Some musings on infant formula, advertising and undermining breastfeeding

A microscopic glimmer of positive out of the Chinese milk tragedy…  But it’s not just a Chinese thing – whilst other countries don’t tend to put melamine in their milk, don’t imagine for one moment that formula is 100% safe, wherever in the world you are.

When you breastfeed, you control the milk production – from the beginning of the process to the end.  You know what you eat, you know what your baby eats.  You’re not reliant on a multinational who, chances are, will be putting profit ahead of ideal.  Of course, formula manufacturers don’t want to kill the end user of their product – that would be commercial suicide, if it was to happen on a regular basis.  However, formula can and does kill babies, worldwide.  Problems such as enterobacter sakazakii and salmonella, which can be found in powdered formula (one study found it in 14% of samples taken), is seemingly considered by the industry to be a manageable risk.  Tell that to the babies it affects – mortality rates for babies who succumb to this infection are between 20 and 50% – and that doesn’t include the babies who are left permanently disabled by it.  And that’s something that kills babies in developed countries – I’ve not even touched on

Before you panic, the risk of these bugs can be minimised by either using ready-to-feed cartons or by making up formula with recently-boiled water (no less than 70 degrees) and discarding any your baby doesn’t drink within an hour.  But the fact remains that these fluffy companies, the ones that tell you, with cutesy slogans (SMA’s “Love the milk you give”, Aptamil’s “Inspired by breastmilk” and “Best infant milk” and Cow & Gate’s “Complete nutrition”) and pictures of teddies and ducks, are NOT there to help you, they are there to make money.  There is no mention on the packs that infant formula isn’t sterile, not one of them explains the reason you need to use water of no less than 70 degrees to reconstitute the formula and their websites and marketing material frequently undermine breastfeeding – in fact, the very existence of any of it by definition undermines breastfeeding.

This is why I support calls by Baby Milk Action for all advertising of infant formula to cease.  Advertising doesn’t tell us anything useful about the product, which in turn doesn’t allow parents to make informed choices about what they’re feeding their babies.  I know many people who visit this site find their way here because they’re feeling guilty about feeding their babies formula (I see the search engine terms people use to land on this site).  If formula wasn’t advertised, many people say this guilt would increase, but I see it differently.

One of the things you do when you’re pregnant, particularly for the first time, is read pregnancy and birth magazines.  In these magazines are adverts for formula and related products (bottles, teats, sterilisers, etc).  OK, fair enough, free country.  However, the very presence of those adverts affects the content of the magazines.  After all, as a magazine editor, do you bite the hand that feeds you by writing articles with a “these are the risks of formula feeding” tone?  Or do you write “balanced” articles, ignoring the fact that you’re comparing apples with oranges when you do a comparison of breastmilk and formula?  In fact, even apples and oranges aren’t a decent analogy – breastmilk is a living substance that alters in response to your baby’s needs throughout the feed, throughout the day, depending on the weather, the age of your baby, etc.  Formula is the same stuff, whether you feed it on day one or day 365 or day 700 to your baby.  It contains nothing living.  It tastes identical at every feed.  But you’ll never see that in a baby magazine…

 

I’m going to post this, then revisit it when other things occur to me and edit it, I think!