Over the earth many animal milks are used--mare's milk, camel's milk, reindeer's milk, ass's milk, goat's milk, cow's milk, etc., serve as human food although, in most parts of the world, the feeding of animal milks to children and infants is not a general practice. In this country cow's milk and goat's milk are about the only kinds used. Despite the many claims made for the superiorly of goat's milk over cow's milk, none of the claims have been substantiated. In my own experience cow's milk has served better in some cases and goat's milk in others. For growth and development animal milks serve better than soy milk and other artificial milks.

Cow's milk, when fed to babies, should be diluted. Equal parts of pure, whole, raw milk, and pure, preferably distilled water, should be given to the young child. Absolutely nothing but water is to be added to the milk. If goat's milk, mare's milk, or ass's milk is used, these same rules and regulations should apply.

Milk for babies should be half-and-half--half water and half milk--up to three months, after which time it may be increased to two-thirds milk and one-third water.

Until the child is six months old, milk feeding should be four to six ounce feedings.

At six months these may be increased to six ounce feedings. At nine months they may be increased to eight ounce feedings. Babies should never be given over eight ounces.

One is likely to get a more uniform standard of milk where the milk comes from a herd of cows, than if it is taken from only one cow. It does not injure a baby to have its milk come from several cows in this way.

Milk should be prepared as it is used and not prepared a day's supply at a time. Bottles and nipples should be thoroughly cleansed each time but the usual fuss over this thing is ridiculous and born of the fear engendered by the germ theory. All of this boiling and sterilizing of bottles, nipples and vessels belongs to the germ fetish. It is a lot of bothersome foolishness that is possessed of neither rhyme nor reason. Mothers patiently carry out such processes day after day and, then, when their over-fed, over-heated, over-excited, over-treated babies develop diarrhea or cholera infantum, they accept the doctor's verdict that the child is suffering because of some want of cleanliness on the part of the mother. She failed to boil the nipple long enough, or something. If these mothers could watch young pigs and see how they scoff at this thing called sterilization they would demand of the doctor's intelligent reasons for their babies illnesses.

Feeding The Milk

"All milk-eating creatures are and should be sucklings," says Dr. Page. Quite right! Milk should never be drunk like water. Nature teaches us how milk should be taken. So long as your child is to have milk, up to five or six years, give it to him or her from a bottle and nipple. This will insure thorough insalivation and prevent the child from gulping it down.

Certified Milk

The present method of keeping cows for producing certified milk, in sunless barns, feeding them dry food and tuberculin testing them at frequent intervals and force feeding them, assures us a milk of poor quality.

Boiled Milk

Attention has previously been called to the fact that when milk is boiled or subjected to prolonged heating its complex carbo-phosphates of calcium and magnesium, salts indispensible to the upbuilding of bone, are precipitated in the form of the quite insoluble salts, calcium-phosphate, magnesium-phosphate and calcium-carbonate. This greatly impairs the physiological usefulness of the salts of the milk.

Defects Of Milk

Barnes, Hume, Hart, Steenbock, Hess, Ellis, Butcher and their collaborators have shown that the amount of vitamin C in cow's milk rises and falls with the season, being highest from May to July when plants are in their most vigorous stages of development, and lowest in winter, the decrease beginning when the hay is ripened. A single pasteurization of milk suffices to rob it of the little C it contains. Berg has pointed out that "it is owing to this scanty supply of C in the milk that bottle-fed infants sometimes become affected with scurvy. Of course the customary practice of diluting cow's milk for the hand-feeding of infants lowers the percentage of C in the food to a dangerous extent, seeing that the C content of cow's milk is already low in many cases."

It should be apparent that if raw cow's milk is fed to infants in diluted form, the vitamins and salts, in which the milk is deficient, must be supplied from some other source. This need is much greater in the case of pasteurized, boiled, condensed and dried or powdered milk; for, these milks are usually diluted, in addition to being heated. The mere addition of demineralized and devitaminized sugar or syrup, and insoluble lime to the milk will not compensate for these deficiencies. It only adds to the deficiencies.

It will be objected that most doctors now give orange juice, or tomato juice, or both. While this is true of many of them, it is alas! also true, that they give these for their vitamins only and, as only small quantities of vitamins are supposed to be needed, these juices are given in quantities too small to make up for the mineral deficiencies. Nor is any effort made to render the protein adequate.

Will it be replied that they feed potatoes and grains as early as possible? I answer: these should not be fed before the end of the second year, because of the absence of the starch-splitting enzymes in the child's digestive juices up to this time. There is barely enough ptyalin in the saliva of an infant to convert the sugar of milk into primary dextrose. Feeding these foods to infants and young children is a most prolific cause of gastro-intestinal disturbances. Not only are the starch-splitting enzymes absent, but even were they present, such foods would not excite the flow of saliva and its ptyalin, for they are habitually fed in the form of mush or gruel--boiled and soaked.

Additions To Milk

Lime water has been added to the milk of infants for several generations, because the doctors ordered it. The lime is not only of no value to the child, due to its crude form, but it is also an irritant as well as a nutritive evil. An excess of lime, even of the organic lime salts, interferes with the mineral balance in the body. This is of particular importance to young babies. Besides these considerations, cow's milk contains three times as much lime as human milk. The giving of lime salts to children produces acidosis.

Bicarbonate of soda added to the milk of an infant is an unjustifiable stab at the baby's digestion. It increases the alkalinity of the milk and calls for greater effort in digestion. It overworks and impairs the gastric glands. It also destroys some of the vitamins of the milk.

Milk with corn starch, or arrow root, or crackers, or rice, or barley water, or cereal water of any kind, or farina, or oatmeal is an abomination. Babies so fed suffer and die from wasting gastrointestinal disorders. These foods set up fermentation, diarrhea, etc.

Sugar should never be added to milk. It tends to produce fermentation and all of the resulting evils. A child may be given all the sugar it needs in fruit juices.

When medical men learned that cow's milk contains about twice as much protein as human milk, they began to dilute cow's milk with water when feeding it to infants. But diluting the proteins also dilutes the carbohydrates of milk, so they add sugar, karo syrup and other sweets to the milk. Diluting the milk fifty per cent, reduces its calcium by this same percentage. Lime water is added to make up the deficiency.

Due in part to its greater abundance in the indispensable amino-acid, tryptophan the protein of mother's milk is superior to cow's milk. The growing child needs fairly large amounts of tryptophan and when the protein supply contains only small quantities of this amino-acid, the growth of the organism runs, to an extent, parallel to the tryptophan content. Although the protein content of human milk is little more than half the protein content of cow's milk, the absolute tryptophan content is considerably more in human than in cow's milk. This partly explains why babies grow more rapidly on their mother's milk than on the milk of the cow. Diluting cow's milk reduces the tryptophan content.

As pointed out in a previous chapter, the amino-acids (lecin, lysin, cystin, tyrosin, tryptophan, etc.) are utilized by the body only in proportion to the amounts of other constituents in the diet, which enable the body to synthesize them into proteins peculiar to man. Every dilution of the salts of the milk, which is not made good from some source, renders the milk less adequate as food.

Cow's milk contains nearly four times as much lime as human milk and only about one-half as much iron. Yet, it is the practice, when diluting cow's milk for infants, to add lime and ignore the iron. Children need more iron than adults just as pregnant and lactating women require proportionately more iron than men. When milk is diluted all of its salts are diluted and not merely its lime.