Feeding Babies Part One — Formula Marketing Is Dodgy
Why most claims on baby formula are unsupported or outright false
Note: this is part one. You can find part two, which looks at the claims about the benefits of breastfeeding here.
If there’s one thing that’s contentious online, it’s talking about what we feed infants. There are a group of about five topics that most science writers steer clear of, not because they aren’t interesting, but because if you wade into those waters then no matter how careful you are you’ll likely have people shouting at you for years to come.
But I wrote about vaping, so I thought I might as well look at one of the other topics that makes people furious. And when it comes to formula for babies — specifically, milk formula produced as a breastmilk replacement — there is some really interesting scientific evidence that has recently come out showing that most of the claimed benefits that are promoted by industry are total nonsense.
It turns out that pretty much all of the marketing claims behind formula that you see on the shelves of supermarkets and pharmacies every day are either unsupported…
