1½ ounces of Milk Sugar
This mixture fills 6 bottles—each to contain 6 ounces. Feed 3 hours apart.
After 9th month:—
Full pasteurized milk, 8 ounces every 4 hours.
When the modified milk can be obtained from a dairy laboratory where it is prepared with scientific care and accuracy, it is better to use it than to depend on home-made preparations, and in many cases a doctor’s prescription may be necessary. Even if the modified cow’s milk is prepared so as to contain apparently the same proportion of the various groups of nutrients as mother’s milk, there may still be some essential difference. For instance, the protein in human milk consists mainly of albumin, while that of cow’s milk is mostly casein. It is often a question whether the individual baby can digest the casein without trouble. A trifle of rennet ferment,—a fraction of a Junket Tablet,—added to the modified cow’s milk just before feeding may be beneficial to overcome that defect. A little limewater also is healthful as it neutralizes any acid that may develop in the mixture. For the particular needs of the individual baby, a competent doctor should be asked to prescribe.
MILK FOR GROWING CHILDREN
When the child is big enough to thrive on undiluted, unmodified cow’s milk, it should not only be allowed, but urged, to continue on a diet in which this, the best of all foods, is the most essential part. An excellent form in which to feed milk to the growing child is junket. Eaten slowly with a spoon as a pudding, it is exposed to the action of digestion much better than milk swallowed by the glassful in a hurry and even if it is cold there is no danger of defective rennet action in the stomach because such action has already taken place.
Doctors still disagree as to the desirability of pasteurizing milk for young children (see “Pasteurization,” Chapter [I]), some holding that the digestibility is affected by the process. The truth is probably that strong pasteurization at a temperature above 157° and holding the heated milk unnecessarily long at such high temperature do change the properties of the milk so as to make it harder to digest, but that the main difficulty is in the change of diet from raw to pasteurized milk or vice versa. Let the child get used to the change by making it gradual, diminishing the amount of one and increasing the amount of the other from day to day in a week, until the change is completed, and there will usually be little if any trouble. The secretions of digestive ferments in the stomach soon adapt themselves to the change in the food. The same holds good in case of other changes, as, for instance, from whole milk to more or less fatless milk, with additions of cereals or other partial substitutes;—it is always advisable to make any change in the child’s diet gradual.