Boobs are Political
I consider myself a republican when it comes to voting time. But good grief. This makes me angry. Granted, some of the ad descriptions are rather graphic, but the reality is that obesity and Type II diabetes are both linked to infants who were fed formula instead of being breastfed (along with numeous other health difficulties).
Please don’t be offended by the obvious liberal/democratic slant this article displays. Instead, read the information and then DO SOMETHING. Let the current administration know how you feel about this issue. It is important.
I will also preface this entry by saying that I tried unsuccessfully to breastfeed all 4 of my children. I developed severe infections with each and resorted to bottle feeding when antibiotics and pain drove me to it. (I have information NOW that would help me breasfeed successfully though it does my first 4 children precious little good.)
I admit openly though that I cried for the first few days of bottle feeding because I was keenly aware of the health risks I was exposing my children to and taking from them by the choice. How many women do NOT have that information becfore making a choice to bottle feed?
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The Los Angeles Times | By Wendy Orent | September 30, 2007
What science the Bush administration chooses to stifle or promote seems to
be a matter of politics and economics. According to a recent story in the
Washington Post, the multibillion- dollar baby formula industry pressured the
Department of Health and Human Services to weaken a 2004 public-service
campaign promoting breast-feeding — and it worked, even though the science
supported the other side. Numerous studies suggest that breast milk protects
infants from developing certain illnesses and that formula-feeding increases
their health risks. The ad campaign was designed to drive home that point.
Now the health of millions of infants is at risk because mothers don’t have
the scientific knowledge the ads would have conveyed to make an informed
choice between breast- or formula-feeding.
According to the Post, a recent report by an agency within the Health and
Human Services Department makes the same point as the canceled ads but has
also been downplayed by the government because of pressure from the formula
industry. The original ad campaign was sponsored by the department’s Office
on Women’s Health and developed by the Ad Council, a nonprofit group that
produces public-service TV commercials. One spot shows a pregnant woman
riding a mechanical bull while a voice-over says, “You wouldn’t take such
risks while you were pregnant — why take them afterward? Babies were born
to be breast-fed.” Another ad features a hypodermic needle lying alongside a
nipple-topped insulin bottle — and states that formula-fed infants are 40%
more likely to develop Type 1 diabetes. The ads aimed to shock women into an
awareness that the risks of not breast-feeding their infants were real.
According to Gina Ciagne, a former public affairs specialist in the women’s
health office who worked on the campaign: “Very soft campaigns had always
been used for breast-feeding. These weren’t resonating. We needed something
to break through the clutter.” Formula companies got wind of the ads on the
Ad Council’s website and immediately tried to kill them. Powerful economic
interests were at stake. For Abbott Laboratories, Mead Johnson Nutritionals,
Wyeth Nutrition and Nestle Nutrition, feeding babies is big business. For
instance, in 2006, according to public filings with the Securities and
Exchange Commission, Abbott Nutrition, a division of Abbort Laboratories and
the industry leader, sold more than $1 billion worth of these products in
the United States alone.
At the 2004 meeting of the American Academy of Pediatrics, formula industry
lobbyists buttonholed Dr. Carden Johnston, the academy’s new president, and
persuaded him to write a letter to Tommy G. Thompson, then-secretary of
Health and Human Services, protesting the “negative” tone of the
pro-breast-feeding ads. “I support the ad campaign being very positive.
Breast-feeding should be a nurturing sort of experience; we should not use
guilt,” Johnston says now. Johnston’s letter outraged Dr. Lawrence M.
Gartner, then-head of the academy’s committee on breast-feeding. “The
formula companies wanted to get the ad campaign killed [because] of the
strong financial relationship between the formula companies and the
[American Academy of Pediatrics], ” he told me.
