I am pretty sure its components have changed over the years. Sometimes through more scientific knowledge and sometimes through commercial interest. Personally my view on modern baby formula is that while it may promote growth, it does not promote health.
I would be interested to know what the contents of baby formula was in 1946 when I was a baby as i recall my mother telling me I was not breast fed.
I have a huge cookbook from 1959 called Mary Margaret McBride Encyclopedia Of Cooking. It’s more than a cookbook, it’s a how-to-be-a-homemaker-wife-and-mother manual for the young bride. with a section on “infant and child feeding”. Here’s what it has to say:
By the way, a whole lot of the other advice in here, things like “Despite the fact that great progress has been made in the artificial feeding of infants, there is no doubt whatever that breast-milk is the best food your baby can have,” and “If it is impossible to breast-feed your baby, and you have to feed him by bottle, give him the same attention he would have if he were nursing,” and “It can’t be too often repeated that each child has his own personality and temperament,” really show that the advice HASN’T changed much over the years.
When my grandmother protests that she didn’t breastfeed because “we didn’t know back then it was any better!”…she’s lying. Or perhaps “misremembering” would be a more charitable verb. I have a lot of old cookbooks and old medical texts and old child rearing manuals; it’s something of a hobby of mine. (I’ll look later to see if I have one from 1946; this one is handy, the others are in a box somewhere.) I haven’t found a single one that says formula is superior to or equivalent to breastmilk, from any era.
But by looking only at official books, you might see only part of the picture.
There was for example the Nestle boycott because of the huge problems that Nestle’s aggressive marketing had caused in developing countries .
If your grandmother lived earlier, then at the turn of the century, middle-class people were not breastfed by the mothers, but given cows milk, too. Scroll down a bit in this essay on scurvy to the paragraph
(Note the solution they came up with - onion juice! bleagh, poor kids).
A person in the great-grandfather/ grandfather age range grew up on a moderately rich farm in East Europe at the turn of the 19th century, and developed ricketis because he didn’t drink pure cow milk despite having lots of cows on the farm; presumably because of tuberculosis (he drank heated milk). In the 1950s there was still a big campaign in Bavarian farms to eradicate tuberculosis on milk farms, and those which were certified free got a special badge and more money for their milk. (Today everybody expects milk and cows to be free, so a special badge is no longer necessary).
There is a high risk of scouseness.
Absolutely…which is *why *Nestle is Teh Evil. It wasn’t that no one knew/knows that breastmilk is superior. It’s that formula makers and supporters lie about the equivalency of formula. It’s not ignorance, it’s untruth. It’s willful untruth.
(And, before this thread goes off the rails, as breastfeeding threads always do, let me state that I used formula after exhausting all other methods known to medical science (and a few that aren’t) to increase my milk supply under the care of a certified lactation consultant, and yes, I’m damn glad it’s there to save lives when it’s needed. I’m also glad that insulin is there to save lives when it’s needed, but I’m not about to rip my baby’s pancreas out and give him shots instead.)
Now that Wikipedia is back, a stop there is helpful.
Hey, My sisters and I were fed formula in the 60s and 70s - my mother has encapsulated TB and was therefore absolutly forbidden from breastfeeding (which she still regrets not being allowed to do.)*
So for 1946 I can guess that I was fed with evaporated milk and sugar… or maybe normal pasteurized bottled cow milk with sugar added?
C Like
May God have Mersey on your soul.
Calm down.
Is that associated with pooling of the liver?
And extracathedralitis.
TB doesn’t hang out in the bloodstream when it’s latent , so it’s safe to donate blood even if you have latent TB. (“Encapsulated” is what they used to call it, so by today’s terms, your mom had latent TB; she tested positive, but had no symptoms. Not uncommon, and not a public health risk. I’m in the same boat, and they let me be a nurse.) Red Cross will exclude you for donation for active, symptomatic TB and while you’re on TB treatment.
It’s also safe to breastfeed if you have latent TB or TB that’s been treated for 2 weeks. I will grant you that they may not have known that in the 70’s, but now we do. Cite 1 Cite 2 (sorry, I don’t know how to make that link right to the section in question - scroll down about halfway and you’ll find it.)
But yeah, if the doctor said she shouldn’t breastfeed because of risk of infection, then that’s a perfectly cromulent *medical *reason to use formula in my book. No judgey-judgey. 
So where does it stay then? The lung? I know some diseases stay in the bone marrow, but most I think of as being inside the blood as well as cells.
Lungs, bones, other organs. It forms capsules (hence the old term “encapsulated”) inside body tissues, but isn’t flowing freely inside the bloodstream most of the time. Eventually, these capsules pop open and release TB viruses into the tissues and blood, and that’s when you develop symptoms and we call it “active TB”.
That’s why TB is so freakin’ hard to treat. It’s very difficult to get antibiotics inside those capsules. They’re like TB armor. So it takes 6 months or more of antibiotic therapy to find and eradicate all those capsules as they each rupture.
Even then, we don’t consider you “cured” of TB. There are probably some capsules still hiding out, even though they’re not causing symptoms. You’ll need yearly or biyearly x-rays to make sure you’re not going into the active phase of TB again, and you’ll always test positive to the PPD skin test.
My link says the odds were about 50/50 between evaporated milk formulas and commercial formulas. I don’t know if this was more lopsided for certain income or region or ethnic heritage or whatever. I’m not sure how you should best call it.
Evaporated milk and Karo syrup! Blue label!
And bottles and nipples and the caps (the little round things so you had to turn the nipples upside down inside the bottles for storage) all had to be STERILIZED! Great vats of boiling water in the kitchen when Mommy “made bottles.”
~VOW
According to what my mother said, she did try breastfeeding me in 1937, but got no encouragement from her doctor. My wife breastfed two of our kids for about a year and third until he started drawing blood (at about 9 months) to the constant ridicule of her stepfather (late 60s and early 70s). My DIL’s sister absolutely refused to even consider it. The idea revolted her. She had gone to college in S. Carolina and stayed there, marrying eventually. I wonder if that is where she got that attitude. At any rate, she never got the chance, highly metastasized melanoma was discovered when she was in her fifth month, the baby was induced 3 months later and she died three months after that. So the baby was raised entirely on formula and seems none the worse for it. My DIL herself breastfed until her son lost interest at about age 2.
So there was a complete commercial formula available? At the local grocery store I imagine? The contents of this package is what I would like to know.
IIRC, Similac was the one of the first formulas for sale in the supermarket. It came in a can and was a powder that had to be mixed with water. The stuff was damned near impossible to dissolve, and only a blender could accomplish the task. This was late 'fifties.
~VOW