The Motherwear Breastfeeding Blog

Guest post: Nestlé Partnership “Let’s Move’’ Turned “Bad Move” for Newark

I'm pleased to share a guest post today from Maria Parlapiano RN, IBCLC of on the partnership between Nestle and the city of Newark, New Jersey. 

On February 11th, Marilyn Knox, CEO of Nestlé Nutrition USA, presented a $100,000.00 check to Mayor Cory Booker of Newark, NJ, to sweeten the deal on a partnership to reduce childhood obesity.

In the US, Nestlé owns Gerber and Beechnut brand of baby food.  With their recent purchase of Pfizer’s Infant Nutrition Division, they are now “the number one” purveyor of infant formula and baby food in the world.   So for starters, can anyone say, “Conflict of Interest?”   

Suddenly, it was clear to me that Mayor Booker and his poor Newark families (25% below the poverty level) were to be unknowingly used as a "front" for the largest coup in US formula industry history. Nestlé’s newest marketing scheme- cleverly disguised as a nutrition program targeted at the latest global concern, childhood obesity.  

In an attempt to halt this hypocritical affiliation and Nestlé’s national branding of these programs, I created the petition, “Stop Newark /Nestlé Now!" on February 16. 

I, and those who support this petition, believe that Nestlé sponsorship of this anti-obesity campaign is a ploy to appear “benevolent”, in order to divert attention from these very chilling facts:

1. Nestlé has a well-deserved, notorious reputation for aggressive and unethical marketing placing them among the top four most boycotted companies on the planet!
2. Gerber formula is milk from a cow, laden with addictive high fructose corn syrup, sucrose, oils and chemical additives, which are directly linked to obesity in infants. Formula-fed infants ingest 30,000 more calories/year than their breastfed counter parts.
3. Nestlé’s baby foods are processed and packaged with cost in mind, not quality.
4. Nestlé spends $4 million each year lobbying against regulation and taxation of unhealthy food 

This manipulation enables them to continue manufacturing and marketing junk and confectionary foods that have resulted in increasing world obesity rates. 

1. Formula feeding is linked to diabetes as well as many other diseases resulting in increased healthcare costs, energy usage, production, transport, pollution and waste.  Furthermore, it costs about $200 a month to formula feed one baby. That is 14% of the per capita income of the average Newark families.  Some parents will over dilute the formula or substitute other fluids, such as coffee creamers, which lead to even further illness, poor development and death.
2. The Surgeon General's 2011 Call to Action for Breastfeeding Report called for "all women to exclusively breastfeed their babies for the first 6 months" and states “full-term infants have a 32% excess risk of childhood obesity associated with not breastfeeding.” Action 6 (from her report) states: "ensure that the marketing of infant formula is conducted in a way that minimizes its negative impact on exclusive breastfeeding". (We have had no replies to our pleas for help from the Surgeon General)
3. The First Lady, Michelle Obama breastfed her 2 daughters and is a staunch supporter of        breastfeeding.  Her campaign, "Let's Move" to target childhood obesity is being corrupted by Nestlé and Mayor Booker.

 (We have as yet had no replies to our pleas for help from the First Lady.)

As of today, more than 2000 people have signed from more than 50 countries and close to a hundred people have left negative comments about Nestlé on the petition site.  All International Organizations, under WHO and UNICEF's direction to protect breastfeeding from commercial pressures to artificially feed babies including IBFAN (International Baby Food Action Network), WABA, (World Alliance for Breastfeeding Action), BMA (Baby Milk Action, UK) and IBFAN Switzerland have signed and written letters asking the Mayor to cancel his partnership.  Now it’s your turn.

Since you are now better informed and educated, hopefully you are compelled to act on behalf of those who have no voice- the children of our planet.  Be a part of this world-wide outcry to “Stop Newark/Nestle Now!"  Please take a moment to read, sign and share this important petition.  

Thank you and feel free to contact me for further information.

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This "Breastfeeding Works" campaign starts running on buses in my area this week.

The Massachusetts Breastfeeding Coalition puts out great posters and educational materials about breastfeeding.  I was able to help with one on "las dos" last year.

