Speaker 1: What's starving my babies? Shit? Fuck Sophie Robert. That's not
Speaker 1: how you start a podcast, is it. Why? Well, it
Speaker 1: is appropriate to the theme of the podcast. This is
Speaker 1: behind the Bastards. Thank you, Sophie. Podcast bad people tell
Speaker 1: you all about them? Um, And our guest today is
Speaker 1: Ariel do him Ross? Did I get it right? Close? Close? Close?
Speaker 1: You did? You did pretty good? You did pretty good.
Speaker 1: It's it's Ariel Zoom Ross. Um. But but you know what,
Speaker 1: that was a valiant effort. Well, valiant is the only
Speaker 1: word that could possibly describe me. So I appreciate you
Speaker 1: saying that. Um. Ariel. You are a correspondent and host
Speaker 1: of the podcast Vice News Reports. Um. And you are
Speaker 1: currently in a closet, a little bitty padded closet recording. Yeah,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, I got my moving blankets surrounding me and
Speaker 1: my little my little padding. I'm ready to go excellent.
Speaker 1: I used to have a clothus when I lived in
Speaker 1: l a um, except for I only used it for
Speaker 1: about a week and then I filled it with trash. Um.
Speaker 1: So what I'm saying is I respect your ability to
Speaker 1: actually commit to the cloths because it's hard. It's it
Speaker 1: requires both a noble soul and uh discipline beyond the
Speaker 1: can of most mortals. Well, that makes me feel good
Speaker 1: because I think my wife thinks this closet is extremely
Speaker 1: unruly and like has no right or reason because you
Speaker 1: haven't seen the top shelves. It's not cute in here.
Speaker 1: You can fit in it. That means you have you
Speaker 1: have done an impressive job with the cloths. Well, thank you,
Speaker 1: I'll take it. Yeah. Well, Ariel, how do you feel
Speaker 1: about I don't know babies. I mean, I do not
Speaker 1: want a child of my own, but I like babies
Speaker 1: a lot. Do you think like they should be fed? Yes,
Speaker 1: generally speaking, I think that they benefit from food. Well,
Speaker 1: that really puts you on a different standing, uh than
Speaker 1: our bastard today, which is the Nestly Corporation. Um, oh boy,
Speaker 1: I'm actually really excited about this. This is going to
Speaker 1: be great. What do you know, I'm sure I think
Speaker 1: a lot of people I don't know if most people have,
Speaker 1: but I'm sure a lot of people have heard different
Speaker 1: things about like the Nestly baby formula. I don't know,
Speaker 1: kerfuffle disaster, quasi mass murder spree thing. If you heard
Speaker 1: anything about this is this? Is this something that happened, like,
Speaker 1: you know, relatively recently, like in Asia slash Australia. Is
Speaker 1: that relatively recently? You mean the entire lifespan of us
Speaker 1: and our parents? That? Yes? All right, Okay. When I
Speaker 1: heard about this, I thought it was like a tainted
Speaker 1: baby formula thing. I think that's how it was passed
Speaker 1: on to me through like conversations with people. That's actually
Speaker 1: not what happened. It's way more fucked up than that.
Speaker 1: If they had just like sold a bunch of tainted
Speaker 1: baby formula, that would have been so much better. Um. So,
Speaker 1: you know it's bad when you're rooting for tainted baby formula,
Speaker 1: tainted because look, things get tainted, Right, You're gonna make
Speaker 1: a lot of food for people. Some of them are
Speaker 1: going to die from the food because manufacturing at scale
Speaker 1: is never perfect. Um this is much worse than that.
Speaker 1: Uh So we're gonna we're gonna get into that. Are
Speaker 1: you ready? Are you ready to take this journey with me?
Speaker 1: I'm ready. If this is actually gonna end up being
Speaker 1: an episode about how nutrition science is fucked I'm so
Speaker 1: ready for it. I mean there's pieces of that in here.
Speaker 1: It's it's more fucked up than that because Christian scientists
Speaker 1: are to give them credit, some of the people who
Speaker 1: are like trying to warn about this for a while. Um,
Speaker 1: but this is there's there's some complicated aspects of this history. Um.
Speaker 1: So we gotta begin way back in the seventeen hundreds,
Speaker 1: which is when medicine was like, you know, not we
Speaker 1: didn't really have medicine, but it was a time when
Speaker 1: when you know, men were men, and they died of,
Speaker 1: honest god, fearing bacterial infections from skinning their knees playing stickball.
Speaker 1: And in these early days, breastfeeding was the preferred way
Speaker 1: to feed infant children, right, and it's still the second
Speaker 1: best method of feeding infants today after mountain dew baja
Speaker 1: blast But in those primitive days, scientists hadn't discovered baja
Speaker 1: blast um, and so breastfeeding was a pretty good solution, right,
Speaker 1: if you don't have access to mountain dew, Um, it'll
Speaker 1: do the trick. Um. Yeah, it's pretty natural. It's pretty
Speaker 1: pretty natural. Yeah, not as easy to get as baja
Speaker 1: blast but yeah, it's you know, actually breast like breast milk.
Speaker 1: I've spent a lot of time reading about like science
Speaker 1: or it's fucking amazing stuff, Like it's sterile, it has
Speaker 1: like just ridiculous amounts of nutrition. It's InCred how babies
Speaker 1: get a lot of their microbiome in the first couple
Speaker 1: like days weeks and system stuff. Yeah, like I said,
Speaker 1: almost as good as baja blast um. Now, there are
Speaker 1: some issues with breastfeeding though. Um. One of them is
Speaker 1: that people like moms die, especially in the seventeen eighteen
Speaker 1: hundreds and peer like plagues and ship right, and so
Speaker 1: you wind up with a large population of infants and
Speaker 1: maybe there's nobody to breastfeed them, right, So that's a problem.
Speaker 1: You also have cases of like especially back in a
Speaker 1: lot more women died in childbirth. So there were a
Speaker 1: lot of reasons why you would have an infant and
Speaker 1: they wouldn't be able to be breastfet just as there
Speaker 1: are today. There were probably more reasons back then because
Speaker 1: medicine was a lot worse, and it became very common
Speaker 1: for families with means to hire wet nurses to feed
Speaker 1: their babies. Um. And again this is like, if you've
Speaker 1: got money, you can afford a wet nurse, right, because
Speaker 1: you are you are not just hiring someone to feed
Speaker 1: your baby, You're kind of hiring someone to feed their
Speaker 1: own baby less, because that's the way it works in
Speaker 1: a lot of cases. Um. Well, so if I can
Speaker 1: amend some of that, I think that in some cases
Speaker 1: wet nurses would like feed their baby and then keep
Speaker 1: their milk going in various sometimes strange ways. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and then take on a different baby as well, so
Speaker 1: like once their child was weaned off, then they would
Speaker 1: just keep going and take baby after baby. So it
Speaker 1: wasn't always the case that they were taking food away
Speaker 1: from their own kids, but that that did happen. That did. Yeah,
Speaker 1: We're like, obviously, I'm not that that is very important
Speaker 1: to do it. This is not going to be a
Speaker 1: complete history of the of the concept of wet nursing.
Speaker 1: There were ways to do it where it was better
Speaker 1: or worse. Um, but it was very common again, particularly
Speaker 1: for families of means throughout Europe in the early u
Speaker 1: S and the colonial period. UM. Families often would hire
Speaker 1: a wet nurse to live with them. Uh. And in
Speaker 1: some cases they would send the infant to live with
Speaker 1: the wet nurse and then take the baby back once
Speaker 1: it had been weaned. Um. And if you're wondering, did
Speaker 1: doing this to impressionable young babies have any impact on them,
Speaker 1: My answer would be, of course not, that's why everyone
Speaker 1: was so famously well adjusted in the colonial period all
Speaker 1: the I'm sure they had no impact on anybody. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: on that subject, it was also extremely common for enslaved
Speaker 1: people to be forced to act as wet nurses. And
Speaker 1: in this case you are talking certainly that their babies
Speaker 1: are in many cases going malnourished, especially since there was
Speaker 1: an idea among some people, again people of means, that
Speaker 1: you shouldn't let a wet nurse nurse more than one baby. Um.
Speaker 1: So that was not again not universal, but it happened,
Speaker 1: and it particularly happened with like and again not in
Speaker 1: every case of a slave acting as a wet nurse.
Speaker 1: But um there were and there were a number of
Speaker 1: reasons why in some cases people preferred to use slaves
Speaker 1: as wet nurses. One of them was that, when you're
Speaker 1: talking about the colonial United States or the colonial like
Speaker 1: like the European colonies all over the world, there was
Speaker 1: an idea and understanding that black people were more resistant
Speaker 1: to malaria than white people. And obviously they didn't know why,
Speaker 1: they didn't understand much, but they had like early vaccines,
Speaker 1: so they knew a little bit, and there was an
Speaker 1: understanding that making enslaved women nurse their babies would confer
Speaker 1: some immunity to malaria um, which was probably not untrue
Speaker 1: because as you stated, there is some like your immune system,
Speaker 1: you get some of that from breast milk. So that
Speaker 1: was a known reason at the time why they would
Speaker 1: do this very exploitative thing. UM. Now, yeah, it's not great. Um.
