Infant Formula Preparation, Handling, and Related Practices in the United States
Section snippets
Methods
We analyzed data from the US Food and Drug Administration's Infant Feeding Practices Study (IFPS), an unpublished longitudinal survey of mother-infant pairs.1 Mothers were a subsample of a national mail panel of about 500,000 households. Panel members were screened for pregnancy, and the 3,155 women who were listed as being in their third trimester of pregnancy were asked to participate. Data were collected between February 1993 and October 1994. Respondents were considered ineligible if they
Age of Infant When Formula Was Introduced and Health Care Professional Instruction on Formula Use
The majority of mothers in the total sample (89%) reported using infant formula at some point in their infant's first year. Mothers who used formula typically began before the infant was 2 months old; only 21% of mothers started formula after the second month (data not shown). Twenty-one percent of mothers of 2-month-old infants, increasing to 35% of mothers of 7-month-old infants, received instruction from a health care professional about formula preparation.
Formula Purchase and Label Reading
Infant formula is available in 3
Discussion
Published prevalence estimates from previous surveys are available for 4 of the 10 practices examined. Our findings are consistent with this research, which found that very few mothers intentionally overconcentrate formula (53), a large percentage heat bottles in a microwave oven (54), and a substantial percentage feed cereal to young infants (13), (42), (46), (47), (48), (49), (55), (56), (57). With the exception of a 1978 study (55) that examined the relation between breast-feeding and age of
Applications
■Dietitians should provide information on proper preparation and handling of infant formula to all mothers and caregivers, even those who have cared for other infants. Our results show that although 68% of mothers feed formula to infants by age 2 months, only 21% have received instruction by a health care professional on formula preparation by that time. Because almost all mothers feed infant formula in the first year and most begin before the infant is 2 months old, information about formula
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Formulation guidelines for infant formula
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