Henri Nestle's corporation allegedly starved babies by shifting from a 1860s breastfeeding supplement to aggressive global marketing that exploited fear, racism, and Western beauty standards. Through hospital donations, paid doctor endorsements, and deceptive "mothercraft nurses," the company promoted formula in water-scarce regions like Uganda and Nigeria, causing infant deaths via contaminated water and malnutrition. Despite early warnings from pediatricians and the 1981 World Health Assembly code, Nestle continued profit-driven tactics, ignoring infrastructure needs and retaliating against hospitals, ultimately prioritizing sales over child survival while facing modern scrutiny over environmental water extraction. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Lizzie McGuire at 2 A.M00:02:17
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Readers, Katie's finalists, Pablo Sis.
We have an incredible new episode this week for you guys.
We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode.
They put on Lizzie McGuire at 2 a.m. video on demand.
This guy's 2 a.m.
2 a.m.
Whatever time it is.
Lizzie McGuire and I'm like wild bats.
It was like a first closet moment for me where I was like, You're like, I don't feel like she's hot like the rest of them.
No, no, no.
I was like, she's beautiful, but I'm appreciating her in a different way than these boys are.
I'm not like, listen to Las Culturistas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
How much you wait, Wanda, right now?
I'm about 130.
I'm at 183.
We should race.
No, I want to leave here with my original hip.
On the podcast, The Match Up with Aaliyah, I pair prominent female athletes with unexpected guests.
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Hello, gorgeous.
It's Lala Kent, host of Untraditional Ila.
My days of filling up cups at sir may be over, but I'm still loving life in the valley.
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What?
The Wet Nurse Controversy00:15:55
Starving my babies.
Shit.
Ah, 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 y'all about them.
And our guest today is Ariel Duem Ross.
Did I get it right?
Close.
You did pretty good.
You did pretty good.
It's Ariel Duem Ross.
Doem.
But you know what?
That was a valiant effort.
I love it.
Well, valiant is the only word that could possibly describe me.
So I appreciate you saying that.
Ariel, you are a correspondent and host of the podcast Vice News Reports.
And you are currently in a closet, a little bitty padded closet recording.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
I've got my moving blankets surrounding me and my little padding.
I'm ready to go.
Excellent.
I used to have a Clawfus when I lived in LA, except for I only used it for about a week and then I filled it with trash.
So what I'm saying is I respect your ability to actually commit to the Clawfus because it's hard.
It requires both a noble soul and discipline beyond the kin of most mortals.
Well, that makes me feel good because I think my wife thinks this closet is extremely unruly and like has no rhyme or reason because you haven't seen the top shelves.
It's not cute in here.
You can fit in it.
That means you have done an impressive job with the Clawvis.
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 a lot.
Do you think, like, they should be fed?
Yes, generally speaking, I think they benefit from food.
Well, that really puts you on a different standing than our bastard today, which is the Nestle Corporation.
Oh, boy.
I'm actually really excited about this.
This is going to be great.
What do you know?
I'm sure I think 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 Nestle baby formula.
I don't know, kerfuffle disaster, quasi-mass murder spree thing.
Have you heard anything about this?
Is this something that happened like, you know, relatively recently, like in Asia slash Australia?
Is that by relatively recently, you mean the entire lifespan of us and our parents that yes.
Right.
Okay.
Oh, God.
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 just 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 baby formula, that would have been so much better.
So you know it's bad when you're rooting for tainted baby formula.
Oh, tainted.
Because look, things get tainted, right?
You're going to make a lot of food for people.
Some of them are going to die from the food because manufacturing at scale is never perfect.
This is much worse than that.
So we're going to get into that.
Are you ready?
Are you ready to take this journey with me?
I'm ready.
If this is actually going to 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 more fucked up than that because nutrition scientists are, to give them credit, some of the people who are like trying to warn about this for a while.
But there's some complicated aspects of this history.
So we got to begin way back in the 1700s, which is when medicine was like, you know, not.
We didn't really have medicine.
But it was a time 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 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.
And so breastfeeding was a pretty good solution, right?
If you don't have access to Mountain Dew, it'll do the trick.
Yeah, it's pretty natural.
It's pretty easy.
Pretty natural.
Yeah.
Not as easy to get as Baja Blast.
But yeah.
And it's, you know, actually, 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 incredible.
That's how babies get a lot of their microbiome in the first couple like days, weeks, immune system stuff.
Yeah, like I said, almost as good as Baja Blast.
Now, there are some issues with breastfeeding, though.
One of them is that people like moms die, especially in the 17, 1800s and peer, like plagues and shit, 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 the 17, 1800s, a 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 breastfed, 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.
And again, this is like if you've got money, you can afford a wet nurse, right?
