The secret formula

We're weaning our youngest, an event, or rather series of events, I welcome, for though it now adds feeding duties to my roster it also means I get my wife back.  Well, it's a step in the right direction, anyway.

It also means it's time for research.  I don't recall how deeply we delved into the question of which baby formula to use for FM, but at the time we were living in the Netherlands, and I have a lot more respect for European food safety laws than I do for American ones (we're only just now updating ours--keep your fingers crossed--having apparently been happy to let industry find new ways of poisoning us in the pursuit of profits since the last regulatory clawback in 1938) so I think we probably did without an exhaustive review back then.  And, too, I'm sure whatever we used there we can't get here.  So, GM, what will it be?

[READER ALERT:  The rest of this post is probably pretty boring (but check the photo of The Gid at the bottom regardless) unless you're trying to make the same decision we are.  Even then it's probably pretty boring, but may save you doing even more boring research yourself.  The bottom line is, it's tough to know what you're eating.  It's tough to know what your kid's eating.  It shouldn't be.]

The general points of concern to my mind are:

1. Source of the ingredients:  Obviously not interested in having foreign, and in particular Chinese-supplied, ingredients if avoidable.  (Perhaps not so obvious if you missed the 2008 Chinese milk scandal, and if you did miss it then I recommend staying innocent, it was a particularly nauseating example of its kind.)  FDA review of foreign-sourced ingredients is even more scanty than that of domestically-sourced ones.  As of 2008, all US companies manufacturing baby formula in the US claimed that they were not using Chinese-sourced ingredients.  I don't believe that was true then--none of the ingredients or precursors came from China, when China is the source of XX?--and it is even less likely to be true now.
2. Sugar:  Don't want an unnecessarily sweet formula.  The EU--ahead of the curve again--has banned sucrose as an ingredient in formula due to associations with childhood obesity.  (Only a true cynic would not be surprised to learn that the EU is more activist on this particular point than we are.)  Probably a good idea.
3. DHA & ARA:  These additives, which are in most cases produced using a petroleum-based solvent, are being pushed as the latest booster for infant development.  As best I can tell, the jury is still out, and frankly I'd rather not have GM be on the test line for this:  history shows that these sorts of enthusiasms are not infrequently regretted.
4. Complexity:  Even more than usual I want to be able to understand the ingredients list.
5. Buyer beware:  FDA review in this area is weak, relying as it does on manufacturer-provided "assurances" as to nutritional quality, and mandates no review of manufacturing processes aside from an annual walk-through.  (Having worked in big companies and been on both sides of a variety of audits, I can tell you an annual walk-through is not enough.)
   

Point three eliminates every organic formula except for Baby's Only.  If only it were that simple:  we have a very tempting offer from an insider for half-price Similac.  Given the amount of this stuff GM already consumes this is very tempting indeed.  So it looks like we'll have to compare ingredients after all.  Apologies, but....

Here are the bulk ingredients, Similac vs. Baby's Only:

Organic Nonfat Milk, Organic Maltodextrin, Organic Sugar (Sucrose), Organic High Oleic Sunflower Oil, Organic Soy Oil, Organic Coconut Oil

Organic Brown Rice Syrup, Organic Non-Fat Dry Milk, Organic High Oleic Sunflower Oil, Organic Soybean Oil, Organic Coconut Oil

Note that Similac uses two sweeteners (one of which is the banned sucrose; for more on that see this article), but that Baby's Only's sweetener is listed as its first ingredient:  which is sweeter, or more likely to make GM even fatter than he already is?  Resort to nutritional comparison can only tell us that they are equivalent from caloric and carb points of view.

The rest of the ingredients are, Similac vs. Baby's Only:

Less than 2% of the Following: C. Cohnii Oil^*, M. Alpina Oil^†, Potassium Citrate, Calcium Carbonate, Ascorbic Acid, Soy Lecithin, Ascorbyl Palmitate, Ferrous Sulfate, Sodium Chloride, Choline Chloride, Choline Bitartrate, Taurine, m-Inositol, Magnesium Chloride, Zinc Sulfate, Mixed Tocopherols, d-Alpha-Tocopheryl Acetate, Niacinamide, Calcium Pantothenate, L-Carnitine, Vitamin A Palmitate, Cupric Sulfate, Thiamine Chloride Hydrochloride, Riboflavin, Pyridoxine Hydrochloride, Folic Acid, Manganese Sulfate, Phylloquinone, Biotin, Beta-Carotene, Sodium Selenate, Vitamin D3, Cyanocobalamin, Potassium Iodide, Potassium Hydroxide, and Nucleotides (Cytidine 5’-Monophosphate, Disodium Guanosine 5’-Monophosphate, Disodium Uridine 5’-Monophosphate, Adenosine 5’-Monophosphate).