Speaker 1: And again we don't have data on whether or not
Speaker 1: there were higher rates of infant mortality for black wet
Speaker 1: nurses because they were being restricted from giving as much
Speaker 1: moke to their own babies are giving to get all
Speaker 1: to their own babies, because nobody cared about getting that
Speaker 1: data because slavery was a nightmare. Um. But there were
Speaker 1: like obviously the people who were kind of being made
Speaker 1: to do that weren't like they had an agency of
Speaker 1: their own, and so there was a variety of like
Speaker 1: mutual aid breastfeeding networks established by enslaved persons in order
Speaker 1: to make sure that like members of their community who
Speaker 1: underproduced milk or who were wet nursing and being restricted
Speaker 1: from nursing the baby. So that's that all of the
Speaker 1: babies could get nursed like. They developed mutual aid networks
Speaker 1: within themselves or within their own communities, learning stuff already. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and these networks of caregiving, um, we're we're, I mean,
Speaker 1: that's pretty rad um and they were. I would say
Speaker 1: those mutual aid networks were as beautiful as the actual
Speaker 1: profession of wet nursing could be callous and horrific. Here's
Speaker 1: how one black wet nurse and this is post slavery,
Speaker 1: This is like nineteen eleven in Georgia described her duties. Quote,
Speaker 1: I live a treadmill, and I see my own children
Speaker 1: only when they happened to see me on the streets,
Speaker 1: when I am out with the children, or when my
Speaker 1: children come to the yard to see me, which isn't
Speaker 1: often because my white folks don't like to see their
Speaker 1: servants children hanging around their premises. So m a lot
Speaker 1: of bleak again, a lot of bleak aspects of this um. Now,
Speaker 1: wet nurses were selected with care by families because it
Speaker 1: was understood that the quality of the milk would determine
Speaker 1: the baby's future disposition. There was this belief that like
Speaker 1: you had to make sure you had to pick a
Speaker 1: wet nurse with a specific disposition, because that got passed
Speaker 1: down to your kids, like their personality in some way
Speaker 1: dead or do you know what they looked for. Well,
Speaker 1: one of the things they looked for was brunettes. They
Speaker 1: were vastly preferred to blonde or redheads. And this is
Speaker 1: again mainly in Europe, where the wet nurses you know,
Speaker 1: are white. Um, and they preferred brunettes to blondze or
Speaker 1: redheads because their milk was said to be more nutritious
Speaker 1: and the children raised on it had a more balanced disposition. Um.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I don't know like like all that, how
Speaker 1: that how anybody comes up with these rules. But okay,
Speaker 1: they weren't good at medicine, so I'm good. It was nonsense, right,
Speaker 1: like most things they believed. Uh Now. During the eighteenth
Speaker 1: century Europe, wet nurses were so in demand that governments
Speaker 1: had to establish bureaus where they could register and live
Speaker 1: until they were needed. The whole process came to be
Speaker 1: heavily regulated. Wet nurses were required to undergo regular health exams,
Speaker 1: and they were forbidden in a lot of cases from
Speaker 1: nursing more than one infant at a time. This was,
Speaker 1: of course a problematic system, and it wasn't even really
Speaker 1: ideal for the rich because you know, people die. Though.
Speaker 1: There was a constant need for mother's milk and more
Speaker 1: than could actually be provided by you know, natural methods,
Speaker 1: so a lot of desperate people um resorted to what
Speaker 1: was then called dry nursing, which was providing animal milk
Speaker 1: to human babies. Um. And we've been doing this much
Speaker 1: further back than the seventeen hundreds. There are records of
Speaker 1: people using animals milk to feed human infants as far
Speaker 1: back as two thousand BCS. So people, this has always
Speaker 1: been a thing pretty much that we've done because you've
Speaker 1: got to figure out something right, Um. And are we
Speaker 1: just talking about cow's milk here or is it like
Speaker 1: a bunch of different stuff yaks, and I think camels
Speaker 1: get used sometimes, and donkeys and and horses and like
Speaker 1: every kind of milk, pretty much every kind of milk
Speaker 1: people have ever found they've tried given to babies. Basically, Yeah,
Speaker 1: camel milk is a whole thing. I once did a
Speaker 1: reporting trip to Australia where they have a bunch of
Speaker 1: camels because they have a bunch of desserts and people
Speaker 1: brought them over and there's a booming camel milk industry
Speaker 1: in Australia. Strangely enough, that's something I've seen a couple
Speaker 1: of camels in person, but I've never gotten to drink
Speaker 1: their milk. I would love to. Is it good? It's fine, salty? Yeah,
Speaker 1: camels are terrified. There's so much bigger than you expect
Speaker 1: them to be. And there was so giants, they so much,
Speaker 1: Oh man, I did. One of my fondest memories in
Speaker 1: Northern India was a little baby camel playing with a
Speaker 1: little puppy dog in the street. I think it was
Speaker 1: rishikesh Um. That sounds adorable. It was, it was, It
Speaker 1: was magical. Um. So dry nursing can work. Obviously, you
Speaker 1: can keep a baby alive and it will, it will,
Speaker 1: it can survive off of other animals milk. But it's
Speaker 1: also not ideal and it was observed again hundreds of
Speaker 1: years ago, they knew that if you dry nurse infants,
Speaker 1: those infants have more health problems, right because it's not
Speaker 1: what it like. It's not meant for them. It's close
Speaker 1: enough that it can keep them alive, but it's not
Speaker 1: what they're supposed to be having because it's not people
Speaker 1: aren't yaks um. Now, doctors debated which animal was healthier
Speaker 1: for dry nursing, and the general consensus was donkey um.
Speaker 1: So I don't know again, I have no idea how
Speaker 1: they came to that conclusion, but that was that was
Speaker 1: what a lot of doctors were like, Yeah, you gotta
Speaker 1: get it. It's the docky milks, the good ship um.
Speaker 1: And there were a lot of debates over whether or
Speaker 1: not animal milk should be warmed or boiled, or deluded
Speaker 1: or mixed with sugar and honey. And we do now
Speaker 1: know that like some variant of those things helps because
Speaker 1: you're supposed to ake down certain proteins that you can
Speaker 1: do by heating it up, and you you want to
Speaker 1: add in certain sugars. Like I'm not an expert on
Speaker 1: how to turn animal milk into formula, but some of
Speaker 1: this stuff worked. Some of it was just nonsense, like
Speaker 1: most medicine at the time. Now, the continued inadequacy of
Speaker 1: all replacement milks was very clear though. Even the best
Speaker 1: replacement milk that they could come up with was not
Speaker 1: nearly as good as breast milk, and for years doctors
Speaker 1: and nutritionists struggled to develop a decent substitute. And I'm
Speaker 1: gonna quote from a write up in Contemporary Pediatrics, which
Speaker 1: is a medical journal. Here quote. In nearly nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: it was observed that infants fed un aaltered cow's milk
Speaker 1: had a high mortality rate and we're prone to indigestion
Speaker 1: and dehydration compared with those who were breastfed. In eighteen
Speaker 1: thirty eight, a German scientist Johann Franz Simon published the
Speaker 1: first chemical analysis of human and cow's milk, which served
Speaker 1: as the basis for formula nutrition science for decades to follow.
Speaker 1: He discovered that cow's milk had a higher protein content
Speaker 1: and a lower carbohydrate content than human milk. In addition,
Speaker 1: he and later investigators believed that the larger curds of
Speaker 1: cow's milk compared compared to the small curds of human milk,
Speaker 1: were responsible for the indigestibility of cow's milk. Empirically, physicians
Speaker 1: began to recommend that water, sugar, and cream be added
Speaker 1: to cow's milk to render it more digestible and closer
Speaker 1: to human milk. By eighteen sixty, a German chemists just
Speaker 1: as fun lie Big, developed the first commercial baby food
Speaker 1: a powdered formula made from wheat flour, cow's milk, malt flour,
Speaker 1: and potassium by carbonate. The formula, which was added to
Speaker 1: heated cow's milk, soon became popular in Europe. Lie Big
Speaker 1: Soluble infant Food was the first commercial baby food in
Speaker 1: the US, selling and groceries for one dollar a bottle
Speaker 1: in eighteen sixty nine. So you made us right there.
Speaker 1: Not cheap one dollar a bottle. That's a good amount
Speaker 1: of money back then, and this is cutting edge science
Speaker 1: at the time. Um, how a bottle go, dude? I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't know how big is a bottle at this point.
Speaker 1: I think you're talking like a day or so worth
Speaker 1: of feeding a baby. That's pricey. Yeah. Now this all
Speaker 1: brings us to the hail of one Honoree nest Lee. Um,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna you can guess what he winds up doing. Uh.
Speaker 1: He came from a German Swiss family, and he had
Speaker 1: an eclectic early career that included apprenticing as a pharmacist
Speaker 1: and becoming a massive rape seed entrepreneur which is an
Speaker 1: unfortunately named seed um. In the eighteen forties, he got
Speaker 1: into the lucrative nut oil business, which is an unfortunately
Speaker 1: named oil, and he started distilling rum and absinthe and
Speaker 1: selling carbonated mineral water. In the eighteen fifties, he started
Speaker 1: producing gas lights and fertilizers. So this guy's doing a
Speaker 1: lot of stuff that's a weird going from a pharmacy
Speaker 1: to making gas lights and fertilizer um. And at some
Speaker 1: point along the line, we don't exactly know when he started.
Speaker 1: In the eighteen sixties, he decided to set his very
Speaker 1: weird mind to the task of creating a fully artificial
Speaker 1: baby formula. And when I say artificial, what I mean
Speaker 1: is you don't have to add any kind of milk
Speaker 1: to it. It's powder and you just add water, right,
Speaker 1: that's what Obviously there's natural kimmo, but that's what an
Speaker 1: artificial formula is. You don't have to add an anim
Speaker 1: will smoked to it. Okay. I've heard a couple of
Speaker 1: different stories purporting to explain why he started down this path.
