Bisphenol-A and the Formula Industry
It is fairly well-known that plastic baby bottles expose infants to bisphenol-A–a chemical found in plastic which can have hormone-disrupting and carcinogenic effects in the body. Indeed, I’ve blogged about the connection between BPA and baby bottles before. What many parents do not realize is that bisphenol-A is also found in infant formula containers like cans for powdered formula and plastic bottles for liquid formulas.
What’s the Problem with Bisphenol-A
BPA is a chemical compound found in plastic. It is also an endocrine disruptor and carcinogen. Recent studies on BPA indicate that it is associated with proliferation of prostate cancer in men and breast cancer in women. It has also been linked with the development of metabolic syndrome.
It doesn’t stop there. The problem with BPA can continue for generations as exposure to BPA in a mother can negatively affect the eggs and overall fertility of her daughter. Additionally, fetal and neonatal exposure to BPA are linked with breast cancer.
It is nasty stuff.
But the Exposure is So Little!
The FDA and the infant formula council (lobbyists for the infant formula industry) claim that BPA exposure from infant formula isn’t high enough to cause any problems. That begs the question, “Do you want any exposure to a known human carcinogen and endocrine disruptor?”
Despite what the FDA claims, an evaluation by the Environmental Working Group found that 1 out of every 16 infants fed liquid formula would be exposed harmful levels of BPA. Additionally, one must examine the compound levels of BPA caused by plastic baby bottles or further lifetime exposure to the chemical.
So what’s to be done?
First and foremost, you should breastfeed your children. Breastfeed your babies until they’re able to start solid foods after 6 months and continue to breastfeed them without infant formula supplementation until they’re at least two years old, and, preferably, until they wean themselves after 2.
But I can’t breastfeed.
It is highly unlikely that you cannot breastfeed. 98% of women are able to breastfeed exclusively, those that are not physically able to breastfeed exclusively can choose milk sharing programs or look for donor milk.
If you want to and intend to breastfeed your baby, do not practice behaviors that would endanger your nursing relationship. These behaviors include medicalized birth, routine infant circumcision, infant formula supplementation, exclusive pumping without necessity, sleep training, pacifiers, early introduction of solids and not bringing your baby to your breast often enough.
It’s time to own up to our responsibilities as parents, and give our children the best start possible and that start includes avoiding exposure to toxic chemicals like BPA when we can.
December 5th, 2007 at 4:11 pm
And your answer to I just adopted my child at a month old, she has been exclusively bottle-fed since she was born and became a ward of the state because her mom left her at the hospital and I need to feed her is? (Situation of our good friends.)
And do you know how difficult it is to find enough women - with babies who are the same age - whom you trust absolutely implicitly - who are willing to pump for you frequently enough so that you have adequate milk for your baby on hand, every day?
Banked milk not only costs a small fortune, it is pasteurized. Milk sharing - great if you’ve got it and if you’re happy feeding your baby milk that has been sitting in a freezer for a while since it’s hopefully quarantined to verify that the donor doesn’t have hepatitis or HIV. It’s a body fluid, not a veggie from someone else’s garden. And a lot of places don’t have milk sharing.
Bless my good friend Anna whose baby was born about 3 weeks before mine, who gave me all of her frozen milk for my son’s first 3 months. After his miserable birth, my breasts failing to work were the nail in my coffin of PPD. But when her milk supply evened out, she grew weary of pumping 4 times a day for me, and since I was pumping after each feeding trying to get my milk supply up, I could definitely see her point. Mothers of babies have things to do other than sit and try to coax every last drop of milk out of our bodies, by machine, no less.
My son just self-weaned at the age of 3. Yes, even through the low milk supply I fought the good fight and nursed him with a supplementer. I got thrush from using my friend’s milk in it. Talk about a bosom buddy.
I am not going to beat myself up any more for feeding him organic formula for his 9 months of his life. The guilt I experienced at the time - feeling like I had failed him because I couldn’t provide him with the food he deserved - was enough to last me through this life and into the next.
December 5th, 2007 at 11:23 pm
And where praytell are these cans made? Please do not tell me ii’s that horrible place in Asia!
December 6th, 2007 at 7:04 am
I will agree that breast is best, but there are times when it isn’t possible. And to make parents feel guilty in the way you have written your post does bother me. I had a pre-term infant, even though I pumped, I was very young and wasn’t taught how to use the pump correctly. There was no way I would have been able to get another mother to donate milk, we don’t live in an area that has too many people like that. And the hospital would have said no. I did the best I could and he was fed through a tube until his death, 1 month later. As for medical births, all of my 3 living children would have died if I hadn’t sought out help. As for circumsizions, people do still practice it out of religous ritual.
