The Milk Conspiracy

In Malaysia, milk companies, especially formula milk companies are laughing their way to the bank because Malaysian parents are so ‘kiasu’ they must feed their children the most expensive, dha filled, donno what scientific formula types of milk powder. Just walk down the baby food aisle of any hypermarkets, and you’d be confused which brand to get, there are just so many of them out there. Then when babies turn 1, there are formula milk for 1-3 year olds and growing up milk for 1-3 year olds, what is the difference? The nutrition they say, is higher for the formula type.

In truth, formula milk is just a convenient method for parents to load their kids with the supposed needed nutrition, and they can forget about feeding real good solid food. With solids, it is hard to know if there is enough Vitamin A, Calcium, Magnesium, Vitamin C, DHA etc etc, but it’s so easy to just look at the milk package nutrition and be contented that our children will be geniuses because the milk contains 50% DHA.

From young I guess we have been taught the importance of drinking milk, and bombarded with the same message on TV adverts, until it is hard to accept that milk is not all that important for kids, except for babies before 12 months old.

I’ve been totally blessed to be able to exclusively breastfeed my son for the past 14 months, but now milk supply is slowly depleting too, that I too, have been worried about which milk to give him after this. The case is especially worrying for me since my son already have an acquired taste for mother’s milk, and do not like any kind of formula I had tried on him so far. I have a cupboardful for samples I got from every company, and so far, he disliked them all. One sip and that’s it, he will start pushing the cup away.

After reading a lot, most people say that formula and cow’s milk is actually not a necessity, as long the baby is eating enough solids with the right nutrition. I feed my baby a good 3 meals a day, with snacks in between, that consists of at least 2-3 kinds of fruit, cereal, brown rice, lentil, 3-4 kinds of vegetables in various colours, and fish, chicken, liver, egg and pork on alternate days. It seemed like a lot of types of food, yet, many times it still lingers on my thought that he needs milk. Well, at the moment he is still drinking my whole milk, but I am just wondering what happens when it’s no more. It’s not easy to be convinced that milk is really not necessary.

At the moment, I think I’m gonna get those choc flavoured growing up milk and let him try. Hope it works out.