Because you are not just hiring someone to feed 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.
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 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 did happen.
That did, yeah.
Like, obviously, I'm not, that is very important to note.
This is not going to be a complete history of the concept of wet nursing.
There were ways to do it where it was better or worse.
But it was very common, again, particularly for families of means throughout Europe and the early U.S. and the colonial period.
Families often would hire a wet nurse to live with them.
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.
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.
Although I'm sure it had no impact on anybody.
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 you shouldn't let a wet nurse nurse more than one baby.
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 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 the European colonies all over the world, there was an idea, an 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, which was probably not untrue 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.
Now, yeah, it's not great.
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 milk to their own babies or giving milk at all to their own babies because nobody cared about getting that data because slavery was a nightmare.
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 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 all of the babies could get nursed.
Like they developed mutual aid networks within themselves or within their own communities.
See, I'm learning stuff already.
Yeah.
And these networks of caregiving were, I mean, that's pretty rad.
And they were, I would say, 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 1911 in Georgia described her duties.
Quote, I live a treadmill life and I see my own children only when they happen to see me on the streets when I am out with the children or when my 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 a lot of bleak, again, a lot of bleak aspects of this.
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 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 did.
Do you know what they looked for?
Well, one of the things they looked for was brunettes.
They were vastly preferred to blondes or redheads.
And this is, again, mainly in Europe where the wet nurses, you know, are white.
And they preferred brunettes to blondes or redheads because their milk was said to be more nutritious and the children raised on it had a more balanced disposition.
So, yeah, I don't know.
I don't like how anybody comes up with these rules, but okay.
They weren't good at medicine, so it was nonsense, right?
Like most things they believed.
Now, during the 18th century in 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.
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 resorted to what was then called dry nursing, which was providing animal milk to human babies.
And we've been doing this much further back than the 1700s.
There are records of people using animal's milk to feed human infants as far back as 2000 BC.
So people, this has always been a thing pretty much that we've done because you got to figure out something, right?
And are we just talking about cow's milk here or is it like something different?
No, a bunch of different stuff.
Yaks and I think camels get used sometimes and donkeys and horses and like every kind of milk pretty much.
Every kind of milk people have ever found, they've tried giving 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 deserts 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 their milk.
I would love to.
Is it good?
It's fine, salty.
Salty.
Yeah.
Camels are terrifying.
They're so much bigger than you expect them to be.
And they spit.
They were so giant.
They spit so much.
Oh, man.
I did.
One of my fondest memories in northern India was a little baby camel playing with a little puppy dog in the streets of, I think it was Rishikesh.
That sounds adorable.
It was magical.
I love that.
So dry nursing can work, obviously.
You can keep a baby alive and 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, those infants have more health problems, right?
Because it's not what they, 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.
Now, doctors debated which animal was healthier for dry nursing.
And the general consensus was donkey.
I don't know, again, I have no idea how they came to that conclusion, but that was what a lot of doctors were like.
Yeah, you got to get it.
It's the donkey milks, the good shit.
And there were a lot of debates over whether or not animal milk should be warmed or boiled or diluted or mixed with sugar and honey.
And we do now know that like some variant of those things helps because you're supposed to break down certain proteins that you can do by heating it up and you want to 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 going to quote from a write-up in Contemporary Pediatrics, which is a medical journal here.
In the early 19th century, it was observed that infants fed on altered cow's milk had a high mortality rate and were prone to indigestion and dehydration compared with those who were breastfed.
In 1838, a German scientist, Johann Franz Simon, published the first chemical analysis of human and cow's milk, which served 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 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 to cow's milk to render it more digestible and closer to human milk.
By 1860, a German chemist, Justus von Liebig, developed the first commercial baby food, a powdered formula made from wheat flour, cow's milk, malt flour, and potassium bicarbonate.
The formula, which was added to heated cow's milk, soon became popular in Europe.
Liebig's soluble infant food was the first commercial baby food in the U.S., selling at groceries for $1 a bottle in 1869.
So, Ymena's right there, not cheap.
$1 a bottle.
That's a good amount of money back then.
And this is cutting-edge science at the time.
Right.
How far does 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 of feeding a baby.
Oh, yeah, that's expensive.
That's pricey.
Yeah.
Now, this all brings us to the tale of one Henri Nestle.
I'm going to, you can guess what he winds up doing.
He came from a German Swiss family, and he had an eclectic early career that included apprenticing as a pharmacist and becoming a massive rapeseed entrepreneur, which is an unfortunately named seed.
In the 1840s, 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 1850s, he started producing gas lights and fertilizers.
So this guy's doing a lot of stuff.
Like, that's a weird career.
Going from a pharmacy to making gas lights and fertilizer.