Speaker 1: One is that he had a neighbor who was having
Speaker 1: trouble nursing her child. Another is that he and his wife,
Speaker 1: although childish childless themselves, were horrified at the high rate
Speaker 1: of infant death in their part of Europe. And wanted
Speaker 1: to do something about it. Now, during this period, breastfeeding
Speaker 1: had become increasingly unpopular among wealthy women. Um, and there's
Speaker 1: a number of reasons for this. One of them is
Speaker 1: that formula has started to become a thing. So it's
Speaker 1: it's fashionable to use formula. It's the newest things. This idea,
Speaker 1: it's seen as like cutting edge science, like it would
Speaker 1: be better than breast milk. Right. Yes, there's also an
Speaker 1: idea that I mean not an idea, the fact that
Speaker 1: breastfeeding you can't wear the same fashion right like it
Speaker 1: it it changes the kind of things that you were
Speaker 1: able to wear, particularly in this period, and so wealthy
Speaker 1: women don't like having to spend more time not being
Speaker 1: able to like wear the latest fashions of the days.
Speaker 1: So it's possible Nestleie just wanted to cash in on
Speaker 1: the fact that there were a lot of rich women
Speaker 1: who preferred not to breast feed. Right. That may have
Speaker 1: been in and may have been it is probably a
Speaker 1: mix of things. Whatever his reasons, by eighteen sixty seven
Speaker 1: all refigured it out. He combined cow's milk with grain
Speaker 1: and sugar to make a substitute for breast milk, acid,
Speaker 1: and starch were removed from the wheat flour in order
Speaker 1: to aid digestion, and the whole thing was dehydrated and powdered.
Speaker 1: Unlike other formulas on the market, you just had to
Speaker 1: add water, which is again why it's an artificial formula. Now,
Speaker 1: because he was a deeply weird dude, Nesley called his
Speaker 1: invention kindermel or children flour, which was thought to be
Speaker 1: a more marketable term but sounds kind I mean it
Speaker 1: is more marketable, Lee Big. The other guy, the guy
Speaker 1: who first comes up with a formula initially called what
Speaker 1: he created soup for infants. So both of these guys
Speaker 1: are making some odd branding choices marketing choices here. So wait,
Speaker 1: I forgive me for having missed this. Where is all
Speaker 1: he living at this point? Alre, I believe he's in Um,
Speaker 1: I believe he's in Switzerland when he's doing this. Okay,
Speaker 1: so he's marketing. He's marketing this in Switzerland. We're not
Speaker 1: like in the U S or anything like that. Not yeah, no,
Speaker 1: I mean it quickly comes over here. But he's a
Speaker 1: German Swiss dude. Um. Yeah, So on reason invention proved
Speaker 1: to be a better product than lee bigs, namely because
Speaker 1: it didn't require access to any fresh milk, and there
Speaker 1: were often fresh milk shortages in a lot of Europe
Speaker 1: and in other parts of the world like the US.
Speaker 1: This is less of an issue because where cow people,
Speaker 1: but like a lot of times you couldn't get the
Speaker 1: milk in Europe, So this formula is a big deal
Speaker 1: for that too. Um all you needed was water that
Speaker 1: had been boiled to ensure it was safe. By the
Speaker 1: eighteen seventies, Nestlie's infant food was selling in the US
Speaker 1: for fifty cents a bottle, so it's also a lot
Speaker 1: cheaper than the other stuff. Now. From the beginning, the
Speaker 1: Nestle Corporation warned that formulas should only be used in
Speaker 1: cases where breastfeeding was not possible. Their early publications described
Speaker 1: the company as quote a strong supporter of breastfeeding and
Speaker 1: believes that breastfeeding provides the best exclusive nutrition for babies
Speaker 1: in the first six months of life. And this is true, right,
Speaker 1: I don't want to be anti form there's net like
Speaker 1: formulas necessary, right, there are needs for it. We're gonna
Speaker 1: be talked about a lot of flaws in the industry,
Speaker 1: but it is by all objective science. Best to use
Speaker 1: breast milk if you possibly can, there's less And also
Speaker 1: there's a lot of shame for women who can't breastfeed,
Speaker 1: and like it's totally okay if you can't breastfeed. It's
Speaker 1: really hard from what I hear, super painful. So like,
Speaker 1: formula is great for people who can't do it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're not trying to be anti formula here where anti
Speaker 1: the way companies start to market this stuff. That's where
Speaker 1: the problem is. Formula is a wonderful invention that saved
Speaker 1: a lot of lives. Um and rins Lee is not
Speaker 1: a he's kind of a weird dude, but he's not
Speaker 1: a bad guy here. He just invents a good formula. See,
Speaker 1: it works pretty well. And Alri himself wrote that quote
Speaker 1: during the first months, the mother's milk will always be
Speaker 1: the most naturally nutritious, and every mother able to do
Speaker 1: so should herself suckle her children. So from the beginning,
Speaker 1: he's like, this is for people who can't who don't
Speaker 1: have act. There's a lot of reasons why you might
Speaker 1: not be able to. That's who I'm making this for.
Speaker 1: It's not supposed to replace breast milk. I want to say,
Speaker 1: I'm still waiting for the bastard to come in here.
Speaker 1: It's coming right now. He kind of sounds kind of fine.
Speaker 1: He's fine. He never becomes a bastard that I'm aware
Speaker 1: of it. The Nestle Corporation, okay, okay, well he's done.
Speaker 1: Is tried to feed babies. Now. People being people, they
Speaker 1: quickly developed in a lot of the Western world, and
Speaker 1: attitude that formula was superior to breastfeeding. Some of this
Speaker 1: was for again aesthetic reasons, right, Um, it's easier on
Speaker 1: people's breasts, it's more cosmetically pleasant. A lot of people
Speaker 1: see it that way, so they prefer formula. Um. And
Speaker 1: because wealthy and educated women start to use formula rather
Speaker 1: than breastfeed, a lot of poorer women who kind of
Speaker 1: like paid attention to what's happening the society pages think
Speaker 1: that formula must be better too, because like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: like these celebrities basically are doing this, and that's what
Speaker 1: the rich people are doing, I should do. It must
Speaker 1: be better if the rich people are doing it. Um.
Speaker 1: The use of formula grew common even among mothers who
Speaker 1: did not need it, and the Nestle Corporation made bank Gradually, however,
Speaker 1: doctors began to recognize problems and I'm gonna quote from
Speaker 1: a right up by students of the Universe Steve Oklahoma's
Speaker 1: Honors College on the history of baby formula here quote.
Speaker 1: By the nineteen thirties, a connection between the use of
Speaker 1: baby formula and malnutrition formed. Dr Cecili Williams became the
Speaker 1: first doctor to observe this connection and denounced the promotion
Speaker 1: of formula as a substitute to breastfeeding. However, Nestley continued
Speaker 1: their aggressive promotion of formula over the course of the
Speaker 1: next four decades, which resulted in a significant decrease in
Speaker 1: the number of mothers who breastfed throughout the world. So,
Speaker 1: starting particularly early nineteen hundreds, you know, on restops being
Speaker 1: part of the picture, right, he doesn't live forever. The
Speaker 1: company realizes, Okay, people are preferring this to breast milk.
Speaker 1: Why don't we market it as better? Like what's the harm?
Speaker 1: Why don't we try to sell people on like this
Speaker 1: is a replacement to breast milk, not something you can
Speaker 1: take if you need it. This is something you should
Speaker 1: take because it's better. Alright, starting to sound bad, Yeah,
Speaker 1: now hearing that probably the first question in your mind
Speaker 1: should be how did they promote formula over breast milk?
Speaker 1: And the answer is, oddly enough, the same way your
Speaker 1: middle school teachers warned you that heroin dealers would get
Speaker 1: it has hooked on. Smack Nestlee and other formula manufacturers
Speaker 1: like Doomex and Abbott Laboratories would donate large quantities of
Speaker 1: baby formula to hospital maternity wards. This save the hospital
Speaker 1: money because again there's a lot of infants who have
Speaker 1: to be formula fed. You know, their moms die, you
Speaker 1: know whatever there there. But the catch was part of
Speaker 1: the deal. In order to get this free formula that
Speaker 1: you can give to the babies who need it, the
Speaker 1: hospital has to give out free formula to every new mother, right,
Speaker 1: so they're trying to get you hooked on the idea.
Speaker 1: It gets worse. So, the early half of the twentieth
Speaker 1: century is a period in which people tended to trust
Speaker 1: their doctors implicitly. Right, we are not in that period anymore.
Speaker 1: There's some downsides to that and some upsides to them.
Speaker 1: But back then, your doctor told you something, you assume
Speaker 1: that's the word of fucking God. Right. Um, Now, doctors
Speaker 1: may not have thought much about what they were doing, right,
Speaker 1: because they I think a lot of them they're saying like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: free formula, Maybe it will help if they need it.
