Nestlé is an ingredient CivicAction didn’t need
Dear CivicAction:
I’ve been a fan of yours for years. As an activist, I love how you provoke public debate and push forward important issues facing our city.
I was super happy to see some of this year’s topics at your boot camp: affordable housing, mental health and workplace, and children’s health — particularly the first 1,000 days, which the World Health Organization says are the most crucial to child development.
As a comrade-in-arms: What were you thinking?
You’ve invited not just one, but two people from Nestlé onto your panel about the child’s first 1,000 days.
One is the current head of corporate affairs for Nestlé Nutrition U.S., Wendy Johnson-Askew. The other is your moderator, Marilyn Knox. It’s true — she left Nestlé last September for the Institute for Better Health. But she’d been there for a whole decade!
Maybe you didn’t know: Nestlé is the biggest producer of infant formula in the world.
The company makes money selling new, exhausted, strung-out mothers bottled and powdered formula to feed their babies, instead of breast milk. Lots of money — the company sucks back almost a quarter of the global $25-billion (U.S.) market, according to a 2013 report by Save the Children.
Maybe you don’t know about the international consumer boycott of Nestlé. The first one started long before your time, in the 1970s. Women around the world found out, through a libel trial in Switzerland, that Nestlé salespeople were regularly pushing formula inside third- world hospitals. You know what happens when poor women mix powdered formula with dirty water — all they often have access to? Their babies get sick. Many of them die.
Even today, the World Health Organization says 1.4 million babies die every year because of “suboptimal breastfeeding.” Sub-optimal is code for formula or baby food.
Back in 1981, the World Health Assembly passed an international code for the marketing of formulas and other “breast-milk substitutes.” It was supposed to stop Nestlé salespeople from pushing their formula on exhausted mothers — not just in hospitals, but in public and on its labels.
But year after year, Nestlé has broken the rules.
One-fifth of the health professionals in Pakistan surveyed by Save the Children in 2012 admitted they’d received gifts from breast-milk supplement companies, mostly Nestlé. Similarly, Save the Children reports that 40 per cent of mothers their workers interviewed in China had been contacted directly by baby food companies’ sales representatives — half of them while in hospital! Most said they’d been given free samples.
Well, we don’t have dirty water, you might be thinking. At least not in Toronto and Hamilton. Babies here don’t die from diarrhea.
That’s true. But even when mixed with good water, formula can make very little babies sick. They have a higher risk of asthma, diabetes, celiac disease, ulcerative colitis, Crohn disease and childhood leukemia according to the WHO. They have a greater chance of becoming obese. Plus, studies show their “cognitive function” is worse than babies who were exclusively breastfed.
For these reasons, both the WHO and Health Canada recommend women breastfeed their babies exclusively — no formula — for at least six months and up to two years.
All this makes me think: Were you being ironic? Did you also invite Imperial Tobacco and the leading crystal-meth producer in Canada to participate on the panel?
In your response to my call, your spokeswoman Sarah Harris emailed that the panel is meant to examine many aspects of childhood health and that CivicAction’s model is to be a “neutral sandbox” for all sectors to play together in.
In that case, you should have asked at least one breastfeeding expert. For instance, Dr. Jack Newman or Midwives of Ontario president Lisa Weston. They wrote you a letter two weeks ago demanding you uninvite Nestlé’s Johnson-Askew from the panel. Or how about Michelle Branco, the lactation consultant who gathered 800 names on a petition asking for the same thing?
They could tell your audience all about a miracle product that boosts babies’ immune systems during their first 1,000 days, feeds them, is perfectly sterile and beautifully free.
It’s called breast milk. Catherine Porter can be reached at cporter@thestar.ca.