How Nestle Starved A Bunch of Babies

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
What's starving my babies? Shit? Fuck Sophie Robert. That's not
how you start a podcast, is it. Why? Well, it
is appropriate to the theme of the podcast. This is
behind the Bastards. Thank you, Sophie. Podcast bad people tell
you all about them? Um, And our guest today is

(00:24):
Ariel do him Ross? Did I get it right? Close? Close? Close?
You did? You did pretty good? You did pretty good.
It's it's Ariel Zoom Ross. Um. But but you know what,
that was a valiant effort. Well, valiant is the only
word that could possibly describe me. So I appreciate you
saying that. Um. Ariel. You are a correspondent and host

(00:48):
of the podcast Vice News Reports. Um. And you are
currently in a closet, a little bitty padded closet recording. Yeah,
oh yeah, I got my moving blankets surrounding me and
my little my little padding. I'm ready to go excellent.
I used to have a clothus when I lived in
l a um, except for I only used it for

(01:09):
about a week and then I filled it with trash. Um.
So what I'm saying is I respect your ability to
actually commit to the cloths because it's hard. It's it
requires both a noble soul and uh discipline beyond the
can of most mortals. Well, that makes me feel good
because I think my wife thinks this closet is extremely
unruly and like has no right or reason because you

(01:31):
haven't seen the top shelves. It's not cute in here.
You can fit in it. That means you have you
have done an impressive job with the cloths. Well, thank you,
I'll take it. Yeah. Well, Ariel, how do you feel
about I don't know babies. I mean, I do not
want a child of my own, but I like babies

(01:51):
a lot. Do you think like they should be fed? Yes,
generally speaking, I think that they benefit from food. Well,
that really puts you on a different standing, uh than
our bastard today, which is the Nestly Corporation. Um, oh boy,
I'm actually really excited about this. This is going to
be great. What do you know, I'm sure I think

(02:12):
a lot of people I don't know if most people have,
but I'm sure a lot of people have heard different
things about like the Nestly baby formula. I don't know,
kerfuffle disaster, quasi mass murder spree thing. If you heard
anything about this is this? Is this something that happened, like,
you know, relatively recently, like in Asia slash Australia. Is

(02:34):
that relatively recently? You mean the entire lifespan of us
and our parents? That? Yes? All right, Okay. When I
heard about this, I thought it was like a tainted
baby formula thing. I think that's how it was passed
on to me through like conversations with people. That's actually
not what happened. It's way more fucked up than that.
If they had just like sold a bunch of tainted

(02:56):
baby formula, that would have been so much better. Um. So,
you know it's bad when you're rooting for tainted baby formula,
tainted because look, things get tainted, Right, You're gonna make
a lot of food for people. Some of them are
going to die from the food because manufacturing at scale
is never perfect. Um this is much worse than that.
Uh So we're gonna we're gonna get into that. Are

(03:19):
you ready? Are you ready to take this journey with me?
I'm ready. If this is actually gonna end up being
an episode about how nutrition science is fucked I'm so
ready for it. I mean there's pieces of that in here.
It's it's more fucked up than that because Christian scientists
are to give them credit, some of the people who
are like trying to warn about this for a while. Um,

(03:40):
but this is there's there's some complicated aspects of this history. Um.
So we gotta begin way back in the seventeen hundreds,
which is when medicine was like, you know, not we
didn't really have medicine, but it was a time when
when you know, men were men, and they died of,
honest god, fearing bacterial infections from skinning their knees playing stickball.
And in these early days, breastfeeding was the preferred way

(04:02):
to feed infant children, right, and it's still the second
best method of feeding infants today after mountain dew baja
blast But in those primitive days, scientists hadn't discovered baja
blast um, and so breastfeeding was a pretty good solution, right,
if you don't have access to mountain dew, Um, it'll
do the trick. Um. Yeah, it's pretty natural. It's pretty
pretty natural. Yeah, not as easy to get as baja

(04:23):
blast but yeah, it's you know, actually breast like breast milk.
I've spent a lot of time reading about like science
or it's fucking amazing stuff, Like it's sterile, it has
like just ridiculous amounts of nutrition. It's InCred how babies
get a lot of their microbiome in the first couple
like days weeks and system stuff. Yeah, like I said,
almost as good as baja blast um. Now, there are

(04:45):
some issues with breastfeeding though. Um. One of them is
that people like moms die, especially in the seventeen eighteen
hundreds and peer like plagues and ship right, and so
you wind up with a large population of infants and
maybe there's nobody to breastfeed them, right, So that's a problem.
You also have cases of like especially back in a

(05:06):
lot more women died in childbirth. So there were a
lot of reasons why you would have an infant and
they wouldn't be able to be breastfet just as there
are today. There were probably more reasons back then because
medicine was a lot worse, and it became very common
for families with means to hire wet nurses to feed
their babies. Um. And again this is like, if you've
got money, you can afford a wet nurse, right, because
you are you are not just hiring someone to feed

(05:29):
your baby, You're kind of hiring someone to feed their
own baby less, because that's the way it works in
a lot of cases. Um. Well, so if I can
amend some of that, I think that in some cases
wet nurses would like feed their baby and then keep
their milk going in various sometimes strange ways. Yeah, yeah,
and then take on a different baby as well, so

(05:50):
like once their child was weaned off, then they would
just keep going and take baby after baby. So it
wasn't always the case that they were taking food away
from their own kids, but that that did happen. That did. Yeah,
We're like, obviously, I'm not that that is very important
to do it. This is not going to be a
complete history of the of the concept of wet nursing.
There were ways to do it where it was better
or worse. Um, but it was very common again, particularly

(06:11):
for families of means throughout Europe in the early u
S and the colonial period. UM. Families often would hire
a wet nurse to live with them. Uh. And in
some cases they would send the infant to live with
the wet nurse and then take the baby back once
it had been weaned. Um. And if you're wondering, did
doing this to impressionable young babies have any impact on them,
My answer would be, of course not, that's why everyone
was so famously well adjusted in the colonial period all

(06:33):
the I'm sure they had no impact on anybody. Um. Now,
on that subject, it was also extremely common for enslaved
people to be forced to act as wet nurses. And
in this case you are talking certainly that their babies
are in many cases going malnourished, especially since there was
an idea among some people, again people of means, that

(06:54):
you shouldn't let a wet nurse nurse more than one baby. Um.
So that was not again not universal, but it happened,
and it particularly happened with like and again not in
every case of a slave acting as a wet nurse.
But um there were and there were a number of
reasons why in some cases people preferred to use slaves
as wet nurses. One of them was that, when you're
talking about the colonial United States or the colonial like

(07:17):
like the European colonies all over the world, there was
an idea and understanding that black people were more resistant
to malaria than white people. And obviously they didn't know why,
they didn't understand much, but they had like early vaccines,
so they knew a little bit, and there was an
understanding that making enslaved women nurse their babies would confer
some immunity to malaria um, which was probably not untrue

(07:38):
because as you stated, there is some like your immune system,
you get some of that from breast milk. So that
was a known reason at the time why they would
do this very exploitative thing. UM. Now, yeah, it's not great. Um.
And again we don't have data on whether or not
there were higher rates of infant mortality for black wet
nurses because they were being restricted from giving as much

(08:00):
moke to their own babies are giving to get all
to their own babies, because nobody cared about getting that
data because slavery was a nightmare. Um. But there were
like obviously the people who were kind of being made
to do that weren't like they had an agency of
their own, and so there was a variety of like
mutual aid breastfeeding networks established by enslaved persons in order