And at some point along the line, we don't exactly know when he started.
In the 1860s, 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 chemical, but that's what an artificial formula is.
Inventing Artificial Baby Formula00:07:42
You don't have to add an animal's milk to it.
Now, 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 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 had become increasingly unpopular among wealthy women.
And there's a number of reasons for this.
One of them is that formula has started to become a thing, so it's fashionable to use formula.
It's the newest thing.
There's this idea of a lot of things.
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 changes the kind of things that you are able to wear, particularly in this period.
And so wealthy women don't like having to spend more time not being able to wear the latest fashions of the days.
So it's possible Nestle just wanted to cash in on the fact that there were a lot of rich women who preferred not to breastfeed, right?
That may have been it.
It may have been.
It's probably a mix of things.
Whatever his reasons, by 1867, Henri figured 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, Nestle called his invention kindermel or children flour, which was thought to be a more marketable term, but sounds, I mean, it is more marketable.
Liebig, 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.
Some great marketing choices here.
So wait, forgive me for having missed this.
Where is Henri living at this point?
Henri, I believe he's in, 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 yet.
No, I mean, it quickly comes over here, but he's a German Swiss dude.
Okay.
Yeah, so Henri's invention proved to be a better product than Liebig's, 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 U.S., this is less of an issue because we're 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.
All you needed was water that had been boiled to ensure it was safe.
By the 1870s, Nestle's infant food was selling in the U.S. for 50 cents a bottle.
So it's also a lot cheaper than the other stuff.
Now, from the beginning, the Nestle Corporation warned that formula 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 in the first six months of life.
And this is true, right?
Don't want to be anti-form.
Formula is necessary, right?
There are needs for it.
We're going to be talking 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.
Yeah, 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 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.
We're 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.
And Henri Nestle is not a, he's kind of a weird dude, but he's not a bad guy here.
He just invents a good formula.
It works pretty well.
And Henri 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, 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 got to say, I'm still waiting for the bastard to come in here.
It's come.
Right now, he kind of sounds kind of fine.
He's fine.
He never becomes a bastard that I'm aware of.
It's the Nestle Corporation that does the bad thing.
Okay, okay, okay.
All he's done is tried to feed babies.
Now, people being people, they quickly developed in a lot of the Western world an attitude that formula was superior to breastfeeding.
Some of this was for, again, aesthetic reasons, right?
It's easier on people's breasts.
It's more cosmetically pleasant.
A lot of people see it that way.
So they prefer formula.
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 in the society pages think that formula must be better too.
Cause like, oh, well, like these, the celebrities basically are doing this.
Yeah, if that's what the rich people are doing, I should do it too.
It must be better if the rich people are doing it.
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 going to quote from a write-up by students of the University of Oklahoma's Honors College on the history of baby formula here.
Quote, By the 1930s, a connection between the use of baby formula and malnutrition formed.
Dr. Cecily Williams became the first doctor to observe this connection and denounced the promotion of formula as a substitute to breastfeeding.
However, Nestle 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 starting particularly in the early 1900s, you know, Henri stops 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 take because it's better.
All right.
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 kids hooked on smack.
Nestle and other formula manufacturers like Dumex and Abbott Laboratories would donate large quantities of baby formula to hospital maternity wards.
This saved 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.
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.
Now, in the early half of the 20th century, it's pretty ugly.
Yeah, it gets worse.
So the early half of the 20th 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 that.
But back then, your doctor told you something.
You assumed that's the word of fucking God, right?
Now, doctors may not have thought much about what they were doing, right?
Because 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 a 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 for private enterprise.
One Abbott Laboratory sales manual laid out the stakes.
Quote, when one considers that for every hundred infants discharged on a particular formula brand, approximately 93 infants remain on that brand, the importance of hospital selling becomes obvious.
And in fact, in the 1970s, Ross Laboratories signed a contract with New York City hospitals guaranteeing that each new mother who left would receive a free one-day supply of Simolac.
One day.
Because again, get them hooked.
Yeah.
Financial Literacy Month Kickoff00:04:17
You know who else wants to get you hooked?
Oh, wow.
That was great.
I'm sensing an ad coming on.
Is that correct?
Okay.
I'm ready for it.
Go.
Nothing our advertisers want to do more than get you hooked.
They'll give you a one-day dose of whatever the fuck it is we're selling.
Especially, Sophie, did we land that big heroin ad deal?
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.
Or die.
Oh, God.
On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budgeta Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never, ever taught.
Financial education is not always about like, I'm going to get rich.
That's great.
It's about creating an atmosphere for you to be able to take care of yourself and leave a strong financial legacy for your family.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
I'm Iris Palmer, and my new podcast is called Against All Odds.
