Hacker News Reader

Comment by PolygonSheep | Hacker News Reader

I'm no expert on infant nutrition but why wouldn't cow milk and/or goat milk be an acceptable substitute? They're both safe for humans to consume, they're widely available at fairly low cost. They provide enough nutrition to get large animals growing.

It may not be scientifically 100% "perfect" but why wouldn't it be "close enough"?

View on HN

Goat's milk was the historical alternative, since it's a close match. We don't have a lot of goats, nor a lot milking of them. But my wife's grandfather was in fact fed on goat's milk when he was young.

Cow's milk is absolutely inappropriate [1]: it has way too much protein for babies and the wrong nutritional profile - even when they start being able to drink it you have to be careful about how much since they're not great at digesting it yet. It's missing all sorts of things - i.e. not enough iron.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4882692/

Look up history of alternatives to breastfeeding. Cow/goat milk has been used as portion of various recipes, and I think cow milk is one of usual inputs in formula making, but it's not enough on its own and could get contaminated etc.

Not to mention other mammals have different micro and macro element needs than humans.

But formula is effectively a safer and more filling endpoint of improvements that started with animal milk and some other foods.

I get that formula is better, and should be the #1 choice but in a formula shortage/emergency situation would most babies be seriously harmed by using goat milk instead?

I suspect the end result would be similar to why me and my two siblings had to be put on formula - malnutrition. Goat milk simply is not going to have all the elements that a human baby needs, so I'd consider it somewhere closer to "last resort" rather than "oh well, not enough formula, let's grab goat milk". Doable, but only because it's emergency.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com