(08:23):
to make sure that like members of their community who
underproduced milk or who were wet nursing and being restricted
from nursing the baby. So that's that all of the
babies could get nursed like. They developed mutual aid networks
within themselves or within their own communities, learning stuff already. Yeah,
and these networks of caregiving, um, we're we're, I mean,
that's pretty rad um and they were. I would say

(08:44):
those mutual aid networks were as beautiful as the actual
profession of wet nursing could be callous and horrific. Here's
how one black wet nurse and this is post slavery,
This is like nineteen eleven in Georgia described her duties. Quote,
I live a treadmill, and I see my own children
only when they happened to see me on the streets,
when I am out with the children, or when my

(09:04):
children come to the yard to see me, which isn't
often because my white folks don't like to see their
servants children hanging around their premises. So m a lot
of bleak again, a lot of bleak aspects of this um. Now,
wet nurses were selected with care by families because it
was understood that the quality of the milk would determine
the baby's future disposition. There was this belief that like

(09:26):
you had to make sure you had to pick a
wet nurse with a specific disposition, because that got passed
down to your kids, like their personality in some way
dead or do you know what they looked for. Well,
one of the things they looked for was brunettes. They
were vastly preferred to blonde or redheads. And this is
again mainly in Europe, where the wet nurses you know,
are white. Um, and they preferred brunettes to blondze or

(09:47):
redheads because their milk was said to be more nutritious
and the children raised on it had a more balanced disposition. Um.
So yeah, I don't know like like all that, how
that how anybody comes up with these rules. But okay,
they weren't good at medicine, so I'm good. It was nonsense, right,
like most things they believed. Uh Now. During the eighteenth

(10:08):
century Europe, wet nurses were so in demand that governments
had to establish bureaus where they could register and live
until they were needed. The whole process came to be
heavily regulated. Wet nurses were required to undergo regular health exams,
and they were forbidden in a lot of cases from
nursing more than one infant at a time. This was,
of course a problematic system, and it wasn't even really
ideal for the rich because you know, people die. Though.

(10:31):
There was a constant need for mother's milk and more
than could actually be provided by you know, natural methods,
so a lot of desperate people um resorted to what
was then called dry nursing, which was providing animal milk
to human babies. Um. And we've been doing this much
further back than the seventeen hundreds. There are records of
people using animals milk to feed human infants as far

(10:53):
back as two thousand BCS. So people, this has always
been a thing pretty much that we've done because you've
got to figure out something right, Um. And are we
just talking about cow's milk here or is it like
a bunch of different stuff yaks, and I think camels
get used sometimes, and donkeys and and horses and like
every kind of milk, pretty much every kind of milk

(11:14):
people have ever found they've tried given to babies. Basically, Yeah,
camel milk is a whole thing. I once did a
reporting trip to Australia where they have a bunch of
camels because they have a bunch of desserts and people
brought them over and there's a booming camel milk industry
in Australia. Strangely enough, that's something I've seen a couple
of camels in person, but I've never gotten to drink

(11:36):
their milk. I would love to. Is it good? It's fine, salty? Yeah,
camels are terrified. There's so much bigger than you expect
them to be. And there was so giants, they so much,
Oh man, I did. One of my fondest memories in
Northern India was a little baby camel playing with a

(11:58):
little puppy dog in the street. I think it was
rishikesh Um. That sounds adorable. It was, it was, It
was magical. Um. So dry nursing can work. Obviously, you
can keep a baby alive and it will, it will,
it can survive off of other animals milk. But it's
also not ideal and it was observed again hundreds of
years ago, they knew that if you dry nurse infants,

(12:19):
those infants have more health problems, right because it's not
what it like. It's not meant for them. It's close
enough that it can keep them alive, but it's not
what they're supposed to be having because it's not people
aren't yaks um. Now, doctors debated which animal was healthier
for dry nursing, and the general consensus was donkey um.
So I don't know again, I have no idea how

(12:42):
they came to that conclusion, but that was that was
what a lot of doctors were like, Yeah, you gotta
get it. It's the docky milks, the good ship um.
And there were a lot of debates over whether or
not animal milk should be warmed or boiled, or deluded
or mixed with sugar and honey. And we do now
know that like some variant of those things helps because
you're supposed to ake down certain proteins that you can
do by heating it up, and you you want to

(13:03):
add in certain sugars. Like I'm not an expert on
how to turn animal milk into formula, but some of
this stuff worked. Some of it was just nonsense, like
most medicine at the time. Now, the continued inadequacy of
all replacement milks was very clear though. Even the best
replacement milk that they could come up with was not
nearly as good as breast milk, and for years doctors
and nutritionists struggled to develop a decent substitute. And I'm

(13:25):
gonna quote from a write up in Contemporary Pediatrics, which
is a medical journal. Here quote. In nearly nineteenth century,
it was observed that infants fed un aaltered cow's milk
had a high mortality rate and we're prone to indigestion
and dehydration compared with those who were breastfed. In eighteen
thirty eight, a German scientist Johann Franz Simon published the
first chemical analysis of human and cow's milk, which served

(13:48):
as the basis for formula nutrition science for decades to follow.
He discovered that cow's milk had a higher protein content
and a lower carbohydrate content than human milk. In addition,
he and later investigators believed that the larger curds of
cow's milk compared compared to the small curds of human milk,
were responsible for the indigestibility of cow's milk. Empirically, physicians
began to recommend that water, sugar, and cream be added

(14:10):
to cow's milk to render it more digestible and closer
to human milk. By eighteen sixty, a German chemists just
as fun lie Big, developed the first commercial baby food
a powdered formula made from wheat flour, cow's milk, malt flour,
and potassium by carbonate. The formula, which was added to
heated cow's milk, soon became popular in Europe. Lie Big
Soluble infant Food was the first commercial baby food in

(14:32):
the US, selling and groceries for one dollar a bottle
in eighteen sixty nine. So you made us right there.
Not cheap one dollar a bottle. That's a good amount
of money back then, and this is cutting edge science
at the time. Um, how a bottle go, dude? I mean,
I don't know how big is a bottle at this point.
I think you're talking like a day or so worth

(14:52):
of feeding a baby. That's pricey. Yeah. Now this all
brings us to the hail of one Honoree nest Lee. Um,
I'm gonna you can guess what he winds up doing. Uh.
He came from a German Swiss family, and he had
an eclectic early career that included apprenticing as a pharmacist
and becoming a massive rape seed entrepreneur which is an

(15:15):
unfortunately named seed um. In the eighteen forties, he got
into the lucrative nut oil business, which is an unfortunately
named oil, and he started distilling rum and absinthe and
selling carbonated mineral water. In the eighteen fifties, he started
producing gas lights and fertilizers. So this guy's doing a
lot of stuff that's a weird going from a pharmacy
to making gas lights and fertilizer um. And at some

(15:39):
point along the line, we don't exactly know when he started.
In the eighteen sixties, he decided to set his very
weird mind to the task of creating a fully artificial
baby formula. And when I say artificial, what I mean
is you don't have to add any kind of milk
to it. It's powder and you just add water, right,
that's what Obviously there's natural kimmo, but that's what an
artificial formula is. You don't have to add an anim