Below is the Coalition's latest poster, which will began appearing on buses in Springfield, Massachusetts yesterday.  It focuses on employer support for breastfeeding, including the new federal law requiring employers to accommodate pumping employees.

You can buy this image in poster and post card form, as well as a lot of other great materials from the Coalition at their store.

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Review: Complementary Feeding, by the author of The Politics of Breastfeeding

Gabrielle Palmer is the author of the definitive guide to the political economy of breastfeeding: The Politics of Breastfeeding: When Breasts are Bad for Business.  That book investigates the marketing of breastmilk substitutes and the consequences for mothers and babies.  I reviewed the revised edition in 2010.

Palmer has now turned her attention to the topic of complementary foods - what we often call solid foods.  In Complementary Feeding: Nutrition, Culture, and Politics, Palmer examines the history, politics, and ethics of these first non-milk foods.

This book is a slim volume based on a paper Palmer wrote for International Baby Food Action.  It's not a practical guide to starting solid foods, but a book about young children and nutrition in a political context.

Palmer says that, while the debate is pretty well developed when it comes to breastfeeding and the marketing of its substitutes, "when it comes to the food that a child eats when she needs more than milk, the whole world is in a muddle."  This book is intended to stimulate discussion, ideas, and further investigation.

Much of this book is about the problems of malnutrition in poverty and malnutrition in affluence, starting at the earliest stage in our experience with non-milk foods.

So, to dig in, here are the topics I found most interesting in this book:

Ready-to-use supplemental foods in developing countries.  Developed to provide immediate nutrition to children in famines, ready-to-use theraputic/supplemental foods may soon be commercially produced and marketed on a broad scale.  Sound familiar?  Infant formula was first developed to aid orphans left without mothers' milk and eventually made its way to the marketplace.  And we know how that ended up.  So, how do we balance the gut-wrenchingly painful reality of millions hungry children with the risks to local agriculture, traditional foodways, and the ethics of dependence on private corporations for the most basic of human needs?  Palmer writes, "Most humans are poor and by 2050 eight of nine billion will live in 'developing' countries.  If such emergency provision is 'brought up to scale,' it will lead to a world where most children are fed with an industrialized mass-produced food...We have to meet the root causes head on."

The commercialization of early solid foods in developed countries.  While there have been benefits to the commercial production of food, Palmer notes that "Today, even many priveleged human beings seem to believe that they cannot prepare their own children's food, that it must be made in a factory and that they must consult a ahealth professional about how to feed their children." 

What did prehistoric toddler eat?*  Since during nearly all of our history as a species we've been hunter-gatherers, our toddlers probably ate a lot of small mammals, insects, molluscs, shellfish, and other sea creatures, says Palmer.  These would be the sources of iron and zinc after birth stores were depleted and breastmilk did not provide sufficient amounts.  One mini-chapter title: "Why don't we give our babies molluscs and insects?"

There is plenty more here - this is a wonderfully dense book for its 100 page length:  cultural and religious beliefs, processes for change, feeding 'local.'  This book lives up to Palmer's trademark style - it's rigorous, passionate, thought-provoking, and intruiguing.  I thoroughly enjoyed it and think you will, too.

* I was provided a review copy of this book from the publisher.

**Wait, is that redundant?  Sorry, have a toddler in my house now.

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Mitt Romney and breastfeeding

When I moved to Massachusetts in eight years ago Mitt Romney was governor.  Around that that time the state's Department of Public Health was revising its hospital regulations for perinatal care.

One of the proposed regulations would have eliminated the practice of formula marketing at hospitals through the formula "gift bags."  These bags have been shown in numerous studies to reduce breastfeeding rates.

The public health council approved the restriction, making Massachusetts the first state to effectively "ban the bags" from hospitals. 

Then, as a few blogs have been posting recently, the Governor took the unusual step of ensuring that the regulation was reversed.  Here's what happened, according to the Massachusetts Breastfeeding Coalition press release:

In a setback for Massachusetts families, the Public Health Council allowed hospitals to continue participating in formula company marketing campaigns. The decision comes in the wake of an eleventh-hour shakeup in which Gov. Romney replaced three Council members who supported marketing restrictions just before the Council’s scheduled meeting today...

