When was formula created

As documented in the book Milk: A Local and Global History, 15th-Century French women relied on goats to feed their infants when wet nurses were cast out of favour following a syphilis outbreak. The most common breast milk substitution was pap or panada, watery mixtures with questionable nutritive value. It was a peculiar mixture of things that are liquid, and sometimes had a bit of bread soaked in as well.

For most of history, "they didn't know about germs, so they were not sterilising" the tools used to feed babies, or keeping fresh the liquids used in place of breast milk. It was the relative instability of these hand-feeding methods, along with an explosion of infant deaths accompanying the immigration and employment booms of the industrial revolution, that led physicians to seek a safer way.

These children were hand-fed using unsanitary pap boats or hard-to-clean bottles, and often being fed cows' milk gone bad. Paediatricians, an emerging class of doctors looking to make their mark, pushed for a medically sound method to feed these children. Formula was manufactured as a result. Formula was a godsend," says Barston. In the beginning half of the 20th Century, condensed milk was also a popular choice for western women who did not breastfeed. The advent of sterile bottles in the s, combined with a cultural preference for the new and scientific, led to an increase in formula use.

That produced a major sea change in the health of non-breastfed babies. Now nobody's getting ill. Evolution has had thousands of generations to optimise the recipe for breast milk. And formula doesn't quite match it, especially in the developing world, where clean water and sterilised equipment is not always available.

A series of articles published by the medical journal the Lancet in lists the risks. Formula-fed infants get sick more often than breastfed children, leading to costs for medical treatment, and parents taking time off work. It's thought that nearly half of all diarrhoea episodes and a third of all respiratory infections could be prevented by breastfeeding. That, combined with the risk of using formula in less than ideal circumstances, can even lead to deaths. According to the Lancet's analysis of more than 1, studies , breastfeeding could prevent about , child deaths a year.

Justus von Liebig wanted to save lives. He would be horrified. Of course, in rich countries, contaminated milk and water are far less of a concern. Again, according to the Lancet, there is evidence that breastfed babies grow up with slightly higher IQs - about three points, when you control as best you can for other factors.

What might be the benefit of making a whole generation of children just that little bit more clever? That's several times the value of the global formula market. Consequently, many governments try to promote breastfeeding. But nobody makes a quick profit from that. Selling formula, on the other hand, can be lucrative. The tiny pill which gave birth to an economic revolution.

TV dinners: The hidden cost of the processed food revolution. How Ikea's Billy bookcase took over the world. Grace Hopper's compiler: Computing's hidden hero. Which have you seen more of recently: public service announcements about breastfeeding, or formula ads? Liebig himself never claimed that his Soluble Food for Babies was better than breast milk: he simply said he'd made it as nutritionally similar as possible.

But he quickly inspired imitators who weren't so scrupulous. By the s, adverts for formula routinely portrayed it as state-of-the-art. Meanwhile, paediatricians were starting to notice higher rates of scurvy and rickets among the offspring of mothers whom the advertising swayed. The controversy peaked in , when the campaigning group War on Want published a pamphlet called The Baby Killer about how Nestle marked and sold infant formula in Africa.

Nestle boycotts lasted years. But the WHO code is not hard law, and many campaigners argue that it is still widely flouted. What if there was a way to get the best of all worlds: equal career breaks for mothers and fathers, and breast milk for infants, without the faff of breast pumps?

Perhaps there is - if you don't mind taking market forces to their logical conclusion. In Utah, there's a company called Ambrosia Labs. Its business model? Pay mothers around the world to express breast milk, screen it for quality, and sell it on to American mothers. But that could come down with scale - and maybe formula could be taxed, to fund a breast-milk market subsidy.

Not everyone likes this idea. Indeed, the government in Cambodia, where Ambrosia used to operate, has banned the export of breast milk. Still, more than years after Justus von Liebig sounded the death knell for wet nursing as a profession, perhaps the global supply chain could find a way to bring it back.

Mothers criticise Baby Dove adverts. Do mums really need breastfeeding help from technology? Wet nursing is when a woman breastfeeds another woman's child. Initially these bottles were made of glass. Shortly after, the first rubber nipple was patented. In evaporated milk was developed. The use of evaporated milk allowed food to be transported and stored without spoiling. It was a huge breakthrough for food sterilization and allowed several baby formula brands to emerge. Various new Formula brands emerged before the Infant Formula Act passed in This set minimum and maximum standards for many nutrients in formulas and mandated testing and manufacturing standards.