Speaker 1: But that act of a doctor handing out formula was
Speaker 1: seen by lot of patients as an explicit medical endorsement. Right,
Speaker 1: my doctor gave me this, it must be good for
Speaker 1: me or good for my baby. This made hospitals into
Speaker 1: commercial platforms froup for private enterprise. One Abbott Laboratory sales
Speaker 1: manual laid out the stakes quote. When one considers that
Speaker 1: for every hundred infants discharged on a particular formula brand,
Speaker 1: approximately ninety three infants remain on that brand, the importance
Speaker 1: of hospital selling becomes obvious and in fact, in the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies, Russ Laboratory signed a contract with New York
Speaker 1: City Hospitals guaranteeing that each new mother who left would
Speaker 1: receive a free one day supply of similac. One day
Speaker 1: is again, Yeah, you know who else wants to get
Speaker 1: you hooked? That was great? Yeah, that correct. Nothing are
Speaker 1: advertisers want to do more than get you hooked? They'll
Speaker 1: give you a one day dose of whatever the funk
Speaker 1: it is we're selling. Um especially Sophie, did we did
Speaker 1: we land that big heroin ad? Deal? Are we? Are
Speaker 1: we being supported by big Heroin? Yet? That's what we do,
Speaker 1: That's what we do. All right, Well, you know, tie off,
Speaker 1: shoot up, and come back for the next part of
Speaker 1: the episode. We're back. Uh, And we're talking about the
Speaker 1: baby formula industry. So baby or formula companies, right, So
Speaker 1: there's this understanding they have like data on this going
Speaker 1: back into like the thirties and forties that if an
Speaker 1: infant is discharged on a particular formula Bland brand, nearly always,
Speaker 1: they're going to keep using that brand. So obviously you
Speaker 1: gotta hook them early. Right. Um, it's like a cigarette
Speaker 1: like and they're they're consciously following. We have like memos
Speaker 1: that they're consciously following like cigarette companies, like the way
Speaker 1: that the cigarette companies are good at this ship. Right,
Speaker 1: you want to pay attention to what they're doing, and
Speaker 1: the formula company does a lot of the same things,
Speaker 1: and so it becomes very important for different formula companies,
Speaker 1: of which Nestlee is the largest, to compete vigorously for
Speaker 1: a hospital's business, as this right up in the New
Speaker 1: Internationalist makes clear. In exchange for giving discharge packs a
Speaker 1: formula to new mothers. Hospitals get free formula for in
Speaker 1: house use, together with equipment, literature, and a package of
Speaker 1: other services. The most insidious of these is a free
Speaker 1: architectural service to hospitals which are building or renovating facilities
Speaker 1: for newborn care. Abbott Laboratories helps design at least two
Speaker 1: hundred maternity departments a year in the u S alone.
Speaker 1: The layout of these centers, whether by accident or design,
Speaker 1: make sure breastfeeding difficult mothers are physically separated from their newborns.
Speaker 1: Nurses come swiftly and conveniently administered donated formula and ready
Speaker 1: to mix bottles. But establishing breastfeeding is more troublesome because
Speaker 1: instead of rooming in mothers and babies together, babies must
Speaker 1: be carried long distances to their mothers for feeding, a
Speaker 1: task that nurses resent. The investment in architectural plans thus
Speaker 1: yields dividends in the form of new bottle feeding customers
Speaker 1: the entire lifespan of the building. That's so sneaky. This
Speaker 1: is written in like that's this is nine three. But
Speaker 1: they start doing this in the thirties and forties, right
Speaker 1: they start specifically pushing. We will build maternity wards to you,
Speaker 1: but we're going to make sure that this is set
Speaker 1: up in a way that leads you to start bottle
Speaker 1: feeding these babies. That makes a pain not be the easy,
Speaker 1: normal thing to breast and like, here's the thing. Breastfeeding,
Speaker 1: like getting your baby to latch on is already a
Speaker 1: difficult thing. If you're gonna give parents another option and
Speaker 1: have your doctor endorse it and have the nurses hate
Speaker 1: bringing your baby to you, Like everything here is just
Speaker 1: designed for you to end up using baby formata. It
Speaker 1: sure is. And it gets worse because they also do
Speaker 1: a lot of like you know, perdue pharmaceutical ship like
Speaker 1: oxy ship. Right, Sure they do a lot of that. Quote.
Speaker 1: Convincing doctors of the virtues of artificial milks, or at
Speaker 1: least neutralizing their resistance, is the key to establishing bottle feeding.
Speaker 1: Baby milk companies spend untold millions of dollars subsidizing office furnishings,
Speaker 1: research project gifts, conferences, publications, and travel junkets of the
Speaker 1: medical profession. The American Academy of Pediatrics received a renewable
Speaker 1: one million dollar grant from Abbott Laboratories. The purpose is
Speaker 1: to generate physician goodwill towards the company and its products.
Speaker 1: An Abbott Laboratories trade publication states, in effect, we are
Speaker 1: striving to make the physician a low pressure salesman for Abbott.
Speaker 1: They just say this shit. And of course it is
Speaker 1: the ordinary purchaser of artificial baby milk who must pay
Speaker 1: a portion of the cost of every cocktail that a
Speaker 1: doctor SIPs at conventions like the recent Ski and Study
Speaker 1: symposium at a California mountain resort, which Abbott Laboratories helped finance.
Speaker 1: They're paying for your offices, They're sending you on ski
Speaker 1: vacation weekends, paying drinks, Yeah, paying for your drinks. And
Speaker 1: they're doing this because you're a salesman if you're a pediatrician. Right,
Speaker 1: I love this story already. This is this is not
Speaker 1: at all depressing. And the formula companies are consciously aping
Speaker 1: tobacco companies who do this for doctor. There's that's why
Speaker 1: there's physician recommended cigarettes. And like the fifties, UM produce
Speaker 1: pharmaceuticals copies this playbook for oxy content. Right like this,
Speaker 1: these are all like everyone's paying attention to what everybody
Speaker 1: does because it keeps working. Now all of this. This
Speaker 1: whole system developed through the thirties and forties, and the
Speaker 1: formula industry exploded in the fifties when birthrates saw it
Speaker 1: After World War two, Western women primed to trust formula
Speaker 1: by their doctors, embraced it as a more scientific and
Speaker 1: the superior way to feed their children. They also saw
Speaker 1: it as liberatory because in a lot of ways it was.
Speaker 1: It means you're not you don't have to you're not
Speaker 1: necessarily as stuck at home. Right if you're a working mom,
Speaker 1: it makes it a lot easier to do that. It
Speaker 1: makes it a lot easier to have a career of
Speaker 1: your own. Um. The impact this had was astonishing. Roughly
Speaker 1: sixty percent of mothers born between nineteen eleven and nineteen
Speaker 1: fifteen breastfed their babies. Only thirty five percent of mothers
Speaker 1: born in the early nineteen forties did the same. So
Speaker 1: this whole all of this, and again it's not just
Speaker 1: the ablets. Obviously there's also some social stuff happening right now,
Speaker 1: but there's a massive impact like this is really significant change.
Speaker 1: The nineteen sixties and seventies were also the period in
Speaker 1: which globalism really exploded, right this is when coca cola
Speaker 1: floods the entire world. The United States began selling everything
Speaker 1: it could to everyone it could. Coca Cola were placed,
Speaker 1: juice and other local beverages in the diets of millions
Speaker 1: of people in the global South. American advertisements slick and
Speaker 1: Polished promised a clean, ultra modern life in imitation of
Speaker 1: the wealthiest society ever known, and these advertisements came to
Speaker 1: dominate the popular culture for dozens of nations. At the
Speaker 1: same time, companies like Nestley and Ross Laboratories saw the
Speaker 1: so called third world, which is that was always referred
Speaker 1: to in their documents, as a great place to expand
Speaker 1: their formula sales. They started sending what they called mothercraft
Speaker 1: nurses into hospitals and poor nations. Now these women are
Speaker 1: not often actually nurses, but they're dressed in uniforms that
Speaker 1: are specifically made to look like the uniforms nurses wear,
Speaker 1: so it confers authority. Exactly. They visit women in maternity
Speaker 1: wards and in their homes. We'll talk about that in
Speaker 1: a second. They would help new mothers with child rearing,
Speaker 1: so they're giving general child rearing advice to new moms,
Speaker 1: and they're also subtly specifically promoting formulas that they had
Speaker 1: been hired to sell. Um Now, because these women are
Speaker 1: dressed the same as nurses in these hospitals, a lot
Speaker 1: of these new mothers are convinced that their independent healthcare
Speaker 1: professionals they work for the hospital, that they're not employees
Speaker 1: of the company's selling formula. Because they don't say I'm
Speaker 1: here for simulac, I'm here for nestlie. They say I'm
Speaker 1: a child ringer, I'm I'm a mother care nurse. You know,
Speaker 1: they have a couple of different terms that they use.
Speaker 1: So a lot of these mothers very understandably take their
Speaker 1: advice to use formula as a considered medical opinion, because
Speaker 1: why wouldn't you write, of course you would, A lot
Speaker 1: of people would. Here's how one mother described a nurse's
Speaker 1: sales pitch. The nurse began by saying breastfeeding was best.
Speaker 1: She then went on to detail the supplementary foods that
Speaker 1: a breastfed baby would need. The nurse was lying that
Speaker 1: it was possible to start with a propriet prietary baby
Speaker 1: milk from birth, which would avoid these unnecessary problems. So
Speaker 1: she's saying breastfeeding is best if you can get this
Speaker 1: nutrient and this nutrient and this nutrient. You have to
Speaker 1: make sure that you're eating all these specific things for
Speaker 1: breast milk to be best, or just give them formula.
Speaker 1: So there's not saying breast milk isn't best. They're saying
Speaker 1: breast milk is best. But you have to do these things,
Speaker 1: and if you take this formula, you don't have to
Speaker 1: do these specific nutritional thing Okay, But to be clear,
Speaker 1: like they're they're lying right there, Yes, absolutely correctly in
Speaker 1: the sense that like when you're breastfeeding a child, that's okay.
Speaker 1: I have not had a child of my own, so
Speaker 1: I don't actually know this, but you don't really you
Speaker 1: don't need anything else other than breast milk for a while.
