, for a baby in the first few says of life, I would seek donor colostrum. My father-in-law is a hog farmer and he has told me several times that if the baby pigs don’t get colostrum in the first days of life, they die. This made a big impression on me and made me wonder about the true effects on human babies that do not get colostrum. There are lots of studies out there on breastfeeding vs. industrial formula but I wonder about colostrum vs. formula in the first days and if the health issues would be even more pronounced. I also wonder about results using bovine instead of human colostrum, or using both.