December 6th, 2007 at 8:43 am
I detect no guilt inducing language in this article. If one is feeling guilty perhaps one has personal demons that have not been dealt with appropriately.
As for defending circumcision as a traditional religious practice one need only research that cannibalism and virgin sacrifice have been a historical part of various religious rituals. They have finally become (more or less) obsolete due to the triumph of medicine and reason. Male genital mutilation is every bit as barbaric as cannibalism or virgin sacrifice. It is pointless and superstitious. The tribe of Abraham has produced many beautiful contributions to humanity in the form of knowledge and tradition. Circumcision is not among that list.
December 6th, 2007 at 3:50 pm
One rarely detects guilt-inducing language when one is on the greener side of the fence. It’s very easy to say what someone should do when you’re not in their shoes, struggling to figure out how to do right by the one person who depends on you the very most.
I have been exorcizing demons for over 2 years now. Each time I strapped on that supplementer, I was battling the feeling that I had failed my son. I nursed on demand. Can you imagine doing that for a full year, that many times a day - and night? Can you imagine having to hang a bottle around your neck full of either someone else’s milk or artificial milk and pop it into your son’s mouth along with your nipple - EVERY TIME YOU NURSED HIM - so that he didn’t starve?! Please, just pause for a moment and think about the magnitude of that. When you believe that breastfeeding is a child’s right and really the best (and optimally the only) way to feed a baby, it is a heartbreaking thing to have to do.
It has been a long road for me and I, too, consider myself a lactivist. Still, I squelch that urge every time I see someone shaking up a bottle of formula for their baby to go up to them and say “why aren’t you breastfeeding that child?” - because there are many more reasons than I could EVER think of for why she’s not breastfeeding that child, and, whether I approve or disapprove, she has to walk her own parenting path and deserves to do so without me judging her.
Jenny, are YOU going to weigh in on this?
December 6th, 2007 at 6:20 pm
I am a lactivist as well and have no demons regarding formula– it has never touched DS’s lips and he was EBF until 6 months and barely had any solids until 8.5 months. I work full-time and pump daily. Yet, I do see how this post could generate feelings of guilt and blame.
It really isn’t as easy to say you should breastfeed. Breastfeeding is hard. There isn’t a lot of support for it or how to do it. On top of that, formula companies use every chance they can get to lower women’s supplies to set them up for failure. Most doctors are complicit with doing so. Sure, highly educated women with their own offices or luxury/desire to stay at home or bring babies to work and the knowledge of how to find knowledge and enough money to easily buy the best pump may be able to make that choice.
But if you ask most women who FF why they didn’t, they will generally tell you something that shows they didn’t have the information to be able to succeed at breast-feeding. They didn’t know breast-feeding was going to be difficult so they didn’t find out about it in advance. They never met anyone who breast-fed before. They didn’t know that the baby seems like it’s hungry when (s)he is building up supply, so they supplemented and eventually ran out. They had no place to pump at work, or the pump wasn’t good enough. They never learned how to latch correctly so after months of bloody breasts they finally gave up. The LLL wasn’t helpful or the LC at the hospital told them to supplement or the medical staff was concerned about weight loss/gain based on the ff charts and suggested supplementation.
What is truly needed is a better more helpful culture that teaches women how breastfeeding works, doesn’t load them up with free formula, and makes it easy to get milk on the job. More people would breastfeed if they knew they would have to obtain information and knew where to get it and had support both before and after the birth. These are goals that we can work towards as a society and I think would have a greater effect on bfing numbers than guilt and blame.
December 7th, 2007 at 7:16 am
I really wish it was more normal to milk share. I’m guilty of not offering when a baby was born (hubby’s co-worker’s son) the same time as ours, and they had trouble breastfeeding. In hind sight I wish I had, and now I offer to pump for people all the time, and just chance that they will look at me like I’m a nut case.
Home-made infant formula is a good alternative. I was adopted at birth, and was fed canned formula, it’s not the end of the world. But there are better options out there, and I hope to do a little better at educating the masses rather than letting the formula companies do the brain washing, er, educating for me.