And that's exactly what the show is about.
Doing whatever it takes to beat the odds.
Get ready to hear from some of your favorite entrepreneurs and entertainers as they share stories about defying expectations, overcoming barriers, and breaking generational patterns.
I'm talking to people like award-winning actress, producer, and director, Fiva Longoria.
I think I had like $200 in my savings account, and my mom goes, What are you going to do?
And I was like, I'll figure it out.
We had a one-bedroom apartment for like $400 a month, and we all could not afford.
Like, I was like, How am I going to make $100 a month?
I'm opening up like I've never before.
For those of you who think you know me from what you've seen on social media, get ready to see a whole new side of me.
Listen to Against All Odds with Iris Palmer as part of the My Cultura Podcast Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
I was hi, dad.
And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
This is badass convict.
Right.
Just finished five years.
I'm going to have cookies and milk.
Yeah.
Yeah.
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If I'm outside with my parents and they see all these people come up to me for pictures, it's like, what?
Today now, obviously, it's like 100%.
They believe everything, but at first, it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food.
Nestle's Deceptive Marketing Campaigns00:15:39
They cannot feed their kids.
They do not have homes.
Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
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We're back and we're talking about the 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 30s and 40s that if an infant is discharged on a particular formula blend brand, nearly always, they're going to keep using that brand.
So obviously you got to hook them early, right?
It's like a cigarette, like, and they're, they're consciously following.
We have like memos, they're consciously following like cigarette companies, like the way the cigarette companies are good at this shit, 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 Nestle is the largest, to compete vigorously for a hospital's business, as this write-up in the new internationalist makes clear.
In exchange for giving discharge packs of 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 200 maternity departments a year in the U.S. alone.
The layout of these centers, whether by accident or design, makes sure breastfeeding difficult mothers are physically separated from their newborns.
Nurses can swiftly and conveniently administer donated formula in 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 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 1973, but they start doing this in the 30s and 40s, 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 it a pain, it not be the easy normal thing to breastfeed.
And like, here's the thing, breastfeeding, like getting your baby to latch on is already a difficult thing.
If you're going to 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 formula.
It sure is.
And it gets worse because they also do a lot of like, you know, Purdue pharmaceutical shit, like oxy shit, 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 projects, gifts, conferences, publications, and travel junkets of the medical profession.
The American Academy of Pediatrics received a renewable $1 million 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 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.
So they're paying for your offices.
They're sending you on ski vacation weekends.
And they're free drinks.
Yeah, paying for your drinks.
And they're doing this because you're a salesman if you're a pediatrician, right?
Cool.
Good shit.
I love this story already.
This is not at all depressing.
And the formula companies are consciously aping tobacco companies who do this for doctors.
That's why there's physician-recommended cigarettes in like the 50s.
Purdue Pharmaceuticals copies this playbook for OxyContin, right?
Like this, these are all like everyone's paying attention to what everybody does because it keeps working.
Now, all of this, this whole system developed through the 30s and 40s, and the formula industry exploded in the 50s when birth rates soared after World War II.
Western women, primed to trust formula by their doctors, embraced it as a more scientific and thus superior way to feed their children.
They also saw it as liberatory because in a lot of ways it was.
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.
The impact this had was astonishing.
Roughly 68% of mothers born between 1911 and 1915 breastfed their babies.
Only 35% of mothers born in the early 1940s did the same.
So this whole, all of this, and again, it's not just the ad blitz.
Obviously, there's also some social stuff happening right now, but there's a massive impact.
Like this is a really significant change.
The 1960s and 70s 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 it could to everyone it could.
Coca-Cola replaced 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 Nestle and Ross Laboratories saw the so-called third world, which is how it's 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 in 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.
So it confers authority.
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.
Now, because these women are dressed the same as nurses in these hospitals, a lot of these new mothers are convinced that they are independent healthcare professionals.
They work for the hospital, that they're not employees of the companies selling formula, because they don't say, I'm here for Simulak.
I'm here for Nestle.
They say, I'm a child rearing, 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 advice to use formula as a considered medical opinion.
Because why wouldn't you, right?
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 implying that it was possible to start with a proprietary 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.
And if you take this formula, you don't have to do these specific nutritional things.
Okay, but to be clear, like they're, they're lying, right?
Yes, absolutely.
Of course.
Right, 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 yourself need to be as like taking care of yourself.
Like you want to have a good diet.
You are feeding yourself correctly, right?
Well, yes, sure.
But I'm going to guess that feeding yourself correctly is cheaper than buying baby formula.
Sure is.
Sure is.
And it's also easier to do.
And even if you're malnourished, because of some things we're about to discuss, it's often still better to give.