Speaker 1: I mean you you yourself need to be as like
Speaker 1: taking care of you want to have a good diet
Speaker 1: for feeding yourself correctly, right, well, sure, but I'm going
Speaker 1: to guess that that's feeding yourself correctly is cheaper than
Speaker 1: buying baby for sure, is sure is And it's also
Speaker 1: easier um to do. And even even if you're malnourished
Speaker 1: because of somethings are about to discuss, it's often still
Speaker 1: better better to give because obviously if you're not well nourished,
Speaker 1: your breast milk is not as nourishing. You know, that's
Speaker 1: just the way it works. But even in those cases,
Speaker 1: because of some stuff we're about to discuss, breast milk
Speaker 1: is still going to be better for most of these babies.
Speaker 1: And what we're about to talk about why. But it's
Speaker 1: important to understand the nurses aren't saying breastmolk isn't as good.
Speaker 1: They're selling you our formula makes this easier on you,
Speaker 1: and so it's safer actually for your baby. Now, by
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties, some health departments had started to get
Speaker 1: wise to the mother craft nurses and milk nurses. In
Speaker 1: places like Singapore, they were banned from entering maternity wards
Speaker 1: so do mex and other companies like Nestlie got around
Speaker 1: this by having their nurses wait outside the hospital gates
Speaker 1: to accost new mothers with free samples on their way home.
Speaker 1: In Jamaica, nurses with Bristol Myers formula got around the
Speaker 1: ban on entering maternity wards by copying down the names
Speaker 1: and addresses of new mothers. They basically said, spice into
Speaker 1: the hospitals, find the names and addresses of new mothers.
Speaker 1: And then go to their homes to leave free samples.
Speaker 1: In the phil that's creepy today, they are right. The
Speaker 1: only thing they need to do is just look at
Speaker 1: your browsing history and then you start getting like ships
Speaker 1: and in the mail with a bunch of pamphlets about
Speaker 1: baby formula. So yeah, you know, when you didn't happening,
Speaker 1: you had to hire nurse spies. So in the Philippines,
Speaker 1: milk nurses would stalk public housing projects looking for clothes
Speaker 1: lines that had baby clothes on them, and then basically
Speaker 1: they would see like a diaper, right, and then they
Speaker 1: would go to that door and offer form I know, right,
Speaker 1: it gets a lot worse. So nurses were just one
Speaker 1: part of the sales pitch. The other chunk was a
Speaker 1: marketing blitz. Again, we've all watched the documentary Madmen. Fifties, sixties, seventies.
Speaker 1: This is when the advertising industry is fucking exploding and
Speaker 1: these formula companies are very cognizant of that, and they
Speaker 1: developed their own comprehensive ad blitz aimed at convincing women
Speaker 1: that their breast milk was inadequate. So again, because you
Speaker 1: have to be a little careful with this, you can't
Speaker 1: say breast milk isn't as its formula, but you can
Speaker 1: say your breast milk, particularly your breast milk as a
Speaker 1: poor woman in the global South, is not as good
Speaker 1: as our formula. It was just using shame as a
Speaker 1: marketing technique. Is it tried in true way of getting
Speaker 1: you to buy stuff? Nessley's ads for lactogen advertised that
Speaker 1: it was for use quote when breast milk fails. In
Speaker 1: the nineteen fifties, Boarding put out a radio jingle in
Speaker 1: the Belgian Congo that went, and this isn't a rough one.
Speaker 1: The child is going to die because because the mother's
Speaker 1: breast milk has given out. Mama, oh mama, the child cries.
Speaker 1: If you want your child to get well, give it
Speaker 1: kle I am milk. Like the jingle starts with the
Speaker 1: child is going to die. That's the part of your
Speaker 1: own version of that mix it. We need very nice rendition.
Speaker 1: We'll get Danial to put a beat behind it. Um So.
Speaker 1: One of the first NGOs to recognize that this seems
Speaker 1: like a bad idea. What's going on with the formula
Speaker 1: industry is called war on one. They recognize the problem.
Speaker 1: They mobilized to fight it. They put out publications where
Speaker 1: they explain the tactic um and they point out that
Speaker 1: the goal of these companies is to make poor women
Speaker 1: fear that they're malnourished and that as a result, they
Speaker 1: were going to harm their newborn baby with an adequate milk.
Speaker 1: This was a confidence trick, and when these women felt
Speaker 1: anxiety and fear, their milk would dry up as a result.
Speaker 1: So there's this understanding like, if we can make them
Speaker 1: scared that their milk is inadequate, because anxiety can affect
Speaker 1: breastmolk production, we can actually make them produce less breast milk.
Speaker 1: In a paper on this, it's pretty comprehensively fucked up.
Speaker 1: In a paper on this, the War on Want pointed
Speaker 1: out that formula companies were playing on something called the
Speaker 1: let down reflex quote, which controls the flow of milk
Speaker 1: to the mother's nipple. This is a nervous system mechanism,
Speaker 1: and quote. Mothers are deciding that the that a bottle
Speaker 1: is necessary to the milk sheet provides some mothers be
Speaker 1: even become so concerned about not having enough milk that
Speaker 1: they will not have enough. Now the right up I
Speaker 1: found from the University of Oklahoma's honors college goes into
Speaker 1: more to take ill quote. Nestley took advantage of this
Speaker 1: system by promoting the view that breastfeeding is complicated and
Speaker 1: prone to failure. Nestle's advertisements, such as their slogan for lactogen,
Speaker 1: instilled fear and anxiety and mothers about their inability to breastfeed,
Speaker 1: which can have the physiological effect of actually stopping lactation,
Speaker 1: forcing the mother to continue to buy formula. Furthermore, Nestly
Speaker 1: focused on societal concerns of mothers centered around Western cultural superiority.
Speaker 1: Such superiority focused on the ideals of Western beauty and
Speaker 1: that breastfeeding will cause breasts to sag, a societal change
Speaker 1: from the West where breast became sexualized. Breastfeeding is time
Speaker 1: consuming and mothers will not have the time to work
Speaker 1: and snob appeal. If you breastfeed, then you are a peasant.
Speaker 1: Racism was also a factor in their ad campaigns by
Speaker 1: playing on the assumption of white superiority, i e. White
Speaker 1: women do not breastfeed, therefore you should not either. Each
Speaker 1: of these tactics were meant to instill fear and mothers
Speaker 1: about breastfeeding and get them hooked on formula, good ship. Yeah,
Speaker 1: oh god, it's so complicated too, because like I don't know,
Speaker 1: even just talking to you now, you're you're you're saying,
Speaker 1: you know, it's true that formula is one of the
Speaker 1: ways that women were able to keep working. And also,
Speaker 1: you know, what's another great way to keep women working
Speaker 1: is by having lactation rooms in offices and making it
Speaker 1: easy for women to have babies. And like all of
Speaker 1: this stuff is still so incredibly like even today, it's
Speaker 1: still so hard, and so this is this is really depressing.
Speaker 1: Thank you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's not like an easy
Speaker 1: answer to all these questions other than companies shouldn't be
Speaker 1: allowed to do this. That part is easy. It should
Speaker 1: be a crime to use advertising in this way. I
Speaker 1: will say that one's pretty simple. Now. The newly developed
Speaker 1: urban areas and countries like Uganda and then the Congo
Speaker 1: were the main target of these promotions. The sixties and
Speaker 1: seventies were a time of rapid globalization and development in
Speaker 1: Africa particularly, and that brought with it not just ads
Speaker 1: for Formula, but adds for all sorts of Western products
Speaker 1: and TV and movies that focused his ads for the
Speaker 1: modern American lifestyle. This was not a conscious part of
Speaker 1: the marketing campaign that Nestley and others employed, but it
Speaker 1: had an impact. Many people were obsessed with modernizing and
Speaker 1: with adopting new Western behaviors and products. Formula companies consciously
Speaker 1: marketed their product as the modern and the superior way
Speaker 1: to feed babies. Quote. The zeal of these communities highlights
Speaker 1: one of the main problems with development. As Western products
Speaker 1: became available in these countries, the new urban class were
Speaker 1: forced to adopt them in order to maintain their new
Speaker 1: modern lifestyles and to separate themselves from the peasant light
Speaker 1: conditions of the rural areas. Development also brought about social
Speaker 1: changes for the women in the newly urbanized areas of Africa.
Speaker 1: As women in these areas began working for wages, they
Speaker 1: had less time to breastfeed. Nestle's promotion of Formula as
Speaker 1: an easier, quicker way of feeding appealed to these women.
Speaker 1: In Nigeria, Formula ads played on the cultural concept of
Speaker 1: power and strength e g. Bottle feeding was seen to
Speaker 1: hasten physical development. Now, there are a number of things
Speaker 1: that made this dangerous. We're gonna talk about nutrition in
Speaker 1: a second, but the first and largest problem with pushing
Speaker 1: formula over breast milk in the global South, is that
Speaker 1: breast milk is sterile. It is very safe. Formula is
Speaker 1: only as safe as the water you add to it.
Speaker 1: And many of the developing places where it was being
Speaker 1: hawked the hardest lacked access to clean water. Nestlie's instructions,
Speaker 1: even the instructions in places they that they handed out
Speaker 1: in places like the Ivory Coast, presumed the person preparing
Speaker 1: the formula was using modern appliances. Instructions such as wash
Speaker 1: your hands thoroughly with soap each time you have to
Speaker 1: prepare a meal for the baby don't really work. And
Speaker 1: say Malawi, where sixty six percent of households didn't just
Speaker 1: lack clean water, they lacked any kind of running water
Speaker 1: facilities whatsoever. Sixty of homes in that country had no
Speaker 1: indoor kitchen. Now, in many of these places, communities or
Speaker 1: villages would share one food preparation area. The most common
Speaker 1: setup for that is what's called the three stone kitchen.
