INFANT FOODS
Rickets and scurvy have so often followed the prolonged use of the so-called "infant foods" which have flooded the market for the past decade, that intelligent physicians unanimously agree that they are injurious and quite unfit for continued use in the feeding of infants. If they are prescribed to replace milk during an acute illness, or at other times when the fats and proteins should be withheld for a short period, both the physician and the mother should be in the possession of definite and exact knowledge as to just what they do and do not contain. To provide such knowledge, we present the analysis (Holt) of some of the more commonly used infant foods.
1. The Milk Foods. Nestle's Food is perhaps the most widely known. The others closely resembling it in composition are the Anglo-Swiss, the Franco-Swiss, the American-Swiss, and Gerber's Food. These foods are essentially sweetened, condensed milk evaporated to dryness, with the addition of some form of flour which has been dextrinized; they all contain a large proportion of unchanged starch.
2. The Liebig or Malted Foods. Mellin's Food may be taken as a type of the class. Others which resemble it more or less closely are Liebig's, Horlick's Food, Hawley's Food, malted milk, and cereal milk. Mellin's food is composed principally (eighty per cent) of soluble carbohydrates. They are derived from malted wheat and barley flour, and are composed chiefly of a mixture of dextrins, dextrose, and maltose.
3. The Farinaceous Foods. These are Imperial Granum, Ridge's Food, Hubbell's Prepared Wheat, and Robinson's Patent Barley. The first consists of wheat flour previously prepared by baking, by which a small proportion of the starch—from one to six per cent—has been converted into sugar.
In chemical composition these four foods are very similar to each other, consisting mainly of unchanged starch which forms from seventy-five to eighty per cent of their solid constituents.
4. Miscellaneous Foods. Under this head may be mentioned Carnrick's Soluble Food and Eskay's Food.
The composition of the foods mentioned is given in the accompanying table.
| Ingredients | Nestle's Food | Mellin's Food | Eskay's Food | Malted Milk (Horlick's) | Ridge's Food | Imperial Granum | Carnick's Food |
| Per cent | Per cent | Per cent | Per cent | Per cent | Per cent | Per cent | |
| Fat | 5.50 | 0.24 | 1.16 | 8.78 | 1.11 | 1.04 | 7.45 |
| Proteins | 14.34 | 11.50 | 5.82 | 16.35 | 11.81 | 14.00 | 10.25 |
| Cane Sugar | 25.00 | ..... | ..... | ..... | ..... | ..... | ..... |
| Dextrose | ..... | ..... | } 53.46[[1]] | ..... | 0.52 | 0.42 | ..... |
| Lactose (milk sugar) | 6.57 | ..... | } 49.15[[2]] | ..... | ..... | ..... | |
| Maltose | } 27.36 | 60.80 | ..... | ..... | ..... | ..... | |
| Dextrins | 19.20 | 14.35 | 18.80 | 1.28 | 1.38 | ..... | |
| Carbohydrates (soluble) | 58.93 | 80.00 | 67.81 | 67.95 | 1.80 | 1.80 | 27.08 |
| Starch | 15.39 | ..... | 21.21 | ..... | 76.21 | 73.54 | 37.37 |
| Inorganic Salts | 2.03 | 3.59 | 1.30 | 3.86 | 0.49 | 0.39 | 4.42 |
| Water | 3.81 | 4.73 | 2.70 | 3.06 | 8.58 | 9.23 | 3.42 |
[1] Chiefly Lactose. [2] Largely Maltose.
CHAPTER XX
BABY'S BATH AND TOILET
From earliest girlhood, women have loved their dolls, and one of the greatest joys connected with the adored experience was the make-believe bath and the dressing of the make-believe baby; so now, when we are the happy possessors of real live dolls, we should go about the task with the same lightheartedness of a score of years ago when we hugged, kissed, bathed, and dressed our dolls. There is one big advantage now, the doll won't break; but, we sigh as we stop to think, we can't stick pins into it as we all did into the sawdust bodies of our dolls those years and years ago.