Gabrielle Palmer Review and Giveaway!

Gabrielle Palmer is a nutritionist and author who has acted as an adviser to UNICEF on infant feeding.  She was a founder of the UK IBFAN group (Infant Baby Food Action Network) and has worked in settings around the world to promote and study infant nutrition.  She is the author of The Politics of Breastfeeding, an in depth and provocative look at the advent of infant formula and marketing practices, and its affect on infant health worldwide.  The Politics of Breastfeeding looks at historical trends in infant feeding and ramifications on public health from the 1800s to the present day, exposing a long history of entrenched and unethical practices on the part of infant formula producers.  Her book is a well informed, well researched tool for anyone interested in infant feeding.

Although I highly recommend The Politics of Breastfeeding, the review and giveaway for this month is for another of her books!  Palmer's book on breastfeeding is well known in breastfeeding and infant nutrition circles, and many of the main facets are becoming common knowledge.  However, her latest book, Complementary Feeding: Nutrition, Culture and Politics examines complementary feeding, or the introduction of foods other than milk into an infant's diet.  This topic has more cultural ambiguity , and research information that is less well known.  Pinter and Martin, the publisher of Palmer's books, has offered a copy of Complementary Feeding for our readers as a part of our review and giveaway!

This book by a world expert on infant nutrition blew my socks off.  I consider myself well informed on infant nutrition and politics, and educated on breastfeeding in particular, but Complementary Feeding showed me the depth of my knowledge gaps.  This book was stuffed full of information I had not considered or learned as of yet.  Palmer published this as an expansion of a position paper she wrote for IBFAN, and the book is self proclaimed as being simply a beginning, an opening of discussion on important topics surrounding complimentary feeding.  It is comprehensive, broad in scope, but does not explore the topics presented in great detail.

For most of human existence, children went without industrially processed foods and branded food products. Can we applaud the progress of the way children are fed today? In our unequal world one billion people risk their health through overconsumption while two billion people are hungry. The health problems of both groups start in early childhood.

The power and influence of the food industry has increased dramatically in recent decades. Seductive and often unethical modern marketing methods have led to the promotion of unsuitable, unnecessary and sometimes harmful baby foods. Yet not all industrially processed foods are bad and not all ‘natural’ foods are good. Both poor and rich children may be inappropriately fed.

What lessons can we learn from history? How do cultural and religious beliefs influence the choice of food? Can government initiatives have any effect? How can we provide good nutrition for all infants? This brief, compassionate and thought-provoking new book will be of interest to anyone who is curious about the world, its children and their nutrition, and will stimulate discussion and debate as part of the campaign to create a world where health for all is a true goal (Pinter and Martin).

The scope of this publication is broad; from entitlement and distribution, processed and imported foods and the benefits and harms inherent in them, the medicalization of undernutrition and poverty, how birth practices affect nutritional status, the diversity of the human diet, to how culture, politics, and medicine intersect when it comes to complementary feeding.

"A true complementary food would add to the diet nutrients such as iron and zinc, which breastmilk has not evolved to provide in the quantities required by the child who is gradually outgrowing her birth stores.  Many so-called complementary foods do not fulfil this function (Palmer 26)."

"It may very well be that inappropriate complementary feeding is more significant in the obesity epidemic than whether a child is breastfed or not (34)."

"The key fact to be aware of in this discussion is that starch is the major component of [infant] cereals and the enzyme amylase is needed to digest this.  Babies do not develop the enzyme amylase in adequate quantities for the digestion of starch until they are two years old and over (57)."

"Modern industrialized society has addressed the problem of the widespread practice of feeding babies the 'wrong food' by fortifying dehusked cereals with the minerals and vitamins removed in the refining process...Our current knowledge of cereals indicates that it is scientifically illogical to endorse the convention that a child's first food in addition to breastfeeding must be a cereal-based soft food.  It is merely culturally and commercially expedient (59)."

Palmer cites high quality, current nutrition research with six full pages of reference materials listed at the end of the book.  Complementary Feeding is provocative and informative, and my only criticism is that it is too short.  I wish most of the topics were discussed at greater length; although this would make it a series rather than a book, because it is so full of imperative topics.  For anyone interested in infant health, nutrition, culture, marketing, entrenched poverty, politics and food, this book is a must read.


Get your hands on a copy!

Buy it!  You can purchase this book directly from the publisher, Here at Pinter and Martin!

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Remember to leave your contact information so we can contact you if you win.  This contest is open until February 2nd, 2012, in the U.S. and Canada.  Good luck!