(16:00):
will smoked to it. Okay. I've heard a couple of
different stories purporting to explain why he started down this path.
One is that he had a neighbor who was having
trouble nursing her child. Another is that he and his wife,
although childish childless themselves, were horrified at the high rate
of infant death in their part of Europe. And wanted
to do something about it. Now, during this period, breastfeeding

(16:20):
had become increasingly unpopular among wealthy women. Um, and there's
a number of reasons for this. One of them is
that formula has started to become a thing. So it's
it's fashionable to use formula. It's the newest things. This idea,
it's seen as like cutting edge science, like it would
be better than breast milk. Right. Yes, there's also an
idea that I mean not an idea, the fact that
breastfeeding you can't wear the same fashion right like it

(16:43):
it it changes the kind of things that you were
able to wear, particularly in this period, and so wealthy
women don't like having to spend more time not being
able to like wear the latest fashions of the days.
So it's possible Nestleie just wanted to cash in on
the fact that there were a lot of rich women
who preferred not to breast feed. Right. That may have
been in and may have been it is probably a
mix of things. Whatever his reasons, by eighteen sixty seven

(17:05):
all refigured it out. He combined cow's milk with grain
and sugar to make a substitute for breast milk, acid,
and starch were removed from the wheat flour in order
to aid digestion, and the whole thing was dehydrated and powdered.
Unlike other formulas on the market, you just had to
add water, which is again why it's an artificial formula. Now,
because he was a deeply weird dude, Nesley called his

(17:25):
invention kindermel or children flour, which was thought to be
a more marketable term but sounds kind I mean it
is more marketable, Lee Big. The other guy, the guy
who first comes up with a formula initially called what
he created soup for infants. So both of these guys
are making some odd branding choices marketing choices here. So wait,

(17:46):
I forgive me for having missed this. Where is all
he living at this point? Alre, I believe he's in Um,
I believe he's in Switzerland when he's doing this. Okay,
so he's marketing. He's marketing this in Switzerland. We're not
like in the U S or anything like that. Not yeah, no,
I mean it quickly comes over here. But he's a
German Swiss dude. Um. Yeah, So on reason invention proved

(18:07):
to be a better product than lee bigs, namely because
it didn't require access to any fresh milk, and there
were often fresh milk shortages in a lot of Europe
and in other parts of the world like the US.
This is less of an issue because where cow people,
but like a lot of times you couldn't get the
milk in Europe, So this formula is a big deal
for that too. Um all you needed was water that
had been boiled to ensure it was safe. By the

(18:29):
eighteen seventies, Nestlie's infant food was selling in the US
for fifty cents a bottle, so it's also a lot
cheaper than the other stuff. Now. From the beginning, the
Nestle Corporation warned that formulas should only be used in
cases where breastfeeding was not possible. Their early publications described
the company as quote a strong supporter of breastfeeding and
believes that breastfeeding provides the best exclusive nutrition for babies

(18:52):
in the first six months of life. And this is true, right,
I don't want to be anti form there's net like
formulas necessary, right, there are needs for it. We're gonna
be talked about a lot of flaws in the industry,
but it is by all objective science. Best to use
breast milk if you possibly can, there's less And also
there's a lot of shame for women who can't breastfeed,
and like it's totally okay if you can't breastfeed. It's

(19:14):
really hard from what I hear, super painful. So like,
formula is great for people who can't do it. Yeah,
we're not trying to be anti formula here where anti
the way companies start to market this stuff. That's where
the problem is. Formula is a wonderful invention that saved
a lot of lives. Um and rins Lee is not
a he's kind of a weird dude, but he's not
a bad guy here. He just invents a good formula. See,

(19:36):
it works pretty well. And Alri himself wrote that quote
during the first months, the mother's milk will always be
the most naturally nutritious, and every mother able to do
so should herself suckle her children. So from the beginning,
he's like, this is for people who can't who don't
have act. There's a lot of reasons why you might
not be able to. That's who I'm making this for.
It's not supposed to replace breast milk. I want to say,
I'm still waiting for the bastard to come in here.

(19:57):
It's coming right now. He kind of sounds kind of fine.
He's fine. He never becomes a bastard that I'm aware
of it. The Nestle Corporation, okay, okay, well he's done.
Is tried to feed babies. Now. People being people, they
quickly developed in a lot of the Western world, and
attitude that formula was superior to breastfeeding. Some of this

(20:20):
was for again aesthetic reasons, right, Um, it's easier on
people's breasts, it's more cosmetically pleasant. A lot of people
see it that way, so they prefer formula. Um. And
because wealthy and educated women start to use formula rather
than breastfeed, a lot of poorer women who kind of
like paid attention to what's happening the society pages think
that formula must be better too, because like, oh, well,

(20:40):
like these celebrities basically are doing this, and that's what
the rich people are doing, I should do. It must
be better if the rich people are doing it. Um.
The use of formula grew common even among mothers who
did not need it, and the Nestle Corporation made bank Gradually, however,
doctors began to recognize problems and I'm gonna quote from
a right up by students of the Universe Steve Oklahoma's
Honors College on the history of baby formula here quote.

(21:04):
By the nineteen thirties, a connection between the use of
baby formula and malnutrition formed. Dr Cecili Williams became the
first doctor to observe this connection and denounced the promotion
of formula as a substitute to breastfeeding. However, Nestley continued
their aggressive promotion of formula over the course of the
next four decades, which resulted in a significant decrease in
the number of mothers who breastfed throughout the world. So,

(21:25):
starting particularly early nineteen hundreds, you know, on restops being
part of the picture, right, he doesn't live forever. The
company realizes, Okay, people are preferring this to breast milk.
Why don't we market it as better? Like what's the harm?
Why don't we try to sell people on like this
is a replacement to breast milk, not something you can
take if you need it. This is something you should

(21:45):
take because it's better. Alright, starting to sound bad, Yeah,
now hearing that probably the first question in your mind
should be how did they promote formula over breast milk?
And the answer is, oddly enough, the same way your
middle school teachers warned you that heroin dealers would get
it has hooked on. Smack Nestlee and other formula manufacturers
like Doomex and Abbott Laboratories would donate large quantities of

(22:07):
baby formula to hospital maternity wards. This save the hospital
money because again there's a lot of infants who have
to be formula fed. You know, their moms die, you
know whatever there there. But the catch was part of
the deal. In order to get this free formula that
you can give to the babies who need it, the
hospital has to give out free formula to every new mother, right,
so they're trying to get you hooked on the idea.

(22:30):
It gets worse. So, the early half of the twentieth
century is a period in which people tended to trust
their doctors implicitly. Right, we are not in that period anymore.
There's some downsides to that and some upsides to them.
But back then, your doctor told you something, you assume
that's the word of fucking God. Right. Um, Now, doctors

(22:50):
may not have thought much about what they were doing, right,
because they I think a lot of them they're saying like, oh, well,
free formula, Maybe it will help if they need it.
But that act of a doctor handing out formula was
seen by lot of patients as an explicit medical endorsement. Right,
my doctor gave me this, it must be good for
me or good for my baby. This made hospitals into
commercial platforms froup for private enterprise. One Abbott Laboratory sales

(23:14):
manual laid out the stakes quote. When one considers that
for every hundred infants discharged on a particular formula brand,
approximately ninety three infants remain on that brand, the importance
of hospital selling becomes obvious and in fact, in the
nineteen seventies, Russ Laboratory signed a contract with New York
City Hospitals guaranteeing that each new mother who left would

(23:34):
receive a free one day supply of similac. One day
is again, Yeah, you know who else wants to get
you hooked? That was great? Yeah, that correct. Nothing are
advertisers want to do more than get you hooked? They'll