Johnston’s letter had an immediate effect at the Health and Human Services
Department, Ciagne says. So did the lobbyists hired by the International
Formula Council: Clayton Yeutter and Joseph Levitt. Yeutter, a former
secretary of Agriculture, had been instrumental in setting up the Women,
Infants and Children program in 1972. Low-income mothers eligible for this
food program buy more than half the formula sold in the United States, and
the formula industry partly subsidizes it through rebates. The rebate
program alone subsidizes about 2 million families. In his letter to
Thompson, Yeutter complained that “the [breast-feeding] ad campaign . . . is
clearly inconsistent with the approach taken by the USDA over the past three
decades.” In order words, the ads threatened the Women, Infants and Children
program’s heavy dependence on the formula companies. > > At the same time,
Wanda Jones, the director of the women’s health office, recalled that she
and others “began to doubt” the science behind the public-service ads. “The
science in these frontier areas was really rather immature,” she told me.
But how questionable was the science? Jones concedes that even in 2004,
research showed that Type 1, or insulin-dependent, diabetes occurs at
significantly lower rates — the percentage ranges from 19% to 40% — among
breast-fed babies. Because the data on formula-feeding and Type 2 diabetes
are more equivocal, Jones says, the ad with the syringe and nipple-topped
insulin bottle was dropped. “Most people don’t know the difference between
Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes [which seldom involves insulin injections], so we
felt it would be confusing,” Jones said. Although the science supporting a
link between childhood leukemia (15% to 19% lower in children who were
breast-fed, according to studies) and asthma (27% to 40% lower in breast-fed
children) is strong, the ads on these illnesses were also scratched.
Pressure from the formula companies and the American Academy of Pediatrics
trumped the science: Instead of nipple-topped syringes and inhalers, new,
soft ads featured dandelion puffs and ice cream sundaes vaguely evoking
breasts. The entire campaign, shown in only 17 states, quietly expired in
2006. The report released in April by the Agency for Healthcare Research
and Quality, a unit within the Health and Human Services Department,
supports the claims made in the original ad campaign — and then some. It
assessed the research designs, methods and results of 9,000 studies, dating
from 1966 to May 2006, on the health implications of breast- versus
formula-feeding. The report concluded that there is a substantially greater
risk of severe lower respiratory (72% higher), intestinal (64% higher) and
middle-ear infections (23% to 50% higher) for formula-fed babies. Sudden
infant death is 36% more likely among formula-fed babies.
“The problem with the formula companies is that they’re marketing a product
clearly inferior to breast milk,” Gartner said. No formula can compete,
nutritionally or immunologically, with something produced by eons of natural
selection and tailored to the precise needs of human infants and their
mothers. Women who do not breast-feed put their babies at risk. Sadly, many
of these mothers are in the Women, Infants and Children program. By law,
according to Kate Houston, a deputy undersecretary in the Agriculture
Department, any participant who wants formula must be given it, and almost
half of all infants born in the U.S. receive assistance from the food
program. For many reasons, not least that work environments are seldom
supportive of breast-feeding, most of these mothers choose formula.
“It’s really personal choice,” said Mardi Mountford, executive vice
president of the International Formula Council. “There are lots of different
circumstances that factor in. The mom is the one to make the
choice.”Mountford also refuses to acknowledge that the Agency for Healthcare
Research and Quality report has any validity. “I don’t accept the science,”
she says flatly.It’s a neat trick. The formula companies and their
supporters have deftly reframed the debate. The science is invalid. So the
debate isn’t about science anymore, it’s just about choice, and mothers
shouldn’t be made to feel guilty about their preferences. “If a formula-fed
child gets leukemia, we don’t want the mother to feel guilt over it, on top
of everything else,” Johnston said. No such mother should feel guilty. But
she should feel angry that she wasn’t told, in some clear, graphic and
unmistakable way, what the health risks of formula-feeding are. The terrible
thing is that our government had the information and for political and
economic reasons chose — and still chooses — to keep that knowledge to
itself.
Wendy Orent is the author of “Plague: The Mysterious Past and Terrifying
Future of the World’s Most Dangerous Disease.”
–
Unfortunately, the role of obstetrics has never been to help women give
birth. There is a big difference between the medical discipline we call
“obstetrics” and something completely different, the art of midwifery. If we
want to find safe alternatives to obstetrics, we must rediscover midwifery.
To rediscover midwifery is the same as giving childbirth back to women. And
imagine the future if surgical teams were at the service of the women and
the midwives, instead of controlling them.” – Michel Odent, MD, French
Obstetrician, 2006.
Tags: breastfeeding political formula infant newborn pregnanc
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