Extract from the book Ultra-Processed People
[...]He met a British couple Derrick and Patrice Jelliffe, paediatricians who were studying infant malnutrition. In a series of papers, they had meticulously documented aggressive marketing practices by the infant formula industry in low-income settings, with a particular focus on Nestlé. Sales representatives with no certification or training were dressed up as ‘mothercraft nurses’. They advised impressionable new mothers about the benefits of formula and promoted it in such a way that has since been linked to thousands of avoidable deaths.Nestlé and some other formula companies were causing a quadruple jeopardy.First, even formula made with clean water is associated with an increased risk of fatal infection, probably because of effects on the infant microbiome. Second, Nestlé was marketing the formula in communities where the possibility of producing an uncontaminated feed was almost zero. In these low-income settings, parents would typically have only one bottle and no way of cleaning it, would have to use river or well water contaminated with sewage and had low literacy rates, which meant they had great difficulty in making up the feeds correctly. Third, while initial samples were given at low price, or even for free, once the mother had stopped lactating the price went up, creating poverty further and endangering the child and its siblings. In east Africa, for example, to feed an infant properly would take more than a third of a labourer’s salary. Finally, it seemed that to save money mothers diluted the formula so the infants, often already suffering with diarrhoeal disease, were then undernourished: ‘Under these circumstances, almost homeopathic quantities of milk are administered with large quantities of bacteria, the result is starvation and diarrhoea, too often leading to death.’ The Jelliffes catalogued instances of formula companies marketing breastfeeding as being ‘backwards and insufficient’, and in 1972 coined the phrase ‘commerciogenic malnutrition’ – malnutrition caused by companies. Modern obesity is also a commerciogenic disease