(23:56):
give you a one day dose of whatever the funk
it is we're selling. Um especially Sophie, did we did
we land that big heroin ad? Deal? Are we? Are
we being supported by big Heroin? Yet? That's what we do,
That's what we do. All right, Well, you know, tie off,
shoot up, and come back for the next part of
the episode. We're back. Uh, And we're talking about the

(24:28):
baby formula industry. So baby or formula companies, right, So
there's this understanding they have like data on this going
back into like the thirties and forties that if an
infant is discharged on a particular formula Bland brand, nearly always,
they're going to keep using that brand. So obviously you
gotta hook them early. Right. Um, it's like a cigarette

(24:48):
like and they're they're consciously following. We have like memos
that they're consciously following like cigarette companies, like the way
that the cigarette companies are good at this ship. Right,
you want to pay attention to what they're doing, and
the formula company does a lot of the same things,
and so it becomes very important for different formula companies,
of which Nestlee is the largest, to compete vigorously for
a hospital's business, as this right up in the New

(25:09):
Internationalist makes clear. In exchange for giving discharge packs a
formula to new mothers. Hospitals get free formula for in
house use, together with equipment, literature, and a package of
other services. The most insidious of these is a free
architectural service to hospitals which are building or renovating facilities
for newborn care. Abbott Laboratories helps design at least two
hundred maternity departments a year in the u S alone.

(25:32):
The layout of these centers, whether by accident or design,
make sure breastfeeding difficult mothers are physically separated from their newborns.
Nurses come swiftly and conveniently administered donated formula and ready
to mix bottles. But establishing breastfeeding is more troublesome because
instead of rooming in mothers and babies together, babies must
be carried long distances to their mothers for feeding, a
task that nurses resent. The investment in architectural plans thus

(25:55):
yields dividends in the form of new bottle feeding customers
the entire lifespan of the building. That's so sneaky. This
is written in like that's this is nine three. But
they start doing this in the thirties and forties, right
they start specifically pushing. We will build maternity wards to you,
but we're going to make sure that this is set
up in a way that leads you to start bottle
feeding these babies. That makes a pain not be the easy,

(26:18):
normal thing to breast and like, here's the thing. Breastfeeding,
like getting your baby to latch on is already a
difficult thing. If you're gonna give parents another option and
have your doctor endorse it and have the nurses hate
bringing your baby to you, Like everything here is just
designed for you to end up using baby formata. It
sure is. And it gets worse because they also do

(26:40):
a lot of like you know, perdue pharmaceutical ship like
oxy ship. Right, Sure they do a lot of that. Quote.
Convincing doctors of the virtues of artificial milks, or at
least neutralizing their resistance, is the key to establishing bottle feeding.
Baby milk companies spend untold millions of dollars subsidizing office furnishings,
research project gifts, conferences, publications, and travel junkets of the

(27:03):
medical profession. The American Academy of Pediatrics received a renewable
one million dollar grant from Abbott Laboratories. The purpose is
to generate physician goodwill towards the company and its products.
An Abbott Laboratories trade publication states, in effect, we are
striving to make the physician a low pressure salesman for Abbott.
They just say this shit. And of course it is

(27:23):
the ordinary purchaser of artificial baby milk who must pay
a portion of the cost of every cocktail that a
doctor SIPs at conventions like the recent Ski and Study
symposium at a California mountain resort, which Abbott Laboratories helped finance.
They're paying for your offices, They're sending you on ski
vacation weekends, paying drinks, Yeah, paying for your drinks. And
they're doing this because you're a salesman if you're a pediatrician. Right,

(27:49):
I love this story already. This is this is not
at all depressing. And the formula companies are consciously aping
tobacco companies who do this for doctor. There's that's why
there's physician recommended cigarettes. And like the fifties, UM produce
pharmaceuticals copies this playbook for oxy content. Right like this,
these are all like everyone's paying attention to what everybody

(28:09):
does because it keeps working. Now all of this. This
whole system developed through the thirties and forties, and the
formula industry exploded in the fifties when birthrates saw it
After World War two, Western women primed to trust formula
by their doctors, embraced it as a more scientific and
the superior way to feed their children. They also saw
it as liberatory because in a lot of ways it was.

(28:31):
It means you're not you don't have to you're not
necessarily as stuck at home. Right if you're a working mom,
it makes it a lot easier to do that. It
makes it a lot easier to have a career of
your own. Um. The impact this had was astonishing. Roughly
sixty percent of mothers born between nineteen eleven and nineteen
fifteen breastfed their babies. Only thirty five percent of mothers
born in the early nineteen forties did the same. So

(28:52):
this whole all of this, and again it's not just
the ablets. Obviously there's also some social stuff happening right now,
but there's a massive impact like this is really significant change.
The nineteen sixties and seventies were also the period in
which globalism really exploded, right this is when coca cola
floods the entire world. The United States began selling everything

(29:12):
it could to everyone it could. Coca Cola were placed,
juice and other local beverages in the diets of millions
of people in the global South. American advertisements slick and
Polished promised a clean, ultra modern life in imitation of
the wealthiest society ever known, and these advertisements came to
dominate the popular culture for dozens of nations. At the
same time, companies like Nestley and Ross Laboratories saw the

(29:35):
so called third world, which is that was always referred
to in their documents, as a great place to expand
their formula sales. They started sending what they called mothercraft
nurses into hospitals and poor nations. Now these women are
not often actually nurses, but they're dressed in uniforms that
are specifically made to look like the uniforms nurses wear,

(29:57):
so it confers authority. Exactly. They visit women in maternity
wards and in their homes. We'll talk about that in
a second. They would help new mothers with child rearing,
so they're giving general child rearing advice to new moms,
and they're also subtly specifically promoting formulas that they had
been hired to sell. Um Now, because these women are
dressed the same as nurses in these hospitals, a lot

(30:19):
of these new mothers are convinced that their independent healthcare
professionals they work for the hospital, that they're not employees
of the company's selling formula. Because they don't say I'm
here for simulac, I'm here for nestlie. They say I'm
a child ringer, I'm I'm a mother care nurse. You know,
they have a couple of different terms that they use.
So a lot of these mothers very understandably take their

(30:40):
advice to use formula as a considered medical opinion, because
why wouldn't you write, of course you would, A lot
of people would. Here's how one mother described a nurse's
sales pitch. The nurse began by saying breastfeeding was best.
She then went on to detail the supplementary foods that
a breastfed baby would need. The nurse was lying that

(31:00):
it was possible to start with a propriet prietary baby
milk from birth, which would avoid these unnecessary problems. So
she's saying breastfeeding is best if you can get this
nutrient and this nutrient and this nutrient. You have to
make sure that you're eating all these specific things for
breast milk to be best, or just give them formula.
So there's not saying breast milk isn't best. They're saying
breast milk is best. But you have to do these things,

(31:21):
and if you take this formula, you don't have to
do these specific nutritional thing Okay, But to be clear,
like they're they're lying right there, Yes, absolutely correctly in
the sense that like when you're breastfeeding a child, that's okay.
I have not had a child of my own, so
I don't actually know this, but you don't really you
don't need anything else other than breast milk for a while.
I mean you you yourself need to be as like

(31:43):
taking care of you want to have a good diet
for feeding yourself correctly, right, well, sure, but I'm going
to guess that that's feeding yourself correctly is cheaper than
buying baby for sure, is sure is And it's also
easier um to do. And even even if you're malnourished
because of somethings are about to discuss, it's often still
better better to give because obviously if you're not well nourished,