Romney had initially overturned a regulation in February, arguing that limits on marketing gimmicks in hospitals forced mothers to breastfeed. In fact, the regulation would have protected all new mothers from aggressive marketing tactics that use hospitals to endorse high-priced brand-name formula.

"There's overwhelming scientific evidence that breastfeeding is good for mothers and babies," says Dr. Alison Stuebe, a Boston obstetrician. "Despite unanimous recommendations to him from physicians and public health advocates, Romney has dismissed the facts, putting corporate profits above public health. Now, doctors, nurses and hospital administrators have an opportunity to show Massachusetts families that their expert opinion is not for sale. Formula marketing campaigns targeting new mothers do not belong in our state's hospitals. Hospitals should market health, and nothing else."

Public discussion about the proposed ban is already changing practice. Since the initial regulation passed on December 20, four Massachusetts hospitals have chosen to protect the doctor-patient relationship from corporate influence, removing the bags from their maternity wards, bringing the total to 11 of the states 52 maternity hospitals and birth centers, including three who serve the lowest-income patients.

Romney has been increasingly isolated in his stance: he received letters opposing the hospital distribution of commercial bags from regional chapters of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), as well as from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates, the American Public Health Association, and the Massachusetts Public Health Association. These letters join statements from the US Surgeon General, the Government Accountability Office, the Massachusetts Medical Society, and the World Health Organization, who all oppose this marketing practice.

Why would the Governor take such an interest in this relatively small change?  The Coalition later pointed out an association between the action and a piece of news announced shortly after the demise of the ban:

Why did Romney go to such extreme measures to make sure women got their bags? We will never know for sure, but 10 days after he quashed the ban in May 2006, he proudly announced a $660 million deal with Bristol-Myers Squibb, the nation's largest formula maker, to build a pharmaceutical plant in Massachusetts.

It's worth noting that those same perinatal regulations, when finally passed, did impose a new requirement (and the only one of which I'm aware) that hospitals provide lactation consultant support to new moms.

Want more background about this issue?  Check out this podcast interview I did with Dr. Alison Steube on the topic.

Moms can get break time to pump during medical boards, says Massachusetts Supreme Court

Back in 2007 I wrote about Sophie Currier, a Harvard MD/Phd student who sued the National Medical Licensing Examiners Board for break time to pump for her 4-month old daughter during her medical boards. 

The Boston Globe reports:

Breast-feeding mothers are protected under state law and special accommodation must be made for women who need to take a break from medical licensing exams in order to properly care for their child, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled today.

“Our decision . . . recognizes that there remain barriers that prevent new mothers from being able to breast-feed or express breast milk,’’ Chief Justice Roderick Ireland wrote.

Ireland then wrote for the unanimous court: “We take this opportunity to extend protection to lactating mothers in the context of lengthy testing required for medical licensure.’’

I imagine that this ruling will cause similar accommodations to be made for other licensing exams, at least in Massachusetts.  Her lawyers commented: 

Although the court was careful to limit its decision to the facts of this case, this case potentially impacts any testing organization that administers exams in a place of public accommodation. The impact is potentially much broader.

Have any of you had to take long exams while breastfeeding?  Did you have enough time to pump?

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Check out this brand new Baby Friendly rap!

I'm happy to share this brand new rap video promoting Baby Friendly Hospitals, produced by the Massachusetts Breastfeeding Coalition and the Breastfeeding Coalition of Oregon (with the support of many other coalitions).

Public Citizen launches campaign to end formula "gift bags" at hospitals

Public Citizen has launched a new campaign to end the formula "gift bags" handed out at most U.S. hospitals - a practice which has been repeatedly shown to decrease breastfeeding rates.

For a good primer on this issue, see this podcast interview I did a few years ago with Dr. Alison Steube.

Public Citizen has begun a petition to the formula companies themselves.  They describe the campaign:

Hospitals should stop including industry-provided samples of infant formula in new mothers’ discharge bags because the distribution is unethical and violates good public health policy, Public Citizen said in letters, co-signed by more than 100 other organizations, sent to more than 2,600 hospitals across the country. The letters are part of a new, nationwide Public Citizen campaign that is aimed at both hospitals and major formula makers.

