What's best for my eight-month-old baby - infant formula or cow's milk?
I've recently weaned my eight-month-old baby and I've been giving her cows' milk to drink as I know it's nutritious. Is it OK for her to drink a lot of this kind of milk now?
When a baby is no longer receiving breast milk, a type of milk that's as similar as possible to breast milk is needed; infant formula is the best option, as it contains a good balance of additional vitamins and minerals including iron and is very much better than cows' milk.
Cows' milk contains very little iron and our previous research showed that a quarter of babies fed cows' milk as their main drink at eight months of age were anaemic. Babies with anaemia can be slow developers.
Once your baby's eating three meals a day, she should naturally reduce the amount of milk she drinks to less than 600ml per day, with additional fluid from water. Stay clear of cows' milk as a main drink until your child is over a year old.
In our recent research, we found children fed large amounts of cows' milk at eight months of age put on weight faster and were heavier than breastfed children right up to 10 years of age. We also found that children who were fed 600ml or more of formula each day put on weight faster in infancy and were heavier than breastfed children up to two and a half years of age.
Gaining weight very fast in infancy has been linked to obesity in later childhood so it's important when bottle feeding to be sensitive to the amount of milk your baby really needs. If she doesn't seem to want to finish a bottle then take that as a signal she's full.
Dr Pauline Emmett from the University of Bristol, who jointly led research into the weight gain of infants fed different types of milk