Speaker 1: This is less of a kitchen in the modern sense
Speaker 1: of the word, and more a way to set up
Speaker 1: a fire pit in order to enable a more sent cooking.
Speaker 1: The gist of it is you have a fire built
Speaker 1: in between three large rocks, very large rocks, and you
Speaker 1: have a big cooking pot in the center resting on
Speaker 1: the rocks, so the rocks both hold up the pot
Speaker 1: and also absorb and conduct heat. It's a good way
Speaker 1: to cook if you're in the woods with a group
Speaker 1: of people and you lack access to a camp stove
Speaker 1: or something. But as you'll notice from that description, there's
Speaker 1: generally just one big pot that people use to prepare
Speaker 1: meals for the group. That kind of situation makes it
Speaker 1: very difficult for mothers to boil water to properly sterilize
Speaker 1: their bottle. It also makes it difficult for them to
Speaker 1: boil water in order to have clean water for the formula.
Speaker 1: And even if a mom can make all that work,
Speaker 1: there's still the issue a very little cool running water
Speaker 1: in most of these communities. So if you manage to
Speaker 1: boil the water to clean the water and you use
Speaker 1: hot boiling water to sterilize the bottle, both of those
Speaker 1: things are hot as hell, so you then I either
Speaker 1: have to wait for it to cool down, you have
Speaker 1: to be very careful to make sure that nothing gets
Speaker 1: on it during the time while it's cooling down, or
Speaker 1: once you fill the bottle, you have to dunk it
Speaker 1: an unclean cold water to cool it down, which can
Speaker 1: still transfer infections. One researcher who studied how Nestle's products
Speaker 1: were used in these places also noted that most women
Speaker 1: in these situations would not have necessarily known they were
Speaker 1: supposed to sterilize the bottle or boil the water. This
Speaker 1: is because even though Nestle provided instructions in the native
Speaker 1: languages of the places where they sold their formula quote,
Speaker 1: most Third world mothers, however, are illiterate even in their
Speaker 1: native languages. And again this is the writing at the time,
Speaker 1: but it's based on analysis of a lot of these communities.
Speaker 1: Now again in the terminology is outdated here, but this
Speaker 1: is a guy studying these places during that time. Another
Speaker 1: person who studied this ship was a dude named Dr
Speaker 1: David Morley. He spent a lot of time in rural
Speaker 1: Nigerian villages trying to answer one important question. Um, all
Speaker 1: of the formula ads in these places were focused on
Speaker 1: women who have difficulty breastfeeding. Right. That's how the formula
Speaker 1: companies justified this, The idea that poor mothers must have
Speaker 1: issues with nutrition or other issues feeding their babies via
Speaker 1: breast milk, and so they need formula. Right. Dr Morley
Speaker 1: study found that less than one percent of mothers in
Speaker 1: rural Nigeria had serious breastfeeding problems. It was just not
Speaker 1: an issue the same way that these companies treated it
Speaker 1: as Again, not to say that some people didn't have
Speaker 1: need this, but not nearly all. And in for most
Speaker 1: of these cases where you're living in a community where
Speaker 1: you all share one big kitchen, it's much safer if
Speaker 1: it's at all possible for your baby to breastfeed for
Speaker 1: all the reasons we've talked about. And meanwhile, like Nesley
Speaker 1: is still penetrating right, Oh yeah, going as hard as
Speaker 1: they can on this. You're endangering your baby by feeding
Speaker 1: it your breast milk. Give it our safe, natural, modern
Speaker 1: formula that you can't sterilize properly because you lack the
Speaker 1: infrastructure to do that. And that we're handing out instructions
Speaker 1: that you probably can't read because we're just shotgunning this
Speaker 1: stuff out to villages that were completely isolated from the
Speaker 1: Western world fifteen years ago. You know. Um Fatima Patel
Speaker 1: was a nurse who worked with Peruvian indigenous people in
Speaker 1: the Amazon in n She told a Senate committee how
Speaker 1: she watched villagers prepare prepare formula and that part of
Speaker 1: the world. Quote, the river is used as a laundry,
Speaker 1: as a bath room, as a toilet, and for drinking water.
Speaker 1: But to get the fuel to boil the water, she
Speaker 1: has to go into the jungle, chop a tree trunk
Speaker 1: with a machete and carry it on her back. No
Speaker 1: mother is going to use that hard earned piece of
Speaker 1: wood to boil that water. So the babies are drinking
Speaker 1: the contaminated water. There's just too much going on, right, Like,
Speaker 1: they don't have the time or the and and they're
Speaker 1: not in a lot for something that's supposed to be
Speaker 1: a heck of a lot easier. Turns out it's way
Speaker 1: more complicated, it's way more dangerous, much bigger problem. And again,
Speaker 1: the vast majority of these women could breastfeed perfectly, safety safely.
Speaker 1: The vast majority these women cannot provide their babies with
Speaker 1: formulas safely to the same extent. Even in cases where
Speaker 1: mothers were extremely perfectly careful about all these other steps,
Speaker 1: which is a very high standard in a lot of
Speaker 1: these places, you still would have to deal with the
Speaker 1: problem that babies often don't finish their bottle of formula right, Like,
Speaker 1: usually it's a couple of meals, right, and every hit,
Speaker 1: every bottle isn't free. Moms have to pay for that.
Speaker 1: And these people are very poor, so they wouldn't throw
Speaker 1: out a half or a two thirds filled bottle of formula.
Speaker 1: They would store it, and because they don't have power,
Speaker 1: they have to store it at room temperature and a
Speaker 1: tropical country where it will suffer explosive bacterial growth during
Speaker 1: that period. Another problem was over delusion, because again the
Speaker 1: women that Nestlie and the company are marketing towards are
Speaker 1: extremely poor, so they can't afford all of the formula
Speaker 1: they need to buy in order to use it properly,
Speaker 1: so they water it down because once they've gotten hooked
Speaker 1: on the stuff, they're not producing enough breastmoke they can
Speaker 1: You can't go back past a certain point, right. That's
Speaker 1: the way this ship is stuck. One study in the
Speaker 1: Journal of Tropical Pediatrics found that in Indonesia, only one
Speaker 1: quarter of women surveyed mixed their formula reasonably close to
Speaker 1: its recommended strength. That study noted that the women they
Speaker 1: surveyed were actually better off financially than most women in
Speaker 1: the country with higher levels of education, they just didn't
Speaker 1: have access to enough funds in order to make that
Speaker 1: work Among poorer groups of mothers, the researchers concluded that
Speaker 1: at many after getting hooked on formula, had to stop
Speaker 1: using formula because they couldn't afford it at all, and
Speaker 1: since their milk had dried up, they would wind up
Speaker 1: replacing formula with cheaper and much less nutritious substitutes like
Speaker 1: rice milk and sugar tea, because what else you getta
Speaker 1: gotta give the baby something. So basically you end up
Speaker 1: with a bunch of kids that are suffering from malnutrition
Speaker 1: and maybe dying. Right conclusion, you sure do huge numbers
Speaker 1: of them in the millions. We'll talk about that in
Speaker 1: a bit. So while all this is ramping up right
Speaker 1: the fifties through the seventies, there's ample documentation from an
Speaker 1: early period that formula, even in best conditions, is not
Speaker 1: as nutritious as breastfeeding. You have to take extra precautions
Speaker 1: if you're formula feeding in order to make sure that
Speaker 1: that the baby is properly gets proper nutrition. The consequences
Speaker 1: of this are first noticed in the United States and
Speaker 1: a Cooperstown, New York, during the nineteen fifties by a
Speaker 1: doctor named Alan Cunningham, a pediatrician who started his career
Speaker 1: working on a Sioux reservation. So he starts working at
Speaker 1: the Merry Image and Bassett Hospital, and he notices that
Speaker 1: almost all of the sick infants that he treats our
Speaker 1: formula fed. I'm gonna quote from the New York Times here.
Speaker 1: Dr Cunningham's subsequent investigation, published as two studies in the
Speaker 1: Journal of Pediatric showed that illness occurred twice as often
Speaker 1: among babies who are not breastfed in the first two
Speaker 1: months of life. The difference was sixteenfold. And again, this
Speaker 1: is the fifties. Formula is not as good. They don't
Speaker 1: know as much about how to This is part of
Speaker 1: how they learned the things you have to do in
Speaker 1: order to make this. You know, we're not saying it's
Speaker 1: bad if you have to, like you can keep take
Speaker 1: care of your baby perfectly well on formula, but it's not.
Speaker 1: You can't just like hand them the formula and kind
Speaker 1: of forget about it. There's things that they had to
Speaker 1: be learned once they started doing this. Another Tristian science.
Speaker 1: At this point is not is not super developed. It
Speaker 1: still has some problems, but at that point it's like
Speaker 1: not pretty yeah now. Another study published in nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: found that only nine percent of infants who were breastfed
Speaker 1: up to the age of six months suffered from malnutrition,
Speaker 1: compared to thirty two percent of babies who were formula fed.