(32:04):
your breast milk is not as nourishing. You know, that's
just the way it works. But even in those cases,
because of some stuff we're about to discuss, breast milk
is still going to be better for most of these babies.
And what we're about to talk about why. But it's
important to understand the nurses aren't saying breastmolk isn't as good.
They're selling you our formula makes this easier on you,
and so it's safer actually for your baby. Now, by

(32:27):
the nineteen sixties, some health departments had started to get
wise to the mother craft nurses and milk nurses. In
places like Singapore, they were banned from entering maternity wards
so do mex and other companies like Nestlie got around
this by having their nurses wait outside the hospital gates
to accost new mothers with free samples on their way home.
In Jamaica, nurses with Bristol Myers formula got around the

(32:48):
ban on entering maternity wards by copying down the names
and addresses of new mothers. They basically said, spice into
the hospitals, find the names and addresses of new mothers.
And then go to their homes to leave free samples.
In the phil that's creepy today, they are right. The
only thing they need to do is just look at
your browsing history and then you start getting like ships
and in the mail with a bunch of pamphlets about

(33:09):
baby formula. So yeah, you know, when you didn't happening,
you had to hire nurse spies. So in the Philippines,
milk nurses would stalk public housing projects looking for clothes
lines that had baby clothes on them, and then basically
they would see like a diaper, right, and then they
would go to that door and offer form I know, right,

(33:32):
it gets a lot worse. So nurses were just one
part of the sales pitch. The other chunk was a
marketing blitz. Again, we've all watched the documentary Madmen. Fifties, sixties, seventies.
This is when the advertising industry is fucking exploding and
these formula companies are very cognizant of that, and they
developed their own comprehensive ad blitz aimed at convincing women

(33:52):
that their breast milk was inadequate. So again, because you
have to be a little careful with this, you can't
say breast milk isn't as its formula, but you can
say your breast milk, particularly your breast milk as a
poor woman in the global South, is not as good
as our formula. It was just using shame as a
marketing technique. Is it tried in true way of getting
you to buy stuff? Nessley's ads for lactogen advertised that

(34:16):
it was for use quote when breast milk fails. In
the nineteen fifties, Boarding put out a radio jingle in
the Belgian Congo that went, and this isn't a rough one.
The child is going to die because because the mother's
breast milk has given out. Mama, oh mama, the child cries.
If you want your child to get well, give it
kle I am milk. Like the jingle starts with the

(34:40):
child is going to die. That's the part of your
own version of that mix it. We need very nice rendition.
We'll get Danial to put a beat behind it. Um So.
One of the first NGOs to recognize that this seems
like a bad idea. What's going on with the formula
industry is called war on one. They recognize the problem.

(35:01):
They mobilized to fight it. They put out publications where
they explain the tactic um and they point out that
the goal of these companies is to make poor women
fear that they're malnourished and that as a result, they
were going to harm their newborn baby with an adequate milk.
This was a confidence trick, and when these women felt
anxiety and fear, their milk would dry up as a result.
So there's this understanding like, if we can make them

(35:22):
scared that their milk is inadequate, because anxiety can affect
breastmolk production, we can actually make them produce less breast milk.
In a paper on this, it's pretty comprehensively fucked up.
In a paper on this, the War on Want pointed
out that formula companies were playing on something called the
let down reflex quote, which controls the flow of milk

(35:42):
to the mother's nipple. This is a nervous system mechanism,
and quote. Mothers are deciding that the that a bottle
is necessary to the milk sheet provides some mothers be
even become so concerned about not having enough milk that
they will not have enough. Now the right up I
found from the University of Oklahoma's honors college goes into
more to take ill quote. Nestley took advantage of this
system by promoting the view that breastfeeding is complicated and

(36:05):
prone to failure. Nestle's advertisements, such as their slogan for lactogen,
instilled fear and anxiety and mothers about their inability to breastfeed,
which can have the physiological effect of actually stopping lactation,
forcing the mother to continue to buy formula. Furthermore, Nestly
focused on societal concerns of mothers centered around Western cultural superiority.

(36:26):
Such superiority focused on the ideals of Western beauty and
that breastfeeding will cause breasts to sag, a societal change
from the West where breast became sexualized. Breastfeeding is time
consuming and mothers will not have the time to work
and snob appeal. If you breastfeed, then you are a peasant.
Racism was also a factor in their ad campaigns by
playing on the assumption of white superiority, i e. White

(36:48):
women do not breastfeed, therefore you should not either. Each
of these tactics were meant to instill fear and mothers
about breastfeeding and get them hooked on formula, good ship. Yeah,
oh god, it's so complicated too, because like I don't know,
even just talking to you now, you're you're you're saying,
you know, it's true that formula is one of the

(37:09):
ways that women were able to keep working. And also,
you know, what's another great way to keep women working
is by having lactation rooms in offices and making it
easy for women to have babies. And like all of
this stuff is still so incredibly like even today, it's
still so hard, and so this is this is really depressing.

(37:30):
Thank you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's not like an easy
answer to all these questions other than companies shouldn't be
allowed to do this. That part is easy. It should
be a crime to use advertising in this way. I
will say that one's pretty simple. Now. The newly developed
urban areas and countries like Uganda and then the Congo
were the main target of these promotions. The sixties and

(37:53):
seventies were a time of rapid globalization and development in
Africa particularly, and that brought with it not just ads
for Formula, but adds for all sorts of Western products
and TV and movies that focused his ads for the
modern American lifestyle. This was not a conscious part of
the marketing campaign that Nestley and others employed, but it
had an impact. Many people were obsessed with modernizing and

(38:14):
with adopting new Western behaviors and products. Formula companies consciously
marketed their product as the modern and the superior way
to feed babies. Quote. The zeal of these communities highlights
one of the main problems with development. As Western products
became available in these countries, the new urban class were
forced to adopt them in order to maintain their new
modern lifestyles and to separate themselves from the peasant light

(38:35):
conditions of the rural areas. Development also brought about social
changes for the women in the newly urbanized areas of Africa.
As women in these areas began working for wages, they
had less time to breastfeed. Nestle's promotion of Formula as
an easier, quicker way of feeding appealed to these women.
In Nigeria, Formula ads played on the cultural concept of
power and strength e g. Bottle feeding was seen to

(38:56):
hasten physical development. Now, there are a number of things
that made this dangerous. We're gonna talk about nutrition in
a second, but the first and largest problem with pushing
formula over breast milk in the global South, is that
breast milk is sterile. It is very safe. Formula is
only as safe as the water you add to it.
And many of the developing places where it was being
hawked the hardest lacked access to clean water. Nestlie's instructions,

(39:20):
even the instructions in places they that they handed out
in places like the Ivory Coast, presumed the person preparing
the formula was using modern appliances. Instructions such as wash
your hands thoroughly with soap each time you have to
prepare a meal for the baby don't really work. And
say Malawi, where sixty six percent of households didn't just
lack clean water, they lacked any kind of running water

(39:42):
facilities whatsoever. Sixty of homes in that country had no
indoor kitchen. Now, in many of these places, communities or
villages would share one food preparation area. The most common
setup for that is what's called the three stone kitchen.
This is less of a kitchen in the modern sense
of the word, and more a way to set up
a fire pit in order to enable a more sent cooking.
The gist of it is you have a fire built

