Preposterousness to posterity

I saw this at the supermarket the other day and found it totally absurd that we'd assume babies need heavily-flavoured combat ration-like food pouches to grow healthily, where mothers for generations to come have never had access to such crap and hey, our parents and grandparents turned out big and strong too.

I decided to give Rafferty's Garden a chance, and looked up their products, nutritional composition and ingredients list. Didn't find any ingredients list since they claim it's "apple + pear + cinammon + nothing else" (I'm looking at the range that's suitable for first introduction to babies from 4mths), but found nutritional composition and a lot of other weird products that even I, as an adult, would not touch with a ten-foot pole. I have many issues with this Rafferty's Garden (RG), um, infant banquet.

(Please note that all facts and figures quoted below come directly from the WHO/UNICEF Pan-American "Guiding Principles for Complementary Feeding of the Breastfed Child 2004" unless otherwise stated)

Firstly, it is recommended that babies be exclusively breastfed for at least 6 months and up to, or even beyond, 2 years of age. We all know the wonders of breast milk so I shall not go into that..
I know I'm not a mother yet, and would never understand the toils of motherhood, but seriously, convenience at the expense of your child's health?? So here you are denying your child the best nutrition it can get, and on the other hand being anal, self-righteous people who lobby and demonstrate for weird rules which you claim are "best for the generations to come". Very interesting and short-sighted.
To quote the guidelines, "The Expert Consultation concluded that the potential health benefits of waiting until six months to introduce other foods outweigh any potential risks." Enough said.

Next, complementary feeding is supposed to replace nutrients that are otherwise obtained from breast milk, especially at the young tender age of 4-months. Let me see what kind of nutrition RG's apple-pear-cinammon combat ration has to offer per serve..
Energy - 42cal
Protein - 0.2g
Fat, total - 0.1g
Fat, saturated - less than 0.1g
Carbohydrate - 9.2g
of which Sugars - 9.0g
Sodium - 1mg

Ok. My first issue is with fat content. Fat is the one major macronutrient that a baby needs during this crucial period of growth, and it is recommended that fat contributes up to 35-38% of energy content in complementary food. It also amazes me that we would transfer our adult fat-phobia to children, seeing how RG has labelled separately saturated fat, when rightfully the fat in an infant's diet should be made up of 15% saturated fat. (Fact from other sources.)
C'mon, the kid is struggling to survive. Give it a fighting chance will ya? In any case, the value doesn't make sense. If Total Fat is 0.1g, surely Saturated Fat content is less than 0.1g??? They probably didn't bother to measure the amount of saturated fat; they just wanted to have it in the nutrition facts to make it seem like "oh, we're sooo conscious about your baby's health we even care about how much saturated fat there is but oops, we don't actually know how much there is and quite frankly we don't care as long as you buy the damn product".

Still on macronutrients, the amount of sugars is startling. 9.0g of sugar is effectively about slightly more than 2 teaspoons of sugar. Wow, really, we need to force-feed our children sugar from such a young age? In fact, it has been studied and found that babies don't actually know tastes and cannot differentiate between sweet, salty, bitter etc etc. Tastes are learnt and then infants are conditioned to like sweet food, because we assume that they don't like bland food (like we do just cos our tastebuds are desensitised and dead) and heavily flavour baby food. Newsflash: sugar is addictive.
Yeah well you can argue that fruit is full of sugar anyway so it isn't really RG's fault if their combat rations are so high in sugar content. Unfortunately, it is also a little known fact that the more processed a food is, even a 'natural' food, the more the starch and carbohydrates break down into simple sugars and the higher the sugar content.

Now the major nutrients that need to be supplied by complementary foods are iron, zinc, phosphorus, magnesium, sodium and calcium. Hmm I see sodium in RG's nutrition list... But what about the rest? Nutritionally, an apple has got all the minerals needed (well, at least in the skin it does). Guess you couldn't keep them all while putting your lovely ingredients through a machine huh, RG.
Yummy, we feed our children infants stuff that has come into contact with metal parts and machinery heated to industrial temperatures.. We're just killing them from the get-go, what for bring them into the world?

And what happened to introducing foods one at a time to test for acceptance and more importantly, allergies??? Oh man, that is really so preposterous. It probably never crossed many people's minds that a baby, yes BABY, can be born with allergies. "The peak incidence of diarrheal disease is during the second half year of infancy, as the intake of complementary foods increases." Apple.. Pear.. Cinammon.. Your baby could be allergic to one, or all three of these seemingly safe 'natural' foods.

It's just ridiculous the amount of crap masquerading as "food" nowadays. Watching Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution on television the other day, I have a whole new level of respect for the man, and a whole new level of disgust for the abhorrent food guidelines that the USDA has in place for school food. It's just... Really sad. It's disheartening to watch and see how adults can be so defensive about something they have absolutely no idea about, and kids just on the road to poor health from the moment of conception (since their mothers probably don't eat well anyway).

Sometimes I think the whole world is a huge conglomerate and it's a great big conspiracy to get us to spend money. If you've spoken with me about healthcare systems enough you'd probably have heard me mention that I think medicine is elitist. If you have money, we will save your life. If you don't, f*ck off for all we care.
Healthcare has no need to be so expensive and inaccessible to the masses. But hey, health is business too. Anything is business. If it croaks, it's business. Even if it doesn't croak, it can be made into a business. The tobacco companies are in cahoots with the drug companies, the pharmaceutical companies are in cahoots with the oil-producers, and everyone is in cahoots with the great big government. But hey, that's another story for another day.

It's so hard to be sure of yourself when it feels like you're the only person in the world who feels this way. Sometimes I see all these hypocrisy and it makes me want to make a difference in the healthcare industry. Other times I'm tired and jaded and wonder if I should just give up and find something else to do with my life and ignore the plight of the world like how the rest of the population does.