New Wives' Tales

The millions of American women who spend hundreds of anxious hours each year warming the baby's formula in a hot-water bath, then splashing a couple of drops on their wrists to make sure that it has reached body temperature, are wasting their time. They may just as well take the bottle out of the refrigerator and shove the cold nipple right into baby's mouth.

This remarkable finding, which runs directly counter to what every mother has ''known'' since babies were first fed a substitute for human breast milk, was reported last week by one of the most eminent of U.S. pediatricians, New York University's Dr. L. Emmett Holt Jr. Four years ago, Dr. John P. Gibson of Abilene, Texas, had come to a similar conclusion, from studying 150 normal, full-term babies. He got the idea from mothers who had forgotten to warm a bottle. Dr. Holt figured that he could put the idea to the acid test by trying unwarmed formulas on premature babies, who would react much more sharply if cold formula did not agree with them.

With the aid of U.S. Public Health Service nurses, Dr. Holt tried cold and warm formulas on similar groups of preemies. The nurses not only took temperatures, but checked the babies' sleep, restlessness and whimpering or crying every ten minutes around the clock, for the staggering total of 65,952 observations.

The upshot, reported in the Journal of Pediatrics: it made not the slightest difference to the delicate little preemie whether he got his formula a few minutes out of the refrigerator, at a temperature of 45DEG to 52DEG F.. or had it warmed to blood heat or higher. On cold formulas, the babies ate as much, and as fast, and kept their feedings down just as well. They slept as well, and gained weight at the same rate. Their own body temperatures dropped only an insignificant .2DEG F. on the cold formula. And in one way they were better off: even with the most expert nursing supervision, some of the warmed formulas occasionally got overheated, and the wrist test did not protect the babies against a scalding-hot feeding.

Hospitals. Dr. Holt concludes, can save countless hours of costly nursing time, and therefore millions of dollars a year, by abandoning a useless tradition. And the average mother can save herself both time and anxiety.

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