(40:02):
in between three large rocks, very large rocks, and you
have a big cooking pot in the center resting on
the rocks, so the rocks both hold up the pot
and also absorb and conduct heat. It's a good way
to cook if you're in the woods with a group
of people and you lack access to a camp stove
or something. But as you'll notice from that description, there's
generally just one big pot that people use to prepare
meals for the group. That kind of situation makes it

(40:24):
very difficult for mothers to boil water to properly sterilize
their bottle. It also makes it difficult for them to
boil water in order to have clean water for the formula.
And even if a mom can make all that work,
there's still the issue a very little cool running water
in most of these communities. So if you manage to
boil the water to clean the water and you use
hot boiling water to sterilize the bottle, both of those

(40:45):
things are hot as hell, so you then I either
have to wait for it to cool down, you have
to be very careful to make sure that nothing gets
on it during the time while it's cooling down, or
once you fill the bottle, you have to dunk it
an unclean cold water to cool it down, which can
still transfer infections. One researcher who studied how Nestle's products
were used in these places also noted that most women
in these situations would not have necessarily known they were

(41:09):
supposed to sterilize the bottle or boil the water. This
is because even though Nestle provided instructions in the native
languages of the places where they sold their formula quote,
most Third world mothers, however, are illiterate even in their
native languages. And again this is the writing at the time,
but it's based on analysis of a lot of these communities.
Now again in the terminology is outdated here, but this

(41:29):
is a guy studying these places during that time. Another
person who studied this ship was a dude named Dr
David Morley. He spent a lot of time in rural
Nigerian villages trying to answer one important question. Um, all
of the formula ads in these places were focused on
women who have difficulty breastfeeding. Right. That's how the formula
companies justified this, The idea that poor mothers must have
issues with nutrition or other issues feeding their babies via

(41:52):
breast milk, and so they need formula. Right. Dr Morley
study found that less than one percent of mothers in
rural Nigeria had serious breastfeeding problems. It was just not
an issue the same way that these companies treated it
as Again, not to say that some people didn't have
need this, but not nearly all. And in for most
of these cases where you're living in a community where

(42:13):
you all share one big kitchen, it's much safer if
it's at all possible for your baby to breastfeed for
all the reasons we've talked about. And meanwhile, like Nesley
is still penetrating right, Oh yeah, going as hard as
they can on this. You're endangering your baby by feeding
it your breast milk. Give it our safe, natural, modern
formula that you can't sterilize properly because you lack the

(42:33):
infrastructure to do that. And that we're handing out instructions
that you probably can't read because we're just shotgunning this
stuff out to villages that were completely isolated from the
Western world fifteen years ago. You know. Um Fatima Patel
was a nurse who worked with Peruvian indigenous people in
the Amazon in n She told a Senate committee how

(42:53):
she watched villagers prepare prepare formula and that part of
the world. Quote, the river is used as a laundry,
as a bath room, as a toilet, and for drinking water.
But to get the fuel to boil the water, she
has to go into the jungle, chop a tree trunk
with a machete and carry it on her back. No
mother is going to use that hard earned piece of
wood to boil that water. So the babies are drinking
the contaminated water. There's just too much going on, right, Like,

(43:16):
they don't have the time or the and and they're
not in a lot for something that's supposed to be
a heck of a lot easier. Turns out it's way
more complicated, it's way more dangerous, much bigger problem. And again,
the vast majority of these women could breastfeed perfectly, safety safely.
The vast majority these women cannot provide their babies with
formulas safely to the same extent. Even in cases where
mothers were extremely perfectly careful about all these other steps,

(43:39):
which is a very high standard in a lot of
these places, you still would have to deal with the
problem that babies often don't finish their bottle of formula right, Like,
usually it's a couple of meals, right, and every hit,
every bottle isn't free. Moms have to pay for that.
And these people are very poor, so they wouldn't throw
out a half or a two thirds filled bottle of formula.

(44:00):
They would store it, and because they don't have power,
they have to store it at room temperature and a
tropical country where it will suffer explosive bacterial growth during
that period. Another problem was over delusion, because again the
women that Nestlie and the company are marketing towards are
extremely poor, so they can't afford all of the formula
they need to buy in order to use it properly,

(44:23):
so they water it down because once they've gotten hooked
on the stuff, they're not producing enough breastmoke they can
You can't go back past a certain point, right. That's
the way this ship is stuck. One study in the
Journal of Tropical Pediatrics found that in Indonesia, only one
quarter of women surveyed mixed their formula reasonably close to
its recommended strength. That study noted that the women they

(44:45):
surveyed were actually better off financially than most women in
the country with higher levels of education, they just didn't
have access to enough funds in order to make that
work Among poorer groups of mothers, the researchers concluded that
at many after getting hooked on formula, had to stop
using formula because they couldn't afford it at all, and
since their milk had dried up, they would wind up
replacing formula with cheaper and much less nutritious substitutes like

(45:08):
rice milk and sugar tea, because what else you getta
gotta give the baby something. So basically you end up
with a bunch of kids that are suffering from malnutrition
and maybe dying. Right conclusion, you sure do huge numbers
of them in the millions. We'll talk about that in
a bit. So while all this is ramping up right
the fifties through the seventies, there's ample documentation from an

(45:28):
early period that formula, even in best conditions, is not
as nutritious as breastfeeding. You have to take extra precautions
if you're formula feeding in order to make sure that
that the baby is properly gets proper nutrition. The consequences
of this are first noticed in the United States and
a Cooperstown, New York, during the nineteen fifties by a
doctor named Alan Cunningham, a pediatrician who started his career

(45:49):
working on a Sioux reservation. So he starts working at
the Merry Image and Bassett Hospital, and he notices that
almost all of the sick infants that he treats our
formula fed. I'm gonna quote from the New York Times here.
Dr Cunningham's subsequent investigation, published as two studies in the
Journal of Pediatric showed that illness occurred twice as often
among babies who are not breastfed in the first two
months of life. The difference was sixteenfold. And again, this

(46:13):
is the fifties. Formula is not as good. They don't
know as much about how to This is part of
how they learned the things you have to do in
order to make this. You know, we're not saying it's
bad if you have to, like you can keep take
care of your baby perfectly well on formula, but it's not.
You can't just like hand them the formula and kind
of forget about it. There's things that they had to
be learned once they started doing this. Another Tristian science.
At this point is not is not super developed. It

(46:35):
still has some problems, but at that point it's like
not pretty yeah now. Another study published in nineteen eighty
found that only nine percent of infants who were breastfed
up to the age of six months suffered from malnutrition,
compared to thirty two percent of babies who were formula fed.
By the early seventies and eighties, the consequences of this
rush into formula feeding were obvious enough that watchdog groups
had started crying foul. In nineteen seventy three, The New

(46:57):
Internationalist published an article titled baby Food Tragedy, which we've
cited once. Published an article with the blunter title baby
Killer by Mike Muehler in nineteen seventy four. In nineteen
seventy five, a documentary called Bottle Babies exposed Neslie's marketing
strategy and their tactics of subtly convincing women that formula
was safer and more modern. Spurred on by this global press,

(47:19):
governments and some of the countries being preyed upon by
Neslie started to take action. In nineteen seventy five, doctors
in Biguio City in the Philippines stopped their routine practice
of separating mothers and babies at birth and feeding the
babies with formula, they started returning the infants to their
mothers within an hour of birth and advising the mothers
to breastfeed on demand. From the New York Times quote,

