THE FEEDING OF INFANTS.

Timaru Herald, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 12907, 22 February 1906, Page 3

THE FEEDING OF INFANTS.

A STRIKING CASE

In the course of a lecture at Mornington last Friday, Dr Truby King cited several interesting cases illustrative of infant malnutrition. One case referred to was that of a perfectly healthy and welldeveloped child which weighed nearly 101b at birth. Eleven weeks later the infant came under Dr King's notice, and on being weighed was found to be actually lslb lighter than it was when born, notwithstanding the fact that the child had been fed on some of the best of the so-called "infant foods." As may be expected, such a glaring instance of malnutrition, as expounded in Dr King's masterly style, created a profound impression upon "his audience, and .they were visibly relieved to hear that under proper diet the child had recovered from the. emacination caused bv lmproper feeding. The lecturer stated that there was only one food' ordained by nature for the nutrition of infants, and that was an animal, and not a vegetable product. That fcod was supplied bv the mother m an ideal form, but when this could j not be obtained it was necessarv to substitute a food which most clcsel'v approximated to thh constituent, parts of the ideal iood, and science and practice had demonstrated that this could be best secured on the line adopted for the instruction of his hearers. Further, be laid great stress on the fact that the tr.od cf one mammal might be quite unsuitable for the nutrition of another, and that there could be no greater mistake than the common idea that unmodified cows' milk bore any close resemblance to human milk. On the contrary, he showed that ordinary milk contains three times the percentage of fleshrormmg material than an infant can make use of for the building of its tissues, and that the getting rid of the extra two-thirds, if it. were digested, involved a strain on cne immature and developing kidneys that was utterly unjustifiable and a "fruitful source of immediate and future disabilities, -the perfect prescription of Nature could not be improved upon by man—could only be approached by making use of the nearest natural products. The reason wincows milk contains three times the proportion oi flesh-forming material present in numan milk is the simple fact that the average calf is designed to grow three times as quickly as the average infant. In six months a calf grows to six times its weight at birth, an infant only doubles its weight in the same time. Not onlv is the percentage of building material'contained in cows milk entirely wrong for infants, but its quality is equally out of place, being mostly present in the form of comparatively indigestible curd instead of a delicate, soluble albumen. The essential purpose of the use of rennet was to eliminate the curd and thus what is called "humanise" the milk and bring it as near as possible, both in percentage and qaulity, to, Nature's own food for infants. Mere dilution might cause cows' milk to be tolerated, but-other-wise did not improve it in either -direction, since the proportion and natures i.f the solid constituents remained unchanged. Further dilution tended to do harm bv dilating the stomach. This must be the case, because human milk was practically as rich in solids as cows' milk. The vse of cane sugar for the purpose of bringing the saccharine constituent up to the proper percentage was condemned on the ground that this purely vegetable substance readily undergoes fermentation in the alimentary canal of the child, which is not the case with milk-sugar. The use of cane sugar was a common factor of infantile indigestion and diarrhoea.—("Otago Daily Times.")