The Care and Feeding of Children 



1003 



food. During this time it may have become contaminated in one of a 

 dozen ways and may finally be unfit for use. Many deaths among babies 

 and little children may be traced directly to the use of unclean milk. 

 Milk not quite fresh, and a little dirty, is a very common cause of a 

 baby's trouble in using cow'srnilk. 



MILK MODIFICATION 



Cow's milk can be so diluted and modified as to make it resemble 

 mother's milk very closely in composition, but no known process of modi- 

 fication can make the two alike in all respects. The two differ not only 

 in composition, but also in other characteristics. The following table will 

 serve to show the external differences between them: 



Cow's milk not only contains more than twice as much protein, but the 

 protein is largely of a kind called casein, which may form a relatively firm 

 curd when it reaches the stomach. This curd is a good developer for the 

 calf's active stomach muscles but it is not so well adapted to the needs of 

 the baby, whose natural food contains but little casein and demands no 

 such effort to digest it. The fat in the cow's milk is in larger particles, or 

 globules, than that in human milk, and it is therefore more difficult to 

 digest. This difference in the two kinds of fat is now believed to be a 

 frequent cause of the child's difficulty in digesting cow's milk. There 

 are just as distinct, though less easily explained, differences in the min- 

 eral content of the two kinds of milk. 



All of the foregoing factors, combined with the possibility of dirty milk, 

 make more difficult the artificial feeding of the baby even with skilfully 

 made modified milk mixtures. They are mentioned here to show that 

 artificial feeding must ever be regarded as unnatural and that the baby 

 thus fed must be treated with double care. 



No matter what method is used in making modified milk mixtures, the 

 underlying principle is the same: that is, to dilute cow's milk so as to 

 reduce the amount of protein present until it is about the same as in 

 mother's milk, and then to increase the food value of the diluted mixture to 