Calcium Phosphate, Calcium Ascorbate (Vit. C), Organic Soy Lecithin, Calcium Citrate, Choline Bitartrate, Organic Vanilla, Taurine, Ferrous Sulfate, Inositol, Natural Vitamin E Acetate, Zinc Sulfate, Niacinamide, Vitamin A Palmitate, Calcium Pantothenate, Thiamin Hydrochloride (Vit. B1), Copper Sulfate, Riboflavin (Vit. B2), Pyridoxine Hydrochloride (Vit. B6), Folic Acid, Phylloquinone (Vit. K1), Potassium Iodide, Sodium Selenate, Biotin, Vitamin D3, Cyanocobalamin (Vit. B12).

Italicized ingredients are those they share, and even without picking them out it's obvious that Similac has a bunch of stuff Baby's Only does not, which means the latter does better in terms of simplicity.  This is important:  each ingredient offers an opportunity for someone to cut some corners, another chance, in sourcing, in handling, in production, for things to go wrong.

I don't wish to sound paranoid (though I know I do), but given that this will represent the majority of GM's input for the next six months or more, doesn't excessive caution seem about right?

*******

ADDENDUM, @ August 2011:

What I used to do and why I don't do it anymore

It happened again the other day, someone asked what I do for work, which led to an explanation of what I used to do for work, which led to an explanation of why I don't do that anymore.  For those of you who never did understand what I did, or why, and for the blecord generally, here's that story. And for those of you who don't care, I do promise a word or two about what I do for work now in a post soon to follow.  (And if you don't care about that may I invite you to go back to the entry on garages, or ham, or some such?)

I used to work as a consultant on banking compliance projects.  I chose this area because it promised to be complex and therefore interesting, and because projects of this sort were unlikely to be canceled:  the banks were required to do this work.  Unfortunately, they were not required to do it well:  in pre-crisis days, so long as they were doing it with some show of sincerity (i.e., so long as they were throwing a lot of money at the problem) actual progress toward the goal of measuring accurately the risks they faced, actual progress I say, was not necessary. The banks were fantastically profitable and politically powerful, accounting as they did for an undue proportion of employment and prosperity generally. The ability of those charged with "regulating" the banks to punish or even persuade was very limited (shown below, the view from my office window with De Nederlandsche Bank--the Dutch regulator--off in the distance, near the tip of the rainbow, as though it existed in some fantasy world). However, by international agreement, it had been decided that most of the world's more important banks would start measuring their risks in roughly similar ways, and that eventually they would report publicly on those measurements. Hence these projects.

"Measuring the risks," that was the key to the whole thing.  Banks, like casinos, are machines for generating profits.  They do this by borrowing money at a low rate of interest (for example, from the government, or from you in the form of a savings account) and by lending it out again at a higher rate (casinos, of course, just take your money, while making a few falsely suggestive pay-outs). This simple model works so long as two important things hold true: first, the general structure of interest rates must hold relatively steady such that what is "low" stays "low" and what is "high" stays "high," and second, borrowers must pay back what they have borrowed, or most of it anyway.  (There are lots of less important things that need to hold true, too--for example, the bank's employees must not steal all the money--but these two are the real keys.) Everything the bank does involves risk--"interest rate risk" (low is low, high is high), "operational risk" (the bit about employees stealing), and many other kinds--but how a bank manages credit risk (i.e., the risk associated with repayment) is probably the one thing that most clearly differentiates the good banks from the bad.

It was in credit risk that I did most of my work.  It was the most interesting area, to my mind, and it was the most active one, too, because the regulations that require banks to sit on some of their money weight the threat of defaulting counterparties more heavily than any other risk the bank faces.  One effect of this is that some banks have come to view credit risk reduction primarily as a means of reducing the amount of money they are forced to keep on the sidelines.  Credit risk can be controlled by being more selective in your choice of counterparty, by investing in research, by making conservative decisions, by sticking to markets and products with which you have long experience, by being what most people still think of as a "good banker."  But the credit risk figures can be reduced much more easily than that.  They can, in a word, be fiddled.

Fiddling your figures--that is to say editing the numbers you report by inserting adjustments of one sort or another into the stream of calculation--is a very much more efficient means to this end. Not only is it pretty easy to do, but, most important of all, it doesn't require you to change the way you do business.  (Hey hey, don't you get all judgmental here:  if the way you did business was earning you a billion bucks a quarter, you wouldn't want want to change it either!)  And that's what some banks did:  they fiddled their figures, more or less with the collusion of the regulators (OK, now you should get judgmental), while claiming to be improving their calculation systems such that those systems would soon report the "truth," which truth, they claimed, would turn out to be the same as that shown by the "corrected" figures.

Now I'm not saying the banks I worked for did this.  No, no, I'm not saying that.  And even if I were it would be kind of a nonsensical thing to say, because the banks I worked for were enormous multi-faceted organizations that were often internally conflicted and where they weren't were as like as not in a situation where the one hand knew not what the other was doing, so to tell it as if "the" bank behaved in a consciously fraudulent way is just not quite right.