December 8th, 2007 at 9:12 am
I stand by what I wrote in reference to what puts your breastfeeding relationship at risk–it’s all true and well-documented. I also stand by the fact that 98% of women are physically capable of exclusive breastfeeding and that anything besides human milk is an inferior substitute.
Nevertheless, I agree that breastfeeding is hard. As natural as it is, it doesn’t come naturally to most women.
I also wish that milk sharing were more prevalent. Milk banking is incredibly important as well. Sure the milk may be pasteurized, but pasteurized breastmilk is still better than pasteurized, oxidized cow milk that has been mixed with other chemicals often including lye and caustic soda.
The cost of milk banking is high–approximately
$3.50 an ounce at the bank I donated gallons and gallons and gallons to. Nevertheless, the cost shouldn’t be the primary issue as no one is ever turned away from a nonprofit milk bank for lack of ability to pay.
It’s a long hard road for any mother to travel. We all of us have our own stories of hardship, whether it’s low supply issues, having to pump, dealing with mastitis, thrush and other nasties. Nevertheless, it’s a road worth traveling despite its hardships.
Still, none of that changes the fact that infant formula is inferior to breastmilk and is associated with disease and illness. If only the mothers who actually experienced a physical problem that necessitated the use of formula used it, we’d be in better shape but that is hardly the case.
I think it’s unfortunate so many women deal with guilt–feeling that they have failed they’re children when in reality they have been failed by the system. The system of doctors and nurses who provide little support. The system that pushes formula on mothers who intend to breastfeed. And the system that shuns mothers nursing their babies in public.
Still, if you’ve done everything you can do you and you’re still struggling you should consider yourself a success. There’s nothing to feel guilty about when you’ve done everything you can do.
December 8th, 2007 at 9:14 am
I agree with Cara too, in that homemade formula–preferably with a raw cow milk base–is an often overlooked alternative when mothers milk isn’t adequate and human donors are difficult to find.
December 18th, 2007 at 3:05 pm
I’d prefer raw goat, goat milk is closer to human milk than cow.
April 9th, 2008 at 5:56 am
I had my stomach lap banded in the year 2000 here in australia and 2 years later had my middle son who is now 14 months old. My milk supply was very low due to the small amount of food I can handle in a day, I tried all the tablets and i still couldnt get enough to satify my son and he lost weight so we had to suppliment him…. at 4 months he weaned him self and would scream the house down if i even tried breast feeding….
I now have a 3 month old who was born 7 weeks early weighing 4.4 pounds he spent allot of time in hospital and I spent every day there breast feeding and then pumping when I was home but i could only get less than 30ml a time again they put me on tablets which helped a little my milk went up to 50ml but once the tablets ran out my milk soon went back bad. I have seen a breastfeeding nurse who admitted that there is a problem with me breastfeeding due to the surgery. I still try but its very hard and you feel so defeated when you cant keep up with the supply even when you try pumping every 2 to 4 hours and get only a small ammount….
I feel no guilt at having to give my son formula I would feel more if he was just breast fed and loosing weight due to my lap band. So i hope you can understand somtimes there is a reason some people cannot breast feed, its very hard to learn and it doesnt come naturally and if you cant keep up with supply then I know how it feels.
April 9th, 2008 at 7:35 am
Lisa -
Thank you for sharing your story.
I’m curious about the low supply you experienced. There’s a considerable amount of factors that can contribute to low supply–many of them, though not all, are behaviors like supplementing, not bringing the baby to the breast often enough etc.
I have little doubt that the surgery, and minimal amount of food you ingested, could have contributed to supply issues. It is, of course, vital for mothers to eat high-quality food and plenty of calories to maximize the output of their milk, but it is not completely necessary as most mothers even under famine-like conditions can breastfeed successfully.
4-month olds do not wean themselves; rather, they can experience nipple confusion and can refuse the breast in favor of the bottle. That is not the same thing as self-weaning which usually occurs no earlier than 2.5 years of age.
I agree with you that breastfeeding is hard and that it does not come naturally. That just furthers the importance of mothers seeking counsel and advice about breastfeeding before birth of their babies.
August 1st, 2008 at 11:03 pm
BPA is a pervasive and universal chemical, in fact about two billion pounds are manufactured in the USA each year, add to that the amount made in other countries and you have a nightmarish situation, its every where - almost; the best alternative to reducing exposure to newborns and babies - since it is almost impossible to escape exposure to the chemical - is through breast feeding. I join in encouraging the practice.