Medicine: Food for Newborns

A peculiarity of newborn babies is that they lose weight the first two or three days of life. The loss runs up to 10% of the baby’s initial weight. Bigger babies lose more in percent as well as in ounces than smaller babies. Males lose more than females, firstborns more than subsequent brothers and sisters, Latin babies more than Nordics, babies born in wards more than private room babies.

To Dr. Isaac Newton Kugelmass, Manhattan pediatrician who last week discussed newborn weight losses in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology, the variations in losses among different kinds of newborns are of no significance compared to the fact that all babies lose weight immediately after birth. He has no hopes of eliminating all the loss because the human baby “is unprepared for its individualized existence in comparison with other mammals, occupying a place somewhere between the domestic mammal and the wild marsupial.” If women gestated like most animals, babies would be four times as big at birth as they are, reasons Dr. Kugelmass.

Besides unripeness, babies suffer a violent shock during the process of being born. The shock shifts the water content of the body cells, also makes them unfit to retain water. The baby is water-starved. To overcome dehydration due to birth shock, Dr. Kugelmass has tried feeding newborns a solution of gelatin, salt and dextrose.

The gelatin, an easily assimilable food, transmits water to the infant. The salt helps to retain water in the baby’s system. The gelatin also raises temperature, which is subnormal at birth, and elevates blood pressure, which the shock of birth has lowered. The dextrose supplies calories for the babe’s first vital activities.

Children born at Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue Hospital, where Dr. Kugelmass is associate pediatrician, received the gelatin-salt-sugar solution at two-hour intervals both between and immediately after nursing during the “first critical three days of life.” Instead of losing seven, eight ounces on the average, the specially fed children lost only an average two ounces. They also rapidly lost “the so-called physiologic apathy, somnolence and stupor in the newborn secondary to birth shock and the compensated acidosis universally present. … All of the infants began to gain weight on the fifth day of life at a rate which far exceeded that of the babies who were left to fend for themselves.”