Speaker 1: By the early seventies and eighties, the consequences of this
Speaker 1: rush into formula feeding were obvious enough that watchdog groups
Speaker 1: had started crying foul. In nineteen seventy three, The New
Speaker 1: Internationalist published an article titled baby Food Tragedy, which we've
Speaker 1: cited once. Published an article with the blunter title baby
Speaker 1: Killer by Mike Muehler in nineteen seventy four. In nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy five, a documentary called Bottle Babies exposed Neslie's marketing
Speaker 1: strategy and their tactics of subtly convincing women that formula
Speaker 1: was safer and more modern. Spurred on by this global press,
Speaker 1: governments and some of the countries being preyed upon by
Speaker 1: Neslie started to take action. In nineteen seventy five, doctors
Speaker 1: in Biguio City in the Philippines stopped their routine practice
Speaker 1: of separating mothers and babies at birth and feeding the
Speaker 1: babies with formula, they started returning the infants to their
Speaker 1: mothers within an hour of birth and advising the mothers
Speaker 1: to breastfeed on demand. From the New York Times quote,
Speaker 1: the results were dramatic, as the incidents of breastfeeding sword,
Speaker 1: the rate of morbidity, illness, and mortality dropped dramatically. A
Speaker 1: similar program worked justice successfully at a hospital in puriscal, A,
Speaker 1: a rural region of Costa Rica. Four years after babies
Speaker 1: began suckling at their mother's side, the rate of diarrheal
Speaker 1: disease had dropped by nine percent, meningitis by and lower
Speaker 1: respiratory infection by the mortality rate for acute infection declined
Speaker 1: by And you reverse those numbers to get an idea
Speaker 1: of how deadly this has been for the countries where
Speaker 1: this right. So this is people are getting wise to this,
Speaker 1: and this is a huge, huge change for them. Yep.
Speaker 1: You know what else, People are getting wise too. Quality
Speaker 1: of the products and services that support this podcast. People
Speaker 1: who have gotten real wise to that. Um here they are.
Speaker 1: That's a heck of an ad intro. That's how we
Speaker 1: do it. We're back, so again awareness starts to build
Speaker 1: and like protest movements start to build against this horrible
Speaker 1: industry in the like early to mid seventies. UM. Now,
Speaker 1: despite this, by nineteen eighty one, formula sales in the
Speaker 1: U s alone had reached five hundred and fifty million
Speaker 1: dollars a year. The world market was estimated to be
Speaker 1: more than two billion dollars a year, and that's nineteen
Speaker 1: eighties dollars, so you're talking a good amount of money.
Speaker 1: Nestley accounted for fully half of that share, with US
Speaker 1: companies like the American Home Products Corporation Abbott Laboratories in
Speaker 1: Bristol Myers making up the rest. Horrific stories like this
Speaker 1: increasingly reached the front page of newspapers like the New
Speaker 1: York Times quote when the Jamaican woman brought her two
Speaker 1: babies to Allan Jackson's clinic at the University of the
Speaker 1: West Indies in Kingston, the pediatrician was shocked by their condition.
Speaker 1: Her four month old son weighed only five pounds to
Speaker 1: less than at birth, and her daughter wasn't even worse shape.
Speaker 1: At eighteen months, she weighed only twelve pounds and soon
Speaker 1: lost four more. With Dr Jackson questioned the woman, who
Speaker 1: had ten other children, He discovered that she had never
Speaker 1: breast fed her two youngest. Their diet since birth had
Speaker 1: been infant formula. Because the family income averaged only seven
Speaker 1: dollars a week, the mother had to heavily dilute the
Speaker 1: expensive formula to make it last longer for the four
Speaker 1: month old baby. Dr Jackson later told Senator Edward I. M.
Speaker 1: Kennedy's Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research one ten of
Speaker 1: feed should have lasted for something like just under three days.
Speaker 1: She said that one tin of feed lasted two weeks
Speaker 1: to feed both of the children. Oh god, that's so brutal. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's pretty bad. Obviously, no blame on like this woman,
Speaker 1: this family is doing the best they can in a
Speaker 1: desperate situation. Um. And also, how many kids did you say?
Speaker 1: Did you say she had twelve? Yeah? I could see
Speaker 1: how like after ten you might want to like not rescue.
Speaker 1: Get that. Um wow, yeah, that's that's really tough. And
Speaker 1: that also has do we know of the kids survived?
Speaker 1: I don't believe those two did, but you often don't
Speaker 1: get Yeah. So, Nesley and their fellows first responded to
Speaker 1: the backlash by ending the most egregious of their marketing practices.
Speaker 1: First they took away the semi official uniforms of their
Speaker 1: mother craft nurses, and then they ended the program entirely.
Speaker 1: This was not enough to stop an international boycott against
Speaker 1: Nestlie products organized by the Infant Formula Action Coalition, nor
Speaker 1: was it enough to stop a river of lawsuits and
Speaker 1: eventually congressional inquiries. We talked about that just a second ago.
Speaker 1: Protesters convened on the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, which
Speaker 1: prompted this response from a Nestlie spokesman. Bestle of course,
Speaker 1: as a Swiss company and does not manufacture, distribute, or
Speaker 1: sell infant formula in the United States and thus there
Speaker 1: has never been any direct impact on the company through
Speaker 1: that product. So Nestlee's like, this protest move it starts
Speaker 1: in the US against this industry and this is like,
Speaker 1: we don't even sell our formula here. And I was like, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's people aren't angry about what you're doing here so
Speaker 1: much like which they're angry about, um, the fact that
Speaker 1: you know, and again Nestlee is half of the global
Speaker 1: market for formula, so they are overwhelmingly responsible for this shock,
Speaker 1: super duper ring the problem. Yeah, and the protests continued.
Speaker 1: Dr Stephen Joseph, a u s AID official, went to
Speaker 1: The New York Times and claimed that reliance on baby
Speaker 1: formula by us AIDS research caused as many as one
Speaker 1: million infant deaths a year through malnutrition and diarrheal diseases.
Speaker 1: The War on Want continued to publish expose s until
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy six, uh Nestle sued the German translator
Speaker 1: of one of their pamphlets titled Nestle Killed Babies, Kills babies,
Speaker 1: which seems like an accurate statement to me based on
Speaker 1: what USAID has said. But Nestle wins their lawsuit because
Speaker 1: there Nestlee and they have all of the money. UM.
Speaker 1: I would suggest that's probably why. And the judge still,
Speaker 1: the judge rules in their favor, but he also tells
Speaker 1: them they have to modify their publicity methods fundamentally. Um,
Speaker 1: which time declared a moral victory for consumers. I don't
Speaker 1: know if I would call it a moral victory for anybody.
Speaker 1: But so did they actually end up changing the way
Speaker 1: they were marketing things? Great question? Absolutely not. I mean legally, yes,
Speaker 1: they do change it. The question is does that change
Speaker 1: what their marketing does, which isn't a point that we
Speaker 1: we're gonna talk about at now. So in nine one,
Speaker 1: the World Health Assembly adopts a resolution that establishes an
Speaker 1: international code of marketing. Breast milk substitutes right, So we decide,
Speaker 1: we've gotta have an international law about how you can
Speaker 1: market this ship. And they put that resolution through and um, well,
Speaker 1: here's the start of an article written by the l. A.
Speaker 1: Times in nineteen ten years after that resolution and thirteen
Speaker 1: years after the lawsuit against Nestlie or bian Nestle. Six
Speaker 1: months old, Jim j H y M had withered away
Speaker 1: to skin and bone by the time the doctors first
Speaker 1: saw him. The diagnosis malnutrition caused by improper formula feeding.
Speaker 1: The doctor said Jim would survive, but UNICEF estimates that
Speaker 1: more than one point five million other Third World babies
Speaker 1: die each year because aggressive promotion of infant formula persuades
Speaker 1: their mothers to bottle feed rather than breastfeed. And again
Speaker 1: I'm quoting here when I say third World. That's how
Speaker 1: it's written at the time. So that article that that
Speaker 1: l A Times article is interesting in part because Jim's
Speaker 1: and I think it's Jim. It's j H y M.
Speaker 1: Jim's parents were middle class in the Ivory Coast, which
Speaker 1: means they had the resources and the nutrition for his
Speaker 1: mother to have breast fed him um. But his mom's working,
Speaker 1: his dad's working. They decide formulas going to be great
Speaker 1: and they give they have like their Her mom is
Speaker 1: taking care of the baby because they're both out of
Speaker 1: the house a lot um and when interviewed, his parents
Speaker 1: claim that Neslee's ad campaign and the free formula Neslie
Speaker 1: gave out in the Avorean hospital where they had their
Speaker 1: baby convinced them that formula would be the easiest and
Speaker 1: healthiest way to feed their baby. It was also fashionable
Speaker 1: and this is an up and coming, upwardly mobile middle
Speaker 1: class family. Right. Um Jim loses more than half of
Speaker 1: his body weight before his parents take him to a
Speaker 1: US financed oral rehydration center. Quote. The baby looked like
Speaker 1: a famine victim, belly bloated, stick like limbs, a tiny
Speaker 1: skeleton clearly visible through a stretch of skin. Most of
Speaker 1: his hair had fallen out and what was left had
Speaker 1: turned orange, a sign of severe malnutrition. While other children
Speaker 1: at the clinic were being fed with spoons of oral
Speaker 1: rehydration fluid. Jim was so weak a drip had to
Speaker 1: be attached to his nose for the fluid to be
Speaker 1: pumped in with a syringe. Yeah. I don't even know
Speaker 1: what to say at this point, because like this is
Speaker 1: just like like actually super depressing. It's it's real bleak,
Speaker 1: it's a real bad time. UM. Probably shouldn't be legal
Speaker 1: to do any of this. UM, certainly to advertise for
Speaker 1: stuff in general. Now, one study showed that babies on
Speaker 1: the Ivory Coast, like Jim, fed on formula rather than
Speaker 1: breast milk are four times as likely to die. And
Speaker 1: again that's not in general, that's in these these locations,
Speaker 1: but these locations are a huge chunk of the market. Right.