Public Citizen also is launching an online petition calling on the three major formula makers – Abbott (maker of Similac), Mead Johnson (maker of Enfamil) and Nestle (maker of Gerber) – to stop marketing their products in healthcare facilities.

Hospital promotion of infant formula in discharge bags contravenes the consensus by all major healthcare provider organizations that exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months after a child is born is best for the health of both babies and mothers. Research convincingly shows that mothers who received infant formula samples are less likely to breastfeed exclusively and are more likely to breastfeed for shorter durations. Hospitals that distribute formula samples are in violation of a 1981 World Health Organization (WHO) code that prohibits healthcare facilities from marketing infant formula.

Yet, at least two-thirds of hospitals in the U.S. distribute samples of infant formula, even if mothers have indicated that they plan to breastfeed. Succumbing to infant formula companies’ marketing techniques is costly, both in terms of money spent on formula and the health of mothers and children. Formula feeding costs between $800 and $2,800 per year. Additionally, the formula samples usually are brand-name products, which cost up to 66 percent more than store brands. Families typically continue to use the same expensive brand they receive in samples.

I recently wrote at Best for Babes that the tide is turning against this process.  But ridding hospitals of this practice will require more pressure - something this campaign provides.

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Have you benefitted from the federal workplace pumping law? We need your stories!

I was recently chosen by the the U.S. Breastfeeding Committee to help publicize the federal "pumping law" which was enacted as part of health care reform legislation two years ago. 

This project is funded by the Office of Women's Health (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services).  I was chosen along with Kimberly Seals Allers, whose Black Breastfeeding 360 project I wrote about recently.

So I'll be posting on other blogs this year to help spread the word about what the law requires employers to do to accommodate pumping moms. 

As part of this project the USBC is collecting moms' stories about how the new pumping law has helped them. We'll be highlighting stories of moms who have benefitted from the law.  

So please follow this link and share how the law has helped you pump at work!

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Emily Gillette settles lawsuit over being forced off plane for breastfeeding in 2006

Some of you may remember that, in 2006, Emily Gillette was forced off a Delta plane for breastfeeding her daughter.

The incident led to the first national protests at Delta ticket counters in multiple airports, and in a way made nurse-ins a national phenomenon.  Emily Gillette filed a discrimination complaint against the Mesa and Freedom Airlines with the Vermont Human Rights Commission (which she won), and brought a suit against Delta Airlines.

Emily Gillette settled her lawsuit with Delta last week.  The terms of the agreement have not been disclosed.  

USA Today reports:

After more than five years of legal wrangling, Gillette and the airlines have settled the case but have agreed not to disclose the amount of money involved.

In a separate settlement, Mesa and Freedom Airlines, which shut down in 2010, also paid $20,000 to the Vermont Human Rights Commission, which enforces that state's law upholding a mother's right to breast-feed. The state commission joined Gillette in suing the airlines after deciding her case was a matter of discrimination, says Robert Appel, the human rights commission's executive director.

This incident happened just as I was starting this blog, and whatever the terms of the settlement, it's an interesting bookend.  I think it's safe to say that public acceptance of breastfeeding, while not universal by any means, has increased.  And many policies, from the federal government down to your local hospital, are changing. 

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Authors of workplace pumping law responds to Staples co-founder

A few weeks ago the Tom Stemberg, co-founder and former CEO of Staples made some remarks in the press about the new workplace pumping law. 

Stemberg had used it as an example of what he found over-reaching about the federal health care reform law, criticizing it for requiring "lactation chambers" for nursing employees.

(And while I make it a rule never to read comments left on blogs which aren't breastfeeding-friendly, some of the comments on the story on wonkette.com absolutely cracked me up.  My favorite:  "My next lactation chamber will certainly not be purchased from Staples, you screwed up there Stemberg!"  Read them if you get a chance.)

Last week the authors of the provision wrote in response, stating in part:

These federal requirements are modeled after a state law in Oregon that requires employers, including Staples, to make similar accommodations for their employees.  The Oregon law provides a hardship exemption for businesses that cannot find a way to establish a specific place for mothers to express milk.

It is interesting to note, however, that not a single Oregon business, including Staples, has chosen to take that exemption. All have found a way to make this work for their nursing mother employees.

You can read the full text here.

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