(47:40):
the results were dramatic, as the incidents of breastfeeding sword,
the rate of morbidity, illness, and mortality dropped dramatically. A
similar program worked justice successfully at a hospital in puriscal, A,
a rural region of Costa Rica. Four years after babies
began suckling at their mother's side, the rate of diarrheal
disease had dropped by nine percent, meningitis by and lower

(48:01):
respiratory infection by the mortality rate for acute infection declined
by And you reverse those numbers to get an idea
of how deadly this has been for the countries where
this right. So this is people are getting wise to this,
and this is a huge, huge change for them. Yep.
You know what else, People are getting wise too. Quality

(48:26):
of the products and services that support this podcast. People
who have gotten real wise to that. Um here they are.
That's a heck of an ad intro. That's how we
do it. We're back, so again awareness starts to build

(48:53):
and like protest movements start to build against this horrible
industry in the like early to mid seventies. UM. Now,
despite this, by nineteen eighty one, formula sales in the
U s alone had reached five hundred and fifty million
dollars a year. The world market was estimated to be
more than two billion dollars a year, and that's nineteen
eighties dollars, so you're talking a good amount of money.

(49:14):
Nestley accounted for fully half of that share, with US
companies like the American Home Products Corporation Abbott Laboratories in
Bristol Myers making up the rest. Horrific stories like this
increasingly reached the front page of newspapers like the New
York Times quote when the Jamaican woman brought her two
babies to Allan Jackson's clinic at the University of the
West Indies in Kingston, the pediatrician was shocked by their condition.

(49:37):
Her four month old son weighed only five pounds to
less than at birth, and her daughter wasn't even worse shape.
At eighteen months, she weighed only twelve pounds and soon
lost four more. With Dr Jackson questioned the woman, who
had ten other children, He discovered that she had never
breast fed her two youngest. Their diet since birth had
been infant formula. Because the family income averaged only seven

(49:57):
dollars a week, the mother had to heavily dilute the
expensive formula to make it last longer for the four
month old baby. Dr Jackson later told Senator Edward I. M.
Kennedy's Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research one ten of
feed should have lasted for something like just under three days.
She said that one tin of feed lasted two weeks
to feed both of the children. Oh god, that's so brutal. Yeah,

(50:20):
it's pretty bad. Obviously, no blame on like this woman,
this family is doing the best they can in a
desperate situation. Um. And also, how many kids did you say?
Did you say she had twelve? Yeah? I could see
how like after ten you might want to like not rescue.
Get that. Um wow, yeah, that's that's really tough. And

(50:42):
that also has do we know of the kids survived?
I don't believe those two did, but you often don't
get Yeah. So, Nesley and their fellows first responded to
the backlash by ending the most egregious of their marketing practices.
First they took away the semi official uniforms of their
mother craft nurses, and then they ended the program entirely.
This was not enough to stop an international boycott against

(51:04):
Nestlie products organized by the Infant Formula Action Coalition, nor
was it enough to stop a river of lawsuits and
eventually congressional inquiries. We talked about that just a second ago.
Protesters convened on the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, which
prompted this response from a Nestlie spokesman. Bestle of course,
as a Swiss company and does not manufacture, distribute, or
sell infant formula in the United States and thus there

(51:25):
has never been any direct impact on the company through
that product. So Nestlee's like, this protest move it starts
in the US against this industry and this is like,
we don't even sell our formula here. And I was like, well, yeah,
that's people aren't angry about what you're doing here so
much like which they're angry about, um, the fact that
you know, and again Nestlee is half of the global
market for formula, so they are overwhelmingly responsible for this shock,

(51:49):
super duper ring the problem. Yeah, and the protests continued.
Dr Stephen Joseph, a u s AID official, went to
The New York Times and claimed that reliance on baby
formula by us AIDS research caused as many as one
million infant deaths a year through malnutrition and diarrheal diseases.
The War on Want continued to publish expose s until

(52:09):
in nineteen seventy six, uh Nestle sued the German translator
of one of their pamphlets titled Nestle Killed Babies, Kills babies,
which seems like an accurate statement to me based on
what USAID has said. But Nestle wins their lawsuit because
there Nestlee and they have all of the money. UM.
I would suggest that's probably why. And the judge still,

(52:30):
the judge rules in their favor, but he also tells
them they have to modify their publicity methods fundamentally. Um,
which time declared a moral victory for consumers. I don't
know if I would call it a moral victory for anybody.
But so did they actually end up changing the way
they were marketing things? Great question? Absolutely not. I mean legally, yes,

(52:51):
they do change it. The question is does that change
what their marketing does, which isn't a point that we
we're gonna talk about at now. So in nine one,
the World Health Assembly adopts a resolution that establishes an
international code of marketing. Breast milk substitutes right, So we decide,
we've gotta have an international law about how you can

(53:11):
market this ship. And they put that resolution through and um, well,
here's the start of an article written by the l. A.
Times in nineteen ten years after that resolution and thirteen
years after the lawsuit against Nestlie or bian Nestle. Six
months old, Jim j H y M had withered away
to skin and bone by the time the doctors first
saw him. The diagnosis malnutrition caused by improper formula feeding.

(53:34):
The doctor said Jim would survive, but UNICEF estimates that
more than one point five million other Third World babies
die each year because aggressive promotion of infant formula persuades
their mothers to bottle feed rather than breastfeed. And again
I'm quoting here when I say third World. That's how
it's written at the time. So that article that that

(53:55):
l A Times article is interesting in part because Jim's
and I think it's Jim. It's j H y M.
Jim's parents were middle class in the Ivory Coast, which
means they had the resources and the nutrition for his
mother to have breast fed him um. But his mom's working,
his dad's working. They decide formulas going to be great
and they give they have like their Her mom is
taking care of the baby because they're both out of

(54:17):
the house a lot um and when interviewed, his parents
claim that Neslee's ad campaign and the free formula Neslie
gave out in the Avorean hospital where they had their
baby convinced them that formula would be the easiest and
healthiest way to feed their baby. It was also fashionable
and this is an up and coming, upwardly mobile middle
class family. Right. Um Jim loses more than half of
his body weight before his parents take him to a

(54:38):
US financed oral rehydration center. Quote. The baby looked like
a famine victim, belly bloated, stick like limbs, a tiny
skeleton clearly visible through a stretch of skin. Most of
his hair had fallen out and what was left had
turned orange, a sign of severe malnutrition. While other children
at the clinic were being fed with spoons of oral
rehydration fluid. Jim was so weak a drip had to

(54:58):
be attached to his nose for the fluid to be
pumped in with a syringe. Yeah. I don't even know
what to say at this point, because like this is
just like like actually super depressing. It's it's real bleak,
it's a real bad time. UM. Probably shouldn't be legal
to do any of this. UM, certainly to advertise for

(55:22):
stuff in general. Now, one study showed that babies on
the Ivory Coast, like Jim, fed on formula rather than
breast milk are four times as likely to die. And
again that's not in general, that's in these these locations,
but these locations are a huge chunk of the market. Right.
Outrage over cases like Jim's convinced the Ivorian health authorities
to regulate and restrict the distribution of Nestlei formula at

(55:44):
hospitals to new mothers. Right, so this becomes a problem
the health authorities, they're like, well, let's stop giving this
out to everybody. Nestley retaliates against them and says, okay,
we're not going to give you any free formula then,
And of course they needed a lot of free formula
because there are there are horrible viral epidemics and bacterial
epidemics throughout the Ivory Coast, and a lot of moms die,

(56:08):
and you have to have baby formula for those moms.
And the hospitals rely on the free formula from Nestlie
in order to feed these babies. And Nestleie says, if
you're not giving free formula to everybody, even the people
who don't need it, we're not giving you any fuck you.
So they're holding like motherless children hostage. They're putting a
gun to orphaned babies and saying it's good ship Nestlee. Um.