Because obviously, if you're not well nourished, 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 we're about to talk about why.
But it's important you understand the nurses aren't saying breast milk isn't as good.
They're selling our formula makes this easier on you.
And so it's safer, actually, for your baby.
Now, by the 1960s, some health departments had started to get wise to the mothercraft nurses and milk nurses.
In places like Singapore, they were banned from entering maternity wards.
So Dumex and other companies like Nestle 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 ban on entering maternity wards by copying down the names and addresses of new mothers.
They would basically send spies into the hospitals, find the names and addresses of new mothers, and then go to their homes to leave free samples.
In the Philippines...
Oh, that's creepy.
Yeah, right.
The only thing they need to do is just look at your browsing history, and then you start getting like shit sent in the mail with a bunch of pamphlets about baby formula.
So, you know, when you did it, that was still happening.
You had to hire nurse spies.
So, in the Philippines, milk nurses would stalk public housing projects looking for clotheslines that had baby clothes on them.
And then, like, basically, they would see like a diaper, right?
And then they would go to that door and offer formula.
That's so gross.
I know, right?
That's pretty fucked up.
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 Madman, 50s, 60s, 70s.
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 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 good as 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.
Just using shame as a marketing technique is a tried and true way of getting you to buy stuff.
Nestle's ads for lactogen advertised that it was for use, quote, when breast milk fails.
In the 1950s, Borden 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 the mother's breast milk is given out.
Mama, oh, mama, the child cries.
If you want your child to get well, give it KLIM milk.
Like, the jingle starts with the child is going to die.
That's the visual.
You should record your own version of that and remix it.
That would be a very nice rendition.
We'll get Daniel to put a beat behind it.
Cool.
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 Want.
They recognize the problem, they mobilize to fight it.
They put out publications where they explain the tactic.
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 inadequate 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 that, like, if we can make them scared that their milk is inadequate, because anxiety can affect breast milk 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 letdown reflex, quote, which controls the flow of milk to the mother's nipple.
This is a nervous system mechanism.
And, quote, mothers are deciding that a bottle is necessary to the milk she provides.
Some mothers may even become so concerned about not having enough milk that they will not have enough.
Now, the write-up I found from the University of Oklahoma's Honors College goes into more detail.
Quote, Nestle took advantage of this system by promoting the view that breastfeeding is complicated and prone to failure.
Nestle's advertisements, such as their slogan for lactogen, instilled fear and anxiety in 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, Nestle focused on societal concerns of mothers centered around Western cultural superiority.
Such superiority focused on the ideals of Western beauty and that breastfeeding will cause breasts to sag, a societal change from the West where breasts 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 women do not breastfeed, therefore you should not either.
Each of these tactics were meant to instill fear in mothers about breastfeeding and get them hooked on formula.
Good shit.
Yeah.
Oh, God.
It's so complicated too because like, I don't know, even just talking to you now, you're saying, you know, it's true that formula is one of the 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 like making it easy for women to have babies.
Having maternity and maternity leave.
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.
Thank you.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
There's not like an easy answer to a lot of 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 in countries like Uganda and in the Congo were the main target of these promotions.
The 60s and 70s were a time of rapid globalization and development in Africa particularly.
And that brought with it not just ads for formula, but ads for all sorts of Western products and TV and movies that focused as ads for the modern American lifestyle.
This was not a conscious part of the marketing campaign that Nestle and others employed, but it had an impact.
Many people were obsessed with modernizing and with adopting new Western behaviors and products.
Formula companies consciously marketed their product as the modern and thus 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-like 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 hasten physical development.
Now, there are a number of things that made this dangerous.
We're going to 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.
Nestle's instructions, even the instructions 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 in, say, Malawi, where 66% of households didn't just lack clean water, they lacked any kind of running water facilities whatsoever.
60% of homes in that country had no indoor kitchen.
Boiling Water Safety Issues00:08:27
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 efficient cooking.
The gist of it is you have a fire built 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 out in the woods with a group of people and you lack access to, you know, 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 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 of 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 things are hot as hell, so you then 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 in 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 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, and the terminology is outdated here, but this is a guy studying these places during that time.
Another person who studied this shit 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 breast milk and so they need formula, right?
Dr Morley's 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 for most of them.
These cases where you're living in a community where 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 Nestle, 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 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 15 years ago.
You know, right?
Um Fatima Patel was a nurse who worked with Peruvian indigenous people in the Amazon.
In 1978 she told a Synod committee how she watched villagers prefer prepare formula in that part of the world.
Quote, the river is used as a laundry, as a bathroom, 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 they don't have the time or the and and they're not in a lot of something that's supposed to be a heck of a lot easier turns out.
It's way more complicated and way more dangerous.
