eli5: why isn’t formula milk just formulated to be better than breastmilk?
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Nutritionally, formula is just as good as breast milk. That’s pretty straightforward when it comes to fats, sugars, vitamins, etc.
The main advantage of breastmilk is that it can pass antibodies and other immune system components from mother to baby to help reinforce the baby’s immune system while it’s still very young. That’s chemically much more complex, and not really feasible to replicate in formula.
Overall though, formula is totally fine if that’s the best option for mom and baby.
Breastmilk is naturally formed to be what each individual baby needs to have at that time. Formula cannot replicate that. It can replicate a “close enough” catch all for what babies overall will need, but breastmilk is different from each individual.
Because it cannot react in real time; breastmilk changes not only with the baby’s development (because you could just buy different types for different ages, as you can diapers, it actually changes over very short timespans to adapt to baby’s needs: mom is ill and baby is in contact with pathogens? Boom, tailored antibodies in breast mill. Baby is losing appetite? Boom, more calorically dense milk. Hot? Boom, more watery breastmilk. Not to mention you can’t possibly recreate, let alone improve on all the effects of the act nursing from jaw development, to emotional connection to skin to skin contact etc.
We can’t do that.
There’s too many different nutrients in breast milk that we can make and mix together to make a replacement. Some of the materials are not stable or prone to spoiling, so all the ingredients would need to be freshly made. To a certain extent, the milk also adjusts to the babiy’s needs, changing the amount of water in it, adding antibodies, etc. There’s no practical way to do that.
Part of it is that breast milk is attuned to a baby’s needs, i.e. if the baby is sick the body starts to produce and include antibodies in the breast milk. As the baby ages, the composition of the milk changes, more sugar or more fat or more protein, as needed.q
Bc how would you add antibodies that change depending on babys needs and illnesses to formula? What would it cost to add stem cells, probiotics, living cells, hormones? Changes of content according to how much the baby is able to consume (fats, carbohydrates, proteins)? It’s thousands of years of evolution what has resulted in what breastmilk contains, and making anything that even resembles it would be super costly and not really possible.
With that said, not everyone can and want to breastfeed. In my country it’s pretty normalised and encouraged top breastfeed, and WHO recommends to two years old or older. But not everyone can and want to do it. That’s perfectly fine. Fed is best. Having others nurse your baby was normal years ago. Especially by rich people, where the mother couldn’t or wouldn’t breastfeed. It’s just not possible to make formula that adapts to what the baby needs.
Because breast milk is really, really complicated. Evolution has a head start of multiple million years at generating the best fuel for infants, and currently our best bet when developing formula milk is to make it as similar to breast milk as possible. However, a number of features cannot be realisticly replicated with our current technology.
For one thing, the milk that is secreted when the infant begins to feed is different from the milk secreted in the end. In the beginning the milk is high in sugar to make the child eat more. At the end of the feeding session, the milk is high in fat to make the child feel sated and stop eating.
Another thing is, scientists continue to discover a vast number of compounds in breast milk, many of which are so unstable they will break down into something else if you put them on storage in a formula mix. Some of these are antibodies that help the child’s immune system repel illnesses, or probiotics that help develop a bacterial flora in the child’s gut that is crucial for the child’s future health. And many, many more compounds are found that have a so far unknown purpose (but you can bet they are good for something!)
Having a formulated milk be better than breast milk would require you to synthesize it on the spot, tailored to your child’s needs at that moment. I’m not saying it is impossible, but we are talking decades or even centuries of technological development before this is realistic
If you are able to breast-feed your child, I highly recommend doing so. Formula milk is serviceable but inferior to the real deal
All these points are really well made and articulated better than I could. But I would like to add one thing:
So many people these days think we can do almost anything with the technology we have now. It’s just not true. There’s so much more learning we feeble humans need to do to figure out the world. So many biochemical processes are still being figured out (not to mention nuclear science, quantum mechanics, A.I… Etc…)
Millions of years of evolution “figured out” the ideal milk for that species through generations upon generations upon generations of trial and error. I bet it will be thousands of years before we can even make a super expensive form of formula that is truly better than mothers’ breast milk. Nature takes its time and learns from millions of years of mistakes at a rate of millions of mistakes each of those years. We’re so far from so many things, and there’s so many people who think we’ve got it all figured out already.
There was an extensive survey done in the year 1900 where the general consensus was that human kind pretty much learned everything that we could already. And I don’t have to tell you how much innovation and new technologies and even completely new branches of science have been discovered since then…
*edit* Sorry for the formatting, I’m on mobile, and it got all janky and Idk how to fix it right now*
You can’t just manufacture antibodies or things that are generated to work specifically best for your DNA. Breast milk has stuff like that in it. It’s not just like a shake you get at GNC.
This question really isn’t specific to breastmilk, but most of the foods we eat are grown through biological processes and not synthesized in a lab. We simply have not gotten to a point where we can manufacture sustenance that is just as healthy, tasty and cost-effective.
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