The Weston A. Price Foundation Has Promoted a Raw-Milk Homemade Infant Formula Since 2000 — Directly Against FDA and AAP Warnings
The Weston A. Price Foundation, a well-funded U.S. nutrition advocacy nonprofit, publishes and actively promotes a homemade infant formula recipe built on raw, unpasteurized milk. The FDA and American Academy of Pediatrics have both issued explicit warnings against feeding infants any homemade formula. Medical literature documents infants hospitalized with rickets, seizures, and brain injury from the wider do-it-yourself formula movement the Foundation helped popularize — and the recipe is still being actively promoted today, including through mainstream news coverage during the 2022 commercial formula shortage.
Who is the Weston A. Price Foundation?
Founded in 1999 by Sally Fallon Morell, the Weston A. Price Foundation (WAPF) promotes what it calls "nutrient-dense" traditional diets, built around raw dairy, organ meats, fermented foods, and animal fats, in explicit opposition to mainstream dietary guidance. Fallon's 2000 book Nourishing Traditions, co-written with the late Mary Enig, PhD, has sold widely and remains one of the foundation's central texts. Among its recipes is a homemade infant formula built on raw cow's or goat's milk, various oils, gelatin, and organ-derived nutrients, marketed as a superior alternative to commercial infant formula for parents who cannot or choose not to breastfeed.
What regulators and pediatricians actually say
⚠️ The FDA: do not make your own infant formula
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has issued a direct public warning against feeding infants homemade formula, stating it does not recommend the practice "because of serious health and safety concerns." The agency notes that commercial formula is strictly regulated to guarantee minimum nutrient levels, and that homemade recipes "have not been evaluated by the FDA and may lack nutrients vital to an infant's growth" — consequences the agency describes as ranging from severe nutritional imbalances to foodborne illness, both of which it says can be life-threatening.
WAPF's recipe specifically calls for raw, unpasteurized milk. The American Academy of Pediatrics' 2013 position statement on raw milk states plainly that any claimed benefits are outweighed by the real risk of serious infection, and the organization has called for a ban on the sale of raw milk products altogether given documented risks of bacterial, viral, and parasitic contamination — risks that are magnified in infants, whose immune systems are still developing.
What the research on homemade formula recipes actually found
A 2020 study of 59 blogs and 144 recipes
Researchers at the University of Alabama systematically reviewed blog postings offering homemade infant formula recipes and published their findings in Public Health Nutrition. The most common ingredients across the 144 recipes studied were cow's milk, raw goat's milk, and liver — the same core combination at the heart of WAPF's own recipe. The study found widespread safety problems: many blogs lacked medical disclaimers, most authors had no nutrition or medical credentials, and many recipes used unpasteurized ingredients carrying risk of Salmonella, Listeria, brucellosis, and other foodborne pathogens, without adequately warning parents of that risk.
Documented harm in infants
| Report | What happened |
|---|---|
| CDC MMWR, Aug. 2021 (3 infants, NJ/PA/DE) | Infants fed a homemade "alkaline diet" formula developed severe hypocalcemia and vitamin D–deficient rickets; one 4-month-old suffered cardiac arrest and was later found to have diffuse hypoxic brain injury after resuscitation. |
| Pediatrics (AAP journal), Sept. 2021 (2 infants) | Two unrelated infants presented within a week of each other with vitamin D–deficiency rickets and severe hypocalcemia, including seizures and cardiac arrest, after being fed a homemade vegan formula their parents found through a Pinterest recipe. |
Neither case series names the Weston A. Price Foundation's specific dairy-based recipe — the documented cases involved vegan and alkaline-diet variants with different ingredients. But the underlying pattern is the same one WAPF has spent over two decades normalizing: that a parent-assembled "natural" formula, built from ordinary kitchen and health-food-store ingredients, is a credible substitute for a product the FDA and AAP consider essential to regulate precisely because getting the nutrient balance wrong can kill or permanently injure an infant.
Still being promoted today
WAPF's homemade formula recipe remains live on the foundation's website as of 2026, including instructional video content. During the severe 2022 U.S. commercial formula shortage — triggered by an Abbott Nutrition plant closure following infant deaths linked to bacterial contamination — local newspapers in multiple U.S. states republished WAPF's recipe verbatim as a practical option for parents unable to find formula on shelves, giving a fringe recipe with no FDA review a mainstream media platform at exactly the moment desperate parents were most likely to act on it without consulting a pediatrician.
Why this belongs on QuackeryWatch
This follows the same pattern as homeoprophylaxis, Kerri Rivera's chlorine dioxide protocol, and Colleen Huber's naturopathic oncology, already documented in our Pediatric Quackery section: an alternative marketed as more "natural" than the regulated, evidence-based standard of care, promoted by people without the clinical training to know what they're overlooking, aimed at parents acting from love and good intentions rather than negligence. The difference here is scale of reach — a well-established nonprofit with a bestselling book, an active social media and publishing presence, and enough mainstream credibility that local newspapers reprint its recipes as helpful advice during a genuine supply crisis.