Much bigger problem, and again, the vast majority of these women could breastfeed perfectly safely.
Safely, the vast majority of these women cannot provide their babies with formula safely.
To the same extent, even in cases where mothers were extremely, perfectly careful about all these other steps, 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 fill bottle of formula.
They would store it and because they don't have power, they have to store it at room temperature in a tropical country where it will suffer explosive bacterial growth during that period.
Another problem was over-dilution because again, the women that Nestle and 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.
So they water it down because once they've gotten hooked on the stuff, they're not producing enough breast milk.
You can't go back past a certain point, right?
That's the way this shit works.
You're 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 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 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 rice milk and sugared tea.
Because what else are you going to do?
You got to give the baby something.
So basically, you end up with a bunch of kids that are suffering from malnutrition and maybe dying, right?
You sure do.
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 50s through the 70s, there's ample documentation from an 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 the baby is properly, gets proper nutrition.
The consequences of this are first noticed in the United States, in a Cooperstown, New York, during the 1950s, by a doctor named Alan Cunningham, a pediatrician who'd started his career working on a Sioux reservation.
So he starts working at the Mary Imogen Bassett Hospital, and he notices that almost all of the sick infants that he treats are formula fed.
I'm going to quote from the New York Times here.
Dr. Cunningham's subsequent investigation, published as two studies in the Journal of Pediatrics, showed that illness occurred twice as often among babies who were not breastfed.
In the first two months of life, the difference was 16-fold.
And again, this is the 50s.
Formula is not as good.
They don't know as much about how to.
This is part of how they learn the things you have to do in order to make this, you know, because we're not saying it's bad if you have to, like, you can 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 had to be learned once they started doing this.
Yeah, and nutrition science at this point is not is not super developed.
It still has some problems, but at that point, it's like not pretty.
Yeah.
Now, another study published in 1980 found that only 9% of infants who were breastfed up to the age of six months suffered from malnutrition compared to 32% of babies who were formula fed.
By the early 70s and 80s, the consequences of this rush into formula feeding were obvious enough that watchdog groups had started crying foul.
In 1973, the New Internationalist published an article titled Baby Food Tragedy, which we've cited.
Wundt published an article with the blunter title, Baby Killer, by Mike Mueller in 1974.
In 1975, a documentary called Bottle Babies exposed Nestle's marketing strategy and their tactics of subtly convincing women that formula was safer and more modern.
Spurred on by this global press, governments in some of the countries being preyed upon by Nestle started to take action.
In 1975, doctors in Beguyo 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, the results were dramatic.
As the incidence of breastfeeding soared, the rate of morbidity, illness, and mortality dropped dramatically.
A similar program worked just as successfully at a hospital in Puriscal, 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 91%, meningitis by 92%, and lower respiratory infection by 43%.
The mortality rate for acute infection declined by 81%.
And you reverse those numbers to get an idea of how deadly this has been for the countries where this was brewing.
Community Economic Thriving Strategies00:03:46
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 to?
Oh, Jesus.
The quality of the products and services that support this podcast.
People have.
I have heard that.
Gotten real wise to that.
Here they are.
That's a heck of an ad intro.
That's how we do it.
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We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never, ever taught.
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I think I had like $200 in my savings account, and my mom goes, what are you going to do?
And I was like, I'll figure it out.
We had a one-bedroom apartment for like $400 a month, and we all could not afford.
Like, I was like, how am I going to make $100 a month?
I'm opening up like I've never before.
For those of you who think you know me from what you've seen on social media, get ready to see a whole new side of me.
Listen to Against All Odds with Iris Palmer as part of the My Cultura Podcast Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
I was, hi, dad.
And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
This is badass convict.
Right.
Just finished five years.
I'm going to have cookies and milk.
Come on.
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International Regulatory Resolution00:14:43
If I'm outside with my parents and they see all these people come up to me for pitches, it's like, what?
Today now, obviously, it's like 100%.
They believe everything, but at first it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food.
They cannot feed their kids.
They do not have homes.
Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
Listen to Eating Wildbrook from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
We're back.
So, again, awareness starts to build and like protest movements start to build against this horrible industry in the like early to mid-70s.
Now, despite this, by 1981, formula sales in the U.S. alone had reached $550 million a year.
The world market was estimated to be more than $2 billion a year, and that's $1980.
So you're talking a good amount of money.
Nestle accounted for fully half of that share, with U.S. companies like the American Home Products Corporation, Abbott Laboratories, and 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 Alan Jackson's clinic at the University of the West Indies in Kingston, the pediatrician was shocked by their condition.
Her four-month-old son weighed only five pounds, two less than at birth, and her daughter was in even worse shape.
At 18 months, she weighed only 12 pounds and soon lost four more.