(56:34):
So yeah. In short order, the medical system had a
shortage of formula and was unable to feed abandoned babies
or orphaned babies. Quote. The situation poses a moral dilemma
for Africa's cash strapped hospitals, said Andoah Joseph, head of
pediatric service at Abba John's state run University Hospital Center. No,
we don't want them handing out their products to mothers
and persuading them against breastfeeding, but we need their products

(56:55):
for mothers who have no choice, he said, Does this
mean hospital should start paying? It's a difficult question. And
of course these are not hospitals with money. This is
the Ivory Coast. They have to make some tough ass
choices with where their money goes. You know, now, we
will never have an accurate account of how many babies
died as a direct result of the ad campaigns and
formula peddaling that Nestlie and other companies engaged in. I

(57:16):
found a single two thousand eighteen study that just looked
at the impact of Neslee's marketing on infant death rates
in low and middle income countries in nineteen eighty one,
So this is one year, one subset of countries, and
they estimated sixty six thousand additional infant deaths in that
year alone. UM to hear a lot of different estimates
as to have, including some that are like in the

(57:37):
millions a year. It's hard to tell because other stuff
going on obviously, right, not every diarrhel Like a lot
of stuff is happening in the Yeah, I mean, I
think that's that's also the main issue. Right. You cannot
say that a baby who is sick was necessarily sick
because of this formula. They might have gotten some other thing,
but maybe their immune system was weak. Because they weren't
being fed properly. Like it is actually so complicated believed

(58:00):
to go after a company like Nestley at this point. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I mean that's why this study that that estimated sixty
six additional list was very narrow when its scope, because
they were trying to specifically look at when the ad
campaigns were launched in which countries, how death rates changed,
all that stuff. And these are all correlation studies, not
like it's because of this, yes, now that study. Two

(58:21):
thousand eighteen, the World Health Assembly voted on a breastfeeding
resolution that was widely considered non controversial. It suggested that
the international community should take a mild stand and state
that formula producing companies should not be able to advertise
that formula is better than breastfeeding. Very simple statement, right.
The Trump administration refused to back the resolution from the

(58:42):
Philadelphia Inquirer quote. In addition, the US delegation threatened poor
countries such as Ecuador that had introduced the measure to
withdraw support of the resolution, or the U s would
draw withdraw its financial support of these poor nations. So
and Russia did eventually introduce the resolution unchallenged by the US.
But again Nestlee threatens countries like, if you're not going

(59:02):
to give everybody this formula, we're taking all of the
free formula way. And the US is like, if you're
going to back a resolution that's bad for formula producing companies,
We're not going to give you aid. Cool. Well, this
makes the US look great. Yeah. Now also in Switzerland too, Yeah,

(59:22):
they're a big part of this. Now. In two thousand eighteen,
a company called the Changing Markets Foundation IS issued a
massive report on the infant milk products sold by Nestle
in forty different countries. Again two eighteen, it found that
Nestlei's products often contradicted health advice given by Nestlee reps
in public statements. The company was found to make health
claims around the world about probiotics and prebiotics that were

(59:43):
prohibited by European health regulators. Several products were advertised as
the closest to breast milk, but each of these products
actually had wildly different ingredients. Quote. The report concludes that
NESTLEIE is not driven by nutritional science, but instead by
a sharp and prioritized focus on profit and growth at
the spensive infants and their parents. I mean, I guess

(01:00:05):
that doesn't surprise me, but damn. Yeah, yep, So like
that's all like pretty recent history, Like yeah, this the
story that you're telling me, Like we're still in the
thick of it. Yeah, we're still dealing with it. Yeah,

(01:00:25):
I mean the good thing is that now more doctors
are aware of what's going on and there's more data
on like, so it's not you know, you're not dealing
with as much of a problem as like, well, there's
more plausible deny ability for these companies to hide behind,
but they are still engaging in practices. It's again not
the same kind of ad campaign, but it does have

(01:00:47):
an effect that is similar um because that effect has
been measured and is continuing to be measured. UM. And
that's cool and good. Anyway, anyone want to get a
Nestle chocolate bar, you know, how about I mean, listen

(01:01:12):
if you want to talk about nestleie. There's also water bottles,
which are a huge issue. Like this company has been
involved in a lot of other ship that is not
good for the planet. You know, we just had don't
have as much time as that, but I mean we'll
talk about it at some point. But yeah, one of
the sketchy things that when Nestlie tries to like talk
about how they've changed and like how they're supporting Like
they make a big deal if we're supporting access to

(01:01:32):
clean water from others in these places, because that's so
important for them being able to use the formulas safely.
And it's like, well, you're also taking water away from
communities in a lot of cases and trying to like,
we just had a big fight in Oregon a couple
of years back to stop them from taking like a
quarter of the water runoff from Mount Hood. Um, and
they're currently sucking California dry. And if there's one thing

(01:01:53):
they know about California, it's the state with plenty of water. Um,
are you in Portland right now? Yeah? Uh you said
Mount Hood. My sister in law got married a looking
at Mount Hood at to look at when you're getting
my favorite mountains? Yeah, yep, yep, souh, nest how's it going?

(01:02:23):
I mean dread? Dread? Yeah, dread is a good feeling.
Everybody likes some dread. Yeah, Um, I don't know. Hydrate Yeah,
hydration is good. Uh, finding Nestlee infrastructure and well, okay,
probably shouldn't so eight, Robert, what is the legal definition

(01:02:45):
of incitement again? We're not doing this again. It's not
happening again. All right, Okay, well but fair enough, Sophie says,
I can't in the show the way I wanted to,
So I'm just going to ask my wonderful guest to
plug her plug dobles. Oh is this now the time? Now?
Is the time? Now? Is the time? Now? H Yeah?
So I host a podcast called Vice News Reports. It

(01:03:07):
is a documentary style weekly news podcast where we really
try and take people to the stories, incorporate a lot
of field audio, um, and we cover a wide range
of topics and it's Vice so you know, it's fun,
it's it's a little uh looser and uh yeah, I

(01:03:28):
think it's really engaging. I think we do some good
journalism that also feels you know, real and and sometimes
there are some swear words in there, so you should
check it out. Well that is rad check that out,
and um, don't check out Nestley products ideally. Yeah yeah, um,
you can find us where you just found us if

(01:03:49):
you if you've listened to this episode, you know where
we are. We're we're already inside you, um your ears
at least in your brain, probably your lymph nodes. There's
a lot of new data coming out about about that,
so UM, congratulation my sinuses right now for for sure. Absolutely. Um.
You can find my book my novel at a t

(01:04:11):
R book dot com or as a podcast on After
the Revolution. You can check that out. And you can,
I don't know, go walk through the grocery store and
look at baby formula products and get very angry and
none of the people around you will understand it unless
they're also listening to this podcast, in which case I
don't know. Sophie says, I can't say anything insiding anymore,

(01:04:33):
so we're just gonna end the episode. Uh well, I
learned a lot that was wonderful. Thank you, Robert

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Robert Evans

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