Johann Hari: There is a smart drug – it's called breast milk
The "drug" exists. It is called breast milk. Yet in the
developed world, we often stigmatise women who give it to their babies as
"creepy". In the developing world, we allow corporations to tug babies from
their mother's nipple, and put them on to powders that bring more profit – and
more death.
I come at this from a strange perspective. My mother breastfed
me until I was nearly three; she only stopped the day I wrote her a note saying
I expected to be breastfed that afternoon. Today, whenever I have a success, she
clutches her breasts and exclaims: "It's thanks to these!" Whenever my
bottle-fed brother and sister have a failing in life, she howls: "Think what you
could have been if I'd given you the tit." (Whenever she gets a bit too
self-congratulatory, I remind her she also smoked 40 cigarettes a day. "Ach,"
she says, "it's stressful having a little bastard suckin' at you all the
time.")
It's the best thing you can do for your baby – without it I'd
be even fatter and more disease-ridden. It's good for you too, significantly
reducing a mother's risk of osteoporosis and cancer of the ovary. Yet my mum was
made to feel like a flasher. She was glared at in public places, and asked to
leave restaurants, parks and even buses. Unsurprisingly, Britain today has the
worst record on breastfeeding in the developed world, after Belgium. Some 24 per
cent of our babies never taste breast milk at all – and by six weeks, a majority
have shifted entirely to formula.
Why? Why do we hobble our babies, and our country? Let's rule
out some of the more glib explanations. The number of women who physically can't
breastfeed with the right support is negligibly small: the World Health
Organisation (WHO) puts it at 1 per cent. Nor is it because women prefer the
"liberation" of the bottle. A Department of Health study found that 90 per cent
of mothers who stopped feeding at six weeks said they wanted to carry on, while
40 per cent of those who stopped at six months felt the same.
The most primal reason belongs to an old, old story: women are
conditioned to find their own bodies disgusting, except when they can be used to
entice men. A get-your-tits-out-for-the-lads culture doesn't want you to get
your tits out for your baby: they're for titillation, not nurture. This week,
one of the Government's best ministers – Harriet Harman – has succeeded in
peeling this back, by including the legal right to breastfeed your baby in
public into the new Equalities Bill.
But the biggest reason most women give for reluctantly pushing
their baby on to the bottle is their need to return to work. How do we change
that? For clues, look at the country where breastfeeding rates are still 90 per
cent at six months: Norway. They give mothers a year off with 80 per cent pay,
and give state employees breastfeeding breaks when they do come back. Yes, this
costs businesses some money up front – but it saves a fortune further down the
line, because you have a cleverer workforce that pays more tax and puts less
pressure on the health service. If British babies were breastfed at Norwegian
rates for just three months, the NHS would save £50m annually in the treatment
of one disease alone – gastroenteritis.
That leaves another dark explanation for the fall-off: the role
of unchecked corporate power. There is no profit to be made from a mother's
milk, so at the turn of the last century corporations tried to find a way to
divert babies from nestling at their mother's breast to Nestlé-ing at the
corporate teat. They invented "baby formula" and marketed it as the classier,
cleaner alternative. Cow & Gate powder was sold with a crown on the tin,
bragging the Windsor children used it. (Look how that turned out.)
Gradually, in the democratic world, the corporations were
restrained from making the most blatantly bogus claims about breast milk – but
they keep slipping the leash. In Britain, they are banned from marketing baby
formula to those younger than six months old. But instead they market "follow-up
formulas" for older kids with exactly the same logo, covered with claims that it
is "closer than ever to breast milk".
This has produced a situation of startling public ignorance,
where a third of mums think baby formula is "as good" or even "better" than
breast milk. The poorest women know least and shift to formula first – adding
another milky layer of inequality to our island. This dodgy marketing needs to
be banned today.
But this breast-con swells to a 52DD scandal in the developing
world. I recently visited Bangladesh, where mothers are routinely told to
abandon their healthy breast milk and spend great swaths of their income on
formula. I think of all the dead and dying babies I saw, and wonder how many
could have been saved by a substance that was there, free, all along. WHO
calculates that 1.3 million babies die every year because they are not
breastfed. That's a World Trade Centre-full a day.
Nestlé are still the most notorious offenders, controlling a
near-majority of the world market. In Botswana, Nestlé has distributed a
pamphlet claiming if you give your baby its "acidified" formula, "diarrhoea and
its side effects are counteracted". In reality, babies who use this rather than
breast milk are more likely to contract diarrhoea – and die. Public health
campaigns can hardly fight back: the corporation's annual marketing budget is
bigger than the entire annual budget of the world's 28 poorest countries.
Nestlé says they consistently promote breastfeeding as the
first, best option – but in 1999, a British Advertising Standards Authority
studied the evidence and ruled they had to remove from their advertising the
claim they sold their formula "ethically and responsibly". It is only tight,
binding international regulation – here, and abroad – that will tame
corporations from milking the poorest with misinformation. To join the campaign
to make it happen, visit www.babymilkaction.org.
And yet, for all the evidence, it still seems like an
implausible story. Can a powder mix of misogyny and unregulated corporate power
really induce women against their will to harm their own children? It does,
baby, every day. These are still shockingly powerful forces. Now suck on that –
or fight back.