Federal breast-feeding ads censored. New ads resulted in less breast-feeding!

The United States has one of the lowest rates of breast-feeding in the developed world. The World Health Organization recommends that, if at all possible, women breast-feed their infants exclusively for at least six months.

In light of this, it was especially shocking when the Washington Post today revealed that the federal government has been colluding with the formula industry, to keep breast-feeding rates down, by doing what the lobbyists told them to do - cancel a hard-hitting campaing promoting breast-feeding and run a wishy-washy "nice" ad campaign instead.

According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, breast-feeding decreases the incidence and/or severity of a wide range of infectious diseases and may decrease the rate of sudden infant death syndrome in the first year of life and reduce the incidence of diabetes, lymphoma, leukemia, and Hodgkin disease, overweight and obesity, hypercholesterolemia,  and asthma in older children and adults who were breastfed, compared with individuals who were not breastfed.

Below are the images from the two breast-feeding campaigns.

After the 2003-05 period in which the dandelion ads aired, the proportion of mothers who breast-fed in the hospital dropped, from 70 percent in 2002 to 63.6 percent in 2006, according to statistics collected in Abbott Nutrition's Ross Mothers Survey. In 2002, 33.2 percent of women were doing any breast-feeding at six months; by 2006, that rate had declined to 30 percent.

The formula industry brought in powerful lobbyists, including Clayton Yeutter, to stop the initial campaign. He was agriculture secretary during the administration of George H.W. Bush. In the end, the feds dropped many of the hard-hitting ads and kept the images of dandelions puffs and ice cream scoops that looked like breasts. In the 2004 letter above, Yeutter thanks the secretary of health and human services for modifying the ad campaign.

Clearly, we have a government that cares more about our corporations than us, the people. Anyone wonder why obesity rates are going through the roof and the government has no idea what to do about it?

- Peter Rost, M.D. is a former VP of Pfizer and the author of Killer Drug and The Whistleblower.

Comments

[Les]

Has there also been a conscious campaign since the 1950s of keeping the public in the dark about the benefits of fathering babies in ones mid 20s to the very early 30s?

: Schizophr Bull. 2007 Aug 21; [Epub ahead of print] Links
Aberrant Epigenetic Regulation Could Explain the Relationship of Paternal Age to Schizophrenia.Perrin MC, Brown AS, Malaspina D.
2Department of Psychiatry, School of Medicine, New York University, New York, NY.

"The causal mechanism underlying the well-established relation between advancing paternal age and schizophrenia is hypothesized to involve mutational errors during spermatogenesis that occur with increasing frequency as males age. Point mutations are well known to increase with advancing paternal age while other errors such as altered copy number in repeat DNA and chromosome breakage have in some cases also been associated with advancing paternal age. Dysregulation of epigenetic processes may also be an important mechanism underlying the association between paternal age and schizophrenia. Evidence suggests that advancing age as well as environmental exposures alter epigenetic regulation..... "

[Alex Elliot]

Yes this represents deplorable behavior by our government, but the original ads would have inappropriately employed hyperbole and scare tactics. While breastfeeding is best, it isn't always feasible. Women who are not capable of breastfeeding do not need more guilt, particularly guilt that is sponsored by our government. Women who are physically capable of breastfeeding, but lack adequate maternity leave, live in states where public breastfeeding is illegal, or work at jobs that do not provide space or time for breastfeeding or pumping could use real government help in terms of changed laws to provide actual support. Nasty advertisements don't address any of the barriers they are facing.

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Peter Rost, M.D., a former Pfizer VP marketing, is an expert witness and marketing consultant. According to Fortune "Peter Rost has become the drug industry's most annoying - and effective - online scourge."

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You bring up an interesting point. It is plausible that many of the people who click on the ads in Google don't necessarily think of them as ads. Google has tried to walk a careful line with simultaneously delineating them and having them blend in with the look-and-feel of the overall page.I think Google's original ambitions were to try to make advertising more useful to Internet users of all kinds. But that is clearly a high bar... and one that could probably use more attention in the industry.

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Interesting article.It's really bad that "the federal government has been colluding with the formula industry, to keep breast-feeding rates down".People should be informed.

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