There are so many baby formulas today that it has become extremely difficult to choose the right. In addition, every single company seems to be calling their forumlas “organic” which adds to the complication of understanding what is really natural and good for your baby.
The fastest way is to ignore all of the glossy marketing materials and videos telling you about how great this company is and how much research has gone into the formula – go straight for the ingredients list. I was dumb-founded how difficult it was to search on Google for “XXX formulas ingredients” – the top 10 results just showed glossy marketing materials of partial ingredients list.
After you found the ingredients list, the moment you find these ingredients you should just drop the product immediately:-
(1) Palm Oil or Palm Olein or Pork Olein Oil
Other than the massive environmental impact caused from its harvesting (e.g. deforestation) Palm Oil has been shown to increase blood LDL cholesterol and triglycerides. It is one of the cheaper oils hence it is used in many of these formulas but I would steer clear of it.
(2) Sucrose
Sucrose is sugar and doesn’t feature in breast milk ever. This ingredient is really bad for human beings as it spikes the insulin level of the new born and changes the metabolism. I imagine producers put this in so that new borns would prefer the taste of their formula to competitors as sugar always taste good to kids but you get the kid hooked on sugar at much younger age and permanently alter his/her metabolism
(3) Maltodextrin
Maltodextrin is a highly-processed ingredient, found in a lot of fast foods and other processed foods that releases glucoses when broken down which would cause an insulin-spike in the new born but in addition to that it causes bloating and other gastro-intestinal side-effects. It is a product that should not be found in any products labelled “Organic” because there is nothing organic about this chemical
An Example of baby formula you should definitely avoid:-
This brand called ColosBaby has no English ingredients not on their website nor on any the container either; after mixing it and I tasted the formula it’s so sickly sweet that it would probably cause anyone drinking it to develop type II diabetes. The Vietnamese translation does not explain what sort out vegetable oils are used which is always a worrying sign; assume that Palm Oil is in it and probably worse things even.