When Dr. Jackson questioned the woman, who had 10 other children, he discovered that she had never breastfed her two youngest.
Their diet since birth had been infant formula.
Because the family income averaged only $7 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 M. Kennedy's Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research, one tin 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, it's pretty bad.
And obviously, no blame on like this woman, this family, just doing the best they can in a desperate situation.
And also, how many kids did you say she had?
12.
Yeah, I could see how after 10, you might want to not breastfeed.
Wow.
Yeah, that's really tough.
And that also has...
Do we know if the kids survived?
I don't believe those two did.
But you often don't get.
Yeah.
So Nestle 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 mothercraft nurses, and then they ended the program entirely.
This was not enough to stop an international boycott against Nestle 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 Nestle spokesman.
Nestle, of course, is a Swiss company and does not manufacture, distribute, or sell infant formula in the United States, and thus there has never been any direct impact on the company through that product.
So Nestle's like, this protest movement starts in the U.S. against this industry.
And Nestle's like, we don't even sell our formula here.
I was like, well, yeah, that's people aren't angry about what you're doing here so much.
Like, they're angry about the fact that, you know, and again, Nestle is half of the global market for formula.
So they are overwhelmingly responsible for this.
Oh, shock, super duper ignoring the problem.
Yeah.
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 USAID's research caused as many as 1 million infant deaths a year through malnutrition and diarrheal diseases.
The War on Want continued to publish exposés until in 1976, 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 they're Nestle and they have all of the money.
I would suggest that's probably why.
And the judge still, the judge rules in their favor, but he also tells them they have to modify their publicity methods fundamentally.
Which time declared a moral victory for consumers.
I don't know if I would call it a moral victory for anybody, but that's so did they actually end up changing the way they were marketing things?
Great question.
Absolutely not.
I mean, legally, yes.
They do change it.
The question is, does that change what their marketing does?
Which isn't a point that we're going to talk about that now.
So in 1981, the World Health Assembly adopts a resolution that establishes an international code of marketing breast milk substitutes, right?
So we decide we got to have an international law about how you can market this shit.
And they put that resolution through.
And well, here's the start of an article written by the LA Times in 1991, 10 years after that resolution and 13 years after the lawsuit against Nestle.
Or by Nestle.
Six-month-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.
The doctor said Jim would survive, but UNICEF estimates that more than 1.5 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.
Right.
So that article, that 1991 LA 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 breastfed him.
But his mom's working, his dad's working.
They decide formula is going to be great, and they give, they have, like, their mom is taking care of the baby because they're both out of the house a lot.
And when interviewed, his parents claim that Nestle's ad campaign and the free formula Nestle gave out in the Avorian 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?
Jim loses more than half of his body weight before his parents take him to a U.S.-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 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 actually super depressing.
It's real bleak.
Yeah.
It's a real bad time.
Um, probably shouldn't be legal to do any of this.
Um, certainly to advertise for 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 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 Nestle formula at hospitals to new mothers, right?
So, this becomes a problem.
The health authorities, uh, they're like, Well, let's stop giving this out to everybody.
Nestle 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 horrible viral epidemics and bacterial epidemics throughout the Ivory Coast, and a lot of moms die, and you have to have baby formula for those moms.
And the hospitals rely on the free formula from Nestle in order to feed these babies.
And Nestle 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 mixture hostage.
They're putting a gun to orphaned babies and saying, cool.
It's good shit, Nestle.
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 Andoa Joseph, head of pediatric service at Abidjan'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 for mothers who have no choice, he said.
Does this mean hospitals 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 count of how many babies died as a direct result of the ad campaigns and formula and peddling that Nestle and other companies engaged in.
I found a single 2018 study that just looked at the impact of Nestle's marketing on infant death rates in low and middle income countries in 1981.
So this is one year, one subset of countries, and they estimated 66,000 additional infant deaths in that year alone.
Wow.
You hear a lot of different estimates as to how, including some that are like in the millions a year.
It's hard to tell because other stuff's going on, obviously, right?
Not every diarrheal, like a lot of stuff is happening in these places.
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 probably to go after a company like Nestle at this point.
Yeah.
I mean, that's why this study that estimated 66,000 additional lists was very narrow in 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 extremely important.
Right, these are all like correlation studies, not like it's because of this.
Yes.
Now, that study, 2018, 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 Philadelphia Inquirer, quote, in addition, the U.S. delegation threatened poor countries such as Ecuador that had introduced the measure to withdraw support of the resolution or the U.S. would withdraw its financial support of these poor nations.
So, and Russia did eventually introduce the resolution unchallenged by the U.S.
But again, Nestle threatens countries like, if you're not going to give everybody this formula, we're taking all of the free formula away.
