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  • Title: The infant food industry and international child health.
    Author: Jelliffe DB, Jelliffe EF.
    Journal: Int J Health Serv; 1977; 7(2):249-54. PubMed ID: 576862.
    Abstract:
    Declining breast-feeding, with accompanying increased marasmus and diarrhea, has occurred in developing countries because of many factors, including inappropriate health services, new urban life styles, and so forth. The infant food industry must bear a considerable burden of blame as a result of "unethical" advertising. Responses have most recently included various journalistic and legal actions. There is a need for revised roles for the infant food industry, and for mechanisms to monitor intrinsically harmful practices. In peri-urban slum and shantytown areas in the resource-poor, technically developing countries, there has been a decline in breastfeeding. Marasmus and diarrheal disease have come to predominate in the 1st year of life, and mothers who try to bottle feed their infants can only afford inadequate amounts of formula and have very low levels of environmental home hygiene. The causes for this change in infant feeding practices are multiple, complex, and "occidentogenic" (derived from Western cultural influences). One of the causes is the unethical promotion of formulas by commercial concerns. Marketing techniques include the use of persuasion and motivation based on prestige and upward social mobility in communities where there is no possibility of the purchase of formula in adequate quantities, and/or where breastfeeding is still the norm. Since World