Oh man, diapers pale in comparison to formula costs. My daughter gets changed ~8 times per day, but she eats up to 36oz of formula. That's about $1.76 in diapers and up to $6.79 worth of formula. Add in DI water (since we make it from powder) and the obscene cost of bottles, and it gets even worse.
What's wrong with tap water? Formula still costs a lot, obviously, but you generally don't need special water for mixing formula unless your kid has an immune disorder or you live somewhere with unsafe tap water.
Depending on where you live, maybe nothing, maybe a lot. For example many areas still have high PPB of lead in their tap water (even if below the EPA guidelines of 15 PPB, or the EU's 10 PPB since 2013, it can still be considered unsafe, just not economical to fix).
Plus even ignoring heavy metal content, in some areas there might be micro-organisms in tap water (since it is sourced from a natural well or similar), so you'd need to be boiling tap water or risk making a newborn sick (even if your body could easily cope with similar water).
> Talk to your baby’s pediatrician and ask what kind of water you should use when mixing infant formula. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends boiling water to remove impurities and kill germs. While most municipal and public drinking water supplies are required to follow strict regulatory guidelines to be safe, pediatricians generally still suggest using boiled water to mix infant formula, at least for the first three or four months. Since there is no evidence that bottled water is safer than municipal water sources, the AAP says that while parents can use bottled water to mix formula, it needs to be boiled first. You can also use distilled water that has already been purified or ready-to-use formulas, which do not need to be mixed with water.
Meh, I’ll take a pass on that. Chlorinated tap water in developed nations should have no appreciable microbial content. If you’re concerned about lead, I can understand that. If your goal is sterile food and your baby is healthy, I don’t really get that. You’re presumably washing your baby’s bottles in tap water anyway.
>Can I use flouridated tap water to mix formula?
"Yes, you can use fluoridated water for preparing infant formula. However, if your child is only consuming infant formula mixed with fluoridated water, there may be an increased chance for mild dental fluorosis. To lessen this chance, parents can use low-fluoride bottled water some of the time to mix infant formula; these bottled waters are labeled as de-ionized, purified, demineralized, or distilled, and without any fluoride added after purification treatment. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requires the label to indicate when fluoride is added."
Tap water through one of those pitcher filters is fine. It's super easy to spook new parents into buying stupid crap they don't need, out of fear.
So even if ten thousand of me said this a hundred thousand times, people would still buy the "special" bottled water with a picture of a baby on the label. You have to either just let them do it, or start bottling water and printing reassuring labels. They might wise up by the second or third kid.
In fact our Palo Alto pediatrician asked immediately if we use bottled water and said we should use tap water because of flouride and minerals that might not be in the water service water.
DI water? De-Ionized? The stuff marked "Not safe for human consumption: Lab Use Only" because of how dirty the ion exchange membranes get [among other things]?
It is not the same thing. Deionized water may contain neutral organic molecules, including viruses and bacteria, as it uses ion exchange resins pre-loaded with protons and hydroxides to remove all other anions and cations. Distilled water has been vaporized out of one container and recondensed into another, so contains nothing but water and molecules that form azeotropes with water.
Distilled water is deionized, but deionized has not necessarily been distilled.
In practice, however, both are overkill for baby formula.
Nobody's arguing that they're identical processes. My point is about the _labeling_ differences. Distilled water is often sold as deionized water in various parts of the world.
But there is literally zero additional printing cost for using the word that precisely matches the purification process. They even have the same number of letters in English. Why would anybody do that?
We use kirkland brand formula from costco. It's repackaged Similac. Exactly the same thing and it is less than half the cost. It even comes in the same plastic containers. They just change the stickers. All the other off-brands are likely just as good as any brand name and usually just repackaged brand name stuff anyway.
Filtered water is fine unless you live in an area with lead problems.
And what obscene cost for bottles? We have exactly 4 bottles so far for our 4 month old and they were less than $5 each. And new nipples are about $2 each when we needed to change the flow.
We managed to save about 50% off the cost of formula by making our own. A can of goat milk powder (Myenberg) costs ~ $10 and makes 3 quarts. Before 6 months we made sure the formula matched breast milk, using a spreadsheet--I'm working on a web app!--but let's say after 6 months it's fine to feed straight goat milk. Assuming a quart (32 fl oz) per day, that's about $3.33 per day, compared to $6/day for Enfamil ($27 for a tub that makes 18 cups).
Our kids were on formula as well. Between kid 1 and 2 we did buy a Baby Brezza (aka the Formula Keurig) which I'm mentioning here solely because it was such an unexpectedly positive help. It cut the process of mixing+warming+testing the formula down to just hitting a button (and likely saved my sanity).
Warming? Testing? We gave our 3 cold bottles premade a few hours before right out of the fridge. Thankfully they never complained, and made our lives a hell of a lot easier. I weep for the parents who need to do the whole warming thing... seems like a giant PIA
