James Dean Palmer

It’s the entry you’ve been waiting for – bottles. I’ve been working on this entry for some time as it has required a lot of subjective and objective research. Keep in mind I have a test subject of one, so my findings may not be representative of the population as a whole. In fact the only way to find the best bottle / nipple combination for your tike is to actually test drive them. Having spent a lot of money on bottles I find I won’t be using, I highly reccommend buying one of each and trying them out. But if you want to take my word for it, feel free to read on for my review of top three bottles that use anti-vacuum systems.

Avent
These bottles have what Avent calls an anti-colic nipple. The nipple itself creates an anti-vacuum skirt that is supposed to prevent a vacuum from forming. You can actually hear these bottles working as air causes the skirt to vibrate and make a sucking sound. Unfortunately it seems that these nipples either don’t eliminate the vaccuum or the internal pressure doesn’t reach equilibrium fast enough. Bubbles would often rise from the bottom to the top of the bottle, especially if Isaac stopped sucking suddenly. Although these bottles would seem to be the easiest to use and maintain since they have the fewest parts, one does have to take special care not to tighten the collar too much so that the nipple can releive the vaccuum and of course if the collar is too loose it will leak. The nipples come in only one large roundish shape that is supposed to reduce nipple/breast confusion. Isaac had a lot of problems with this shape. Milk would squirt 6 to 9 inches out the sides of his mouth because he couldn’t make a good seal with the nipple. The longer thinner nipples promote better suction. Is it at the cost of nipple confusion? I can’t judge. The flow (even using the slowest flowing nipples, level one) was the fastest of all those tested and Isaac would often choke on the milk. B-

Playtex Ventair
These bottles use a thin membrane on the top of the bottle to vent air, while still preventing milk from leaking. In practice milk does leak from the membrane. In fact in one dramatic instance, the membrane was not sealed securely and Yaya lost four ounces of milk faster than you can say the explitive of your choice. Despite these problems, the anti-vacuum feature works extremely well. The bent bottle shape is supposed to help keep the nipple full of milk. Unfortunately I like to hold bottles pretty far back on the neck, and thus instead of working for me the angle works against me. The quality control on the nipples would also seem to be lacking. We received one bottle and nipple and then a three pack of extra nipples. Two of the three nipples in the three pack didn’t have a hole punched in the nipple. We discovered this the hard way as Isaac sucked for over an hour on the defective nipple and was rewarded with nary a drop of milk. The nipples that were punched properly worked extremely well. They had the best (slowest) flow of all the nipples tested and Isaac gulped or choked with these the least. Unfortunately, I hate everything else about the bottle. C-

Dr. Brown’s Bottles
Nick was the first to reccommend these to me. These bottles use an internal vent to equalize the pressure inside and outside the bottle. Unfortunately that means there are more parts to clean than any of the other bottles. The anti-vaccuum effect seems to work just as well as the Playtex without the odd bottle shape and sensetive venting system. Unfortunately the level one nipple flow is extremely fast – just as fast as the Avent bottles. We were able to find the Dr. Brown’s premie nipples but the flow was only modestly slower. A-

Frankenbottle
The one common warning every bottle includes on the package is: DO NOT MIX THE NIPPLES WITH OTHER BOTTLES. Yes, mixing bottle bodies and nipples could cause the entire universe to collapse suddenly into a singularity! This warning is perhaps most justified for the Avent bottles whose nipples really do provide part of the venting mechanism. But we’ve found that you can use the Playtex nipples without incident on the Dr. Brown’s bottles. And in fact we have found this is the best combination. The Dr. Brown’s bottle has excellent ventilation and the Playtex nipple provides extremely good (where good = slow in this case) flow, assuming you find one with a hole in it. As Isaac gets bigger we will probably switch back to the Dr. Brown’s nipples, but right now they just flow too fast. A+