The Food Crisis and Breastfeeding...saving the world with our milk...

First of all, I want to apologize to my readers for the serious disorganization of my blog lately; I've been going off on a million tangents and I know that must make for a frustrating read sometimes. Also, I often don't research anything I write about, so I've had some misleading or inaccurate information which other readers have been kind enough to point out. So I've been inspired to do some serious research...the breastfeeding debate has prompted me to wonder a few things...such as, is it easy to find the carbon footprint of the average jar of baby formula? Can you find out whether the soy beans used in the formula are GMO (genetically modified organisms?) How many heavy metals are in in the average jar of formula? Which is higher, the toxic load in breast milk or the toxic load in formula? How many soy beans does the average jar of formula contain? What percent of our population is actually allergic to soy beans?

So my goal for the next week is to write about these things: I want to explore the world of formula in depth and see what is easily accessible information and which is not. I might e-mail my friend Lauren who just did an enormous project on formula for International Midwifery class and get some information from her. But today, some interesting information I came across is an article on Grist which suggests that many of the most popular brands of formula are indeed manufactured using GMOs, which is enough to frighten me into being an even more stance believer in breast milk...I mean, we know little to nothing about GMOs so far, so giving genetically modified soy beans to your infant is like helping conduct a giant experiment inside the bodies of millions of babies. Here is a link to the article: http://www.grist.org/advice/possessions/2000/04/21/possessions-genetic/

So the formulas which Grist lists as containing GMO foods? These include:
Enfamil ProSobee Soy Formula
Similac Isomil Soy Formula
Nestle Carnation Alsoy

These are large, popular formulas which dominate the market at least here in the US. It seems frightening to me that first, none of the formulas that Grist found GMO soy beans in where labeled as such, and second, that the information is pretty readily available, and yet, people keep buying these products. We know that GMOs are not sufficiently tested (to test sufficiently, you have to feed these products to an organism for at least twenty to thirty years, to see if cancer increases, and so far, these products haven't been around for that long, so we have know way of knowing what we are doing to ourselves.) This is frightening, and for me, is more then enough information alone for me to breastfeed and support other mothers in breastfeeding. However, there is a lot more information to come.

Fight GMOs...feed your infant breast milk!

Love ya,
Carrot