Speaker 1: Outrage over cases like Jim's convinced the Ivorian health authorities
Speaker 1: to regulate and restrict the distribution of Nestlei formula at
Speaker 1: hospitals to new mothers. Right, so this becomes a problem
Speaker 1: the health authorities, they're like, well, let's stop giving this
Speaker 1: out to everybody. Nestley retaliates against them and says, okay,
Speaker 1: we're not going to give you any free formula then,
Speaker 1: And of course they needed a lot of free formula
Speaker 1: because there are there are horrible viral epidemics and bacterial
Speaker 1: epidemics throughout the Ivory Coast, and a lot of moms die,
Speaker 1: and you have to have baby formula for those moms.
Speaker 1: And the hospitals rely on the free formula from Nestlie
Speaker 1: in order to feed these babies. And Nestleie says, if
Speaker 1: you're not giving free formula to everybody, even the people
Speaker 1: who don't need it, we're not giving you any fuck you.
Speaker 1: So they're holding like motherless children hostage. They're putting a
Speaker 1: gun to orphaned babies and saying it's good ship Nestlee. Um.
Speaker 1: So yeah. In short order, the medical system had a
Speaker 1: shortage of formula and was unable to feed abandoned babies
Speaker 1: or orphaned babies. Quote. The situation poses a moral dilemma
Speaker 1: for Africa's cash strapped hospitals, said Andoah Joseph, head of
Speaker 1: pediatric service at Abba John's state run University Hospital Center. No,
Speaker 1: we don't want them handing out their products to mothers
Speaker 1: and persuading them against breastfeeding, but we need their products
Speaker 1: for mothers who have no choice, he said, Does this
Speaker 1: mean hospital should start paying? It's a difficult question. And
Speaker 1: of course these are not hospitals with money. This is
Speaker 1: the Ivory Coast. They have to make some tough ass
Speaker 1: choices with where their money goes. You know, now, we
Speaker 1: will never have an accurate account of how many babies
Speaker 1: died as a direct result of the ad campaigns and
Speaker 1: formula peddaling that Nestlie and other companies engaged in. I
Speaker 1: found a single two thousand eighteen study that just looked
Speaker 1: at the impact of Neslee's marketing on infant death rates
Speaker 1: in low and middle income countries in nineteen eighty one,
Speaker 1: So this is one year, one subset of countries, and
Speaker 1: they estimated sixty six thousand additional infant deaths in that
Speaker 1: year alone. UM to hear a lot of different estimates
Speaker 1: as to have, including some that are like in the
Speaker 1: millions a year. It's hard to tell because other stuff
Speaker 1: going on obviously, right, not every diarrhel Like a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff is happening in the Yeah, I mean, I
Speaker 1: think that's that's also the main issue. Right. You cannot
Speaker 1: say that a baby who is sick was necessarily sick
Speaker 1: because of this formula. They might have gotten some other thing,
Speaker 1: but maybe their immune system was weak. Because they weren't
Speaker 1: being fed properly. Like it is actually so complicated believed
Speaker 1: to go after a company like Nestley at this point. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that's why this study that that estimated sixty
Speaker 1: six additional list was very narrow when its scope, because
Speaker 1: they were trying to specifically look at when the ad
Speaker 1: campaigns were launched in which countries, how death rates changed,
Speaker 1: all that stuff. And these are all correlation studies, not
Speaker 1: like it's because of this, yes, now that study. Two
Speaker 1: thousand eighteen, the World Health Assembly voted on a breastfeeding
Speaker 1: resolution that was widely considered non controversial. It suggested that
Speaker 1: the international community should take a mild stand and state
Speaker 1: that formula producing companies should not be able to advertise
Speaker 1: that formula is better than breastfeeding. Very simple statement, right.
Speaker 1: The Trump administration refused to back the resolution from the
Speaker 1: Philadelphia Inquirer quote. In addition, the US delegation threatened poor
Speaker 1: countries such as Ecuador that had introduced the measure to
Speaker 1: withdraw support of the resolution, or the U s would
Speaker 1: draw withdraw its financial support of these poor nations. So
Speaker 1: and Russia did eventually introduce the resolution unchallenged by the US.
Speaker 1: But again Nestlee threatens countries like, if you're not going
Speaker 1: to give everybody this formula, we're taking all of the
Speaker 1: free formula way. And the US is like, if you're
Speaker 1: going to back a resolution that's bad for formula producing companies,
Speaker 1: We're not going to give you aid. Cool. Well, this
Speaker 1: makes the US look great. Yeah. Now also in Switzerland too, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're a big part of this. Now. In two thousand eighteen,
Speaker 1: a company called the Changing Markets Foundation IS issued a
Speaker 1: massive report on the infant milk products sold by Nestle
Speaker 1: in forty different countries. Again two eighteen, it found that
Speaker 1: Nestlei's products often contradicted health advice given by Nestlee reps
Speaker 1: in public statements. The company was found to make health
Speaker 1: claims around the world about probiotics and prebiotics that were
Speaker 1: prohibited by European health regulators. Several products were advertised as
Speaker 1: the closest to breast milk, but each of these products
Speaker 1: actually had wildly different ingredients. Quote. The report concludes that
Speaker 1: NESTLEIE is not driven by nutritional science, but instead by
Speaker 1: a sharp and prioritized focus on profit and growth at
Speaker 1: the spensive infants and their parents. I mean, I guess
Speaker 1: that doesn't surprise me, but damn. Yeah, yep, So like
Speaker 1: that's all like pretty recent history, Like yeah, this the
Speaker 1: story that you're telling me, Like we're still in the
Speaker 1: thick of it. Yeah, we're still dealing with it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean the good thing is that now more doctors
Speaker 1: are aware of what's going on and there's more data
Speaker 1: on like, so it's not you know, you're not dealing
Speaker 1: with as much of a problem as like, well, there's
Speaker 1: more plausible deny ability for these companies to hide behind,
Speaker 1: but they are still engaging in practices. It's again not
Speaker 1: the same kind of ad campaign, but it does have
Speaker 1: an effect that is similar um because that effect has
Speaker 1: been measured and is continuing to be measured. UM. And
Speaker 1: that's cool and good. Anyway, anyone want to get a
Speaker 1: Nestle chocolate bar, you know, how about I mean, listen
Speaker 1: if you want to talk about nestleie. There's also water bottles,
Speaker 1: which are a huge issue. Like this company has been
Speaker 1: involved in a lot of other ship that is not
Speaker 1: good for the planet. You know, we just had don't
Speaker 1: have as much time as that, but I mean we'll
Speaker 1: talk about it at some point. But yeah, one of
Speaker 1: the sketchy things that when Nestlie tries to like talk
Speaker 1: about how they've changed and like how they're supporting Like
Speaker 1: they make a big deal if we're supporting access to
Speaker 1: clean water from others in these places, because that's so
Speaker 1: important for them being able to use the formulas safely.
Speaker 1: And it's like, well, you're also taking water away from
Speaker 1: communities in a lot of cases and trying to like,
Speaker 1: we just had a big fight in Oregon a couple
Speaker 1: of years back to stop them from taking like a
Speaker 1: quarter of the water runoff from Mount Hood. Um, and
Speaker 1: they're currently sucking California dry. And if there's one thing
Speaker 1: they know about California, it's the state with plenty of water. Um,
Speaker 1: are you in Portland right now? Yeah? Uh you said
Speaker 1: Mount Hood. My sister in law got married a looking
Speaker 1: at Mount Hood at to look at when you're getting
Speaker 1: my favorite mountains? Yeah, yep, yep, souh, nest how's it going?
Speaker 1: I mean dread? Dread? Yeah, dread is a good feeling.
Speaker 1: Everybody likes some dread. Yeah, Um, I don't know. Hydrate Yeah,
Speaker 1: hydration is good. Uh, finding Nestlee infrastructure and well, okay,
Speaker 1: probably shouldn't so eight, Robert, what is the legal definition
Speaker 1: of incitement again? We're not doing this again. It's not
Speaker 1: happening again. All right, Okay, well but fair enough, Sophie says,
Speaker 1: I can't in the show the way I wanted to,
Speaker 1: So I'm just going to ask my wonderful guest to
Speaker 1: plug her plug dobles. Oh is this now the time? Now?
Speaker 1: Is the time? Now? Is the time? Now? H Yeah?
Speaker 1: So I host a podcast called Vice News Reports. It
Speaker 1: is a documentary style weekly news podcast where we really
Speaker 1: try and take people to the stories, incorporate a lot
Speaker 1: of field audio, um, and we cover a wide range
Speaker 1: of topics and it's Vice so you know, it's fun,
Speaker 1: it's it's a little uh looser and uh yeah, I
Speaker 1: think it's really engaging. I think we do some good
Speaker 1: journalism that also feels you know, real and and sometimes
Speaker 1: there are some swear words in there, so you should
Speaker 1: check it out. Well that is rad check that out,
Speaker 1: and um, don't check out Nestley products ideally. Yeah yeah, um,
Speaker 1: you can find us where you just found us if
Speaker 1: you if you've listened to this episode, you know where
Speaker 1: we are. We're we're already inside you, um your ears
Speaker 1: at least in your brain, probably your lymph nodes. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of new data coming out about about that,
Speaker 1: so UM, congratulation my sinuses right now for for sure. Absolutely. Um.
Speaker 1: You can find my book my novel at a t
Speaker 1: R book dot com or as a podcast on After
Speaker 1: the Revolution. You can check that out. And you can,
Speaker 1: I don't know, go walk through the grocery store and
Speaker 1: look at baby formula products and get very angry and
Speaker 1: none of the people around you will understand it unless
Speaker 1: they're also listening to this podcast, in which case I
Speaker 1: don't know. Sophie says, I can't say anything insiding anymore,
Speaker 1: so we're just gonna end the episode. Uh well, I
Speaker 1: learned a lot that was wonderful. Thank you, Robert