And the U.S. 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.
It's good shit.
Cool.
Well, this makes the U.S. look great.
Yeah.
Now also, and Switzerland, too.
Yeah, they're a big part of this.
Now, in 2018, a company called the Changing Markets Foundation issued a massive report on the infant milk products sold by Nestle in 40 different countries.
Again, 2018.
It found that Nestle's products often contradicted health advice given by Nestle reps in public statements.
The company was found to make health claims around the world about probiotics and prebiotics that were 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 Nestle is not driven by nutritional science, but instead by a sharp and prioritized focus on profit and growth at the expense of infants and their parents.
So, no, this is a good idea.
I mean, I guess that doesn't surprise me.
No.
But damn.
Yeah.
Yep.
So, like, that's all like pretty recent history.
Like, yeah.
The story that you're telling me, like, we're still in the thick of it.
Yeah, we're still dealing with it.
Yeah.
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 deniability 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 an effect that is similar because that effect has been measured and is continuing to be measured.
And that's cool and good.
Anyway, anyone want to get a Nestle chocolate bar?
You know, how about Nestle?
I mean, listen, if you want to talk about Nestle, there's also water bottles, which are a huge issue.
Like, this company has been involved in a lot of other shit that is not good for the planet.
You know, we just had, don't have as much time as I'd like.
I mean, we'll talk about it at some point.
But yeah, one of the sketchy things is that when Nestle 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 clean water from others in these places, because that's so important for them being able to use the formula 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.
And they're currently sucking California dry.
And if there's one thing we know about California, it's the state with plenty of water.
Are you in Portland right now?
Yeah.
You said Mount Hood.
My sister-in-law got married looking at Mount Hood.
Cool.
That's a good mountain to look at.
That's a good mountain to look at when you're getting one of my favorite mountains.
Yeah.
Yep.
Yep.
So Nestle.
How's it going?
I mean, dread.
Dread.
Yeah, dread is a good feeling.
Everybody likes some dread.
Yeah.
I don't know.
Hydrate.
Yeah, hydration is good.
Finding Nestle infrastructure.
And well, okay, probably shouldn't.
Sophie.
Robert.
What is the legal definition of incitement again?
We're not doing this again.
This is not happening again.
All right.
Okay.
Well.
But fair enough.
Ending with Dread and Hydration00:04:04
Sophie says I can't end the show the way I wanted to.
So I'm just going to ask my wonderful guest to plug her pluggables.
Oh, is this now the time?
Now's the time.
Now is the time.
Now is the time.
Yeah.
So I host a podcast called Vice News Reports.
It is a documentary style weekly news podcast where we really try and take people to the stories, incorporate a lot of field audio, and we cover a wide range of topics.
And it's vice.
So, you know, it's fun.
It's a little looser.
And yeah, I think it's really engaging.
I think we do some good journalism that also feels, you know, real.
And sometimes there are some swear words in there.
So you should check it out.
Well, that is rad.
Check that out.
And don't check out Nestle products, ideally.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You can find us where you just found us.
If you've listened to this episode, you know where we are.
We're already inside you, your ears at least, and your brain.
Probably your lymph nodes.
There's a lot of new data coming out about that.
So congratulations.
I'm feeling my sinuses right now, for sure.
Sinuses for sure.
Absolutely.
You can find my book, my novel at ATRBook.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 inciting anymore.
So we're just going to end the episode.
Yay!
Well, I learned a lot.
That was wonderful.
Thank you, Robert.
You know the famous author Roald Dahl.
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But did you know he was a spy?
Neither did I. You can hear all about his wildlife story in the podcast, The Secret World of Roald Dahl.
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Binge all 10 episodes of The Secret World of Roald Dahl now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
How much away, Wanda, right now?
About 130.
I'm at 183.
We should race.
No, I want to leave here with my original hips.
On the podcast, The Match Up with Aaliyah, I pair prominent female athletes with unexpected guests.
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Readers, Katie's finalists, publicists, we have an incredible new episode this week for you guys.
We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode.
They put on Lizzie McGuire at 2 a.m. video on demand.
This guy's playing.
2 a.m.
2 a.m.
Whatever time it is.
Lizzie McGuire and I'm like, wild, wild matching away.
It was like a first closet moment for me where I was like, you're like, I don't feel like she's hot like the rest of them.
No, no, no.
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I'm not like, listen to Las Culturalistas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hello, gorgeous.
It's Lala Kent, host of Untraditional Ila.
My days of filling up cups at sir may be over, but I'm still loving life in the valley.
Life on the other side of the hill is giving grown-up vibes, but over here on my podcast, Untraditional Ila, I'm still that Lala you either love or love to hate.