I got a message in my inbox a couple days ago highlighting a recent controversy in infant formula. Now infant formula is controversial enough to begin with, so some sort of brouhaha is certainly nothing new. But this one struck me as, if not sinister, certainly a little troubling. Evidently a particular market-leading brand of organic infant formula is being sweetened with sucrose as opposed to the lactose used in other brands of infant formula. Since sucrose tastes more sweet than lactose, this gives the sucrose-sweetened formula a sweetness equivalent to “grape juice or Country Time lemonade” as opposed to the “unsweetened apple juice” of other brands. Maybe this substitution is a simple cost-cutting measure instead of a concerted attempt to sway a baby’s formula taste preference - maybe. In either case, sucrose is also less preferable to lactose because it might cause more rapid tooth decay. We cannot be sure at this point if, by feeding our babies sucrose-sweetened formula instead of lactose-sweetened, we are giving them an early sweet tooth that has the potential to lead to nutritional ramifications down the road (obesity, diabetes, etc.), but at the least it sounds like a bad idea. Consumers and physicians, take heed.

Photo by Wendy Harman