Full cream milk for 5mth old!

My baby is 5 mths old and already eating the rice cereal twice a day and still loving his formula, my mother is telling me to start giving him full cream milk and stop with the formula. I wanted to know your thoughts on full cream milk here in HK and if anybody else

is thinking about stopping formula and replacing it at some stage?

the parenting books on weaning, etc that i have read they advise that you can add full fat (not low fat until 3 years according to annabel karmel i think) cow's milk into food that you cook for your baby from 6 months but not to give it as a drink until 1 year....

Milk is ok for cooking but as a drink your bubs still needs all the extra vitamins etc that is in the formula. Remember milk is still their main source of nutrition at this stage and any food is only a supplement!!! 1 year is the recommended age to change to cow's milk. I kept my LO on formula until 14 months.

Not as a drink until 1 year old. Before that, either breastmilk or formula should be given.

I have read the issue with replacing formula/breast milk with cows milk is iron deficiency. The iron in cows milk is not enough for baby.


So it is okay to mix cows milk with food (ask your pediatrician or midwife what month you can start doing this.


But it is not okay to replace breast milk/formula with cows milk before one year.

At one year old, baby should be drinking full fat cows milk. Some books say until 2 years old, others say until 3 years old. So again, ask your pediatrician. After that to low fat.


Advice from doctors has changed over the generations - this is why parents and grandparents say things like 'But I did such and such' - and they are correct, because that decade that was 'the thing to do' but now the medical advice is different.


Again, check with your midwife or doctor for what is best for you.

No matter what the form it takes, whether cooked or creamy or mixed in cereal, you can't change the fact that cows milk is made to meet the nutritional needs of calves, not humans. A baby cow triples its bone growth in the first year of life, so cows milk has a lot of casein and other things that our babies don't need or digest well. In contrast, a baby human triples its brain growth in the first year of life. Human milk contains proteins and enzymes to support optimal brain growth, rather than bone growth. Human milk is the only milk that is ideal for babies, period. With this said, the formula companies have done a very good job with modifying the basic protein, fat, and vitamin structure of cow's milk to make it more digestible and nutritionally appropriate for humans. If you can't feed your baby human milk, please at least feed them formula because it's much better suited for human needs especially during the first year of life. That means for everything, whether cooked or in cereal or whatever! Additionally, direct cow's milk contains proteins that can trigger dairy allergies in a child less than one year old. I can't imagine any pediatrician younger than age 70 who would give you any different advice. Just because our mothers or grandmothers or great grandmothers didn't have modern formula available to them and thus had to resort to cow milk products doesn't mean we should blindly do what they did 30 or 50 years ago!

Full fat cows milk to drink after 1 year, semi skimmed after the age of 2 if you want, but skimmed milk not before the age of 5.