All I'm prepared to say in this forum is that because of the way things were set up--because regulators were weak and banks strong, because everyone was high on the pipe dream of infinite profits, because most of us despite it all still did and do respect and trust financial "institutions"--there was so much of this going on in the world of compliance that if you actually cared about getting these calculation systems to work correctly you would probably feel rather out of place a lot of the time. You would repeatedly find yourself much more concerned about the dysfunctionality of the process of development than were those ultimately responsible for that development.  You would find it increasingly difficult to support the goal of being declared on a sound footing when the steps you witnessed day to day were downright drunken.  You would, much to your surprise and as testament to your immaturity, discover that you were an idealist, and that this was no business for idealists.

Lost in translation

Have you ever lost a little piece of your mind?  Not the whole thing, but a small piece which, being small, is both easily misplaced and difficult to find again?  I have, though not often, as best I can recall.

The first such loss I note was that part responsible for reminding a man to zip it up.  At the risk of inviting unwelcome scrutiny, let me confess that I almost never remember this tiny but socially impactful chore.  I used to, but somewhere in the course of the extended period of concentration required to write my college thesis I misplaced this habit.  That is to say early in the year 1990 I suddenly stopped zipping, and while I cared and still do care as much as the next guy about the state of my fly, that state has not been what it should be on most of the many days since then.

The fly example is, I think, a matter of pushing the machinery too hard and thereby breaking some piece of it--I imagine a fragment of mental metal now resting on the floor of my brain case.  Since returning from the Netherlands I have unfortunately discovered another way to lose mental ability:  in attempting to adapt to an alternate system of thought one can, it seems, bend even flexible neuronal strands too far, whereupon it becomes impossible to force that mental plastic back into its original shape.

Should I have been disturbed, upon my return, to find myself uncertain of whether decimal points or commas apply, or the correct order of street name and number?  All of us, you assure me, have occasionally written the wrong year on a check sometime in January, so no surprise that there should be some lag while Dutch habits wear off.  Unfortunately, I reply, they show no sign of doing so, and here it is, almost a year since I've been back.  What's more, they were never habits, and that's the bit that worries me.

The entire time I lived in the Netherlands I had to take great care to date documents correctly, that is to say with day before month, rather than, as we do here, month before day.  I never got used to it, I always found myself thinking "not-month-day," rather than the more direct and natural "day-month."  What a relief, you might expect, to be back in the land of month-day.  And yet, for me, it now feels like "not-not-month-day."  Same thing with the decimal comma/point and with street addresses too.  As for elevators, I actually found myself so confused the other day that only the presence of a big brass star next to the number "1" saved me from giving up and pressing at random.  (And if the star is to be believed I'm not the only one.)

I suppose it doesn't much matter if I detour occasionally to the first floor on my way to ground, and in a reasonable percentage of cases the intended date is unambiguous despite being reversed, but there are other symptoms and one of them bothers me more than a little.  While in the Netherlands I, perhaps foolishly, learned the language.  One effect of this--and I would be curious to hear if this has happened to others--is that I misplaced part of my English vocabulary.  One of the things I had been looking forward to in returning to an English land was regaining those words, and adding some new ones, too.  I can tell you it hasn't happened.  I'm not saying it won't, I'm just saying it hasn't, and, as I said, it's been a year now.  Nonetheless, I'm glad to be back.

"I Lose," a very short play in one act

Felix:  "Hey mama?"
Felix:  "Hey dada?"
Me:  "Why'd you say 'mama'?"
Felix:  "Don't say 'why'!"
Me:  "OK.  What?"
Felix:  "What?"
Me:  "Yes, what?"
Felix:  "Why did you say 'what'?"
Me: "You said, 'Hey dada.'"
Felix:  "No I didn't, I said 'Hey mama.'"

I lose.

Corn maze

No news, I love corn mazes! Mazes in general, spent a good deal of time as a kid drawing them and such, but corn mazes in particular.  And this weekend I found myself in the maze of a lifetime.  This maze was so large and intricate that a map and an associated coordinate system within the maze itself were required for escape.  And I do mean required:  without it you would likely be lost forever.  Scoffers may check it, below:

One enters at the lower of the two white strips on the left. By coordinate point G20 we were already nervously consulting the map.  We took our first shortcut before "Starbucks Station" (which did not have a Starbucks, by the way).  At Z29 we stopped for a nursing break, a very lucky thing, as before the break we were planning to head off towards the upper right hand of the maze, whereas by the end of the break we'd realized the correct route lay quite in another direction.  This proves that in addition to being an amazing maze on the ground, it was a very good one even just on paper.  Here are the pics:



Miraculously, despite carrying a 20 pound baby and a 2 pound pumpkin, we made it out in less than an hour.  Highly recommended.