Formula-Feeding a Dairy-Intolerant Baby

I’m not the kind of mom that has the luxury of time when it comes to breastfeeding my babies. I had three solid months with each of them before my milk supply began to dry up. No amount of mother’s milk tea, water intake, or lactation cookies helped to bring the supply back up, either (believe me, I tried it all).
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When my supply began to slow, we supplemented with a readily available, organic formula. And slowly but surely, things started to unravel.
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It made sense when I thought back on it: When I was pregnant, any time I would have straight milk in my third trimester (in some cereal, for example), Jordan got the hiccups. Not with all dairy products – just milk. And it happened every single time. The one time I had milk after he was born? He screamed all the next day.
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It didn’t happen at first, but after introducing more and more cow-milk-based formula to his diet over the next couple of weeks, Jordan began to get increasingly fussy while eating, while also sleeping worse at night. I think a sure sign of sleep deprivation is dreaming of sleeping while you are actually sleeping – which was a recurring dream of mine in that month of trial and error.
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Soon, the poor guy was screaming every time he pooped, which had me crying too. It was the most helpless feeling as a new mom of just a few months – knowing that I couldn’t produce what he needed. And that what I WAS giving him instead was making him sick and miserable.
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So I trusted my gut and began furiously searching and researching, determined to find an alternative fast. My twin sister had the same milk supply issue and introduced me to the wonderful world of goat milk.

I had been using the goat milk formula for a couple of weeks when we ran out of it while traveling. The replenishment I had ordered didn’t arrive in time for us to leave, and I tried a milk-based option off the store shelf one more time, just to see. I told my mother-in-law, who was traveling with us, that he kind of recoils a little bit when he drinks formula containing cow’s milk. Having raised six children of her own, I’m pretty sure she was skeptical.
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She fed him the bottle with the store-bought formula, and he didn’t even drink a quarter of it before crying, refusing the bottle. It was almost like a child with a peanut allergy that takes a bite of something and instantly knows the dreaded ingredient is there. We never used cow-milk formula again after that trip.
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In my research through all of this, I learned that while cow milk formula is the most common (and most accessible) alternative to breastfeeding, researchers argue that goat milk is actually closer to human milk.
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A group of scientists from RMIT University in Australia analyzed a couple of types of commercial goat milk formula, paying particular attention to probiotic properties, especially oligosaccharides – a type of prebiotic that can boost the growth of beneficial bacteria. They found 14 of those oligosaccharides in goat milk formula (five of which are also in breast milk). This means that goat milk formula has strong prebiotic and anti-infection properties, similar to those of human breast milk.
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It took a lot of digging to find an organic goat milk formula that actually shipped to Maui (where we were living at the time), but I finally found the Holle brand through Grow Organic Baby. The ingredients were sourced in Austria, and the formula was imported from Germany. But the ingredient list was half of what is put in other organic formulas 🤯. And, more than all that, I saw a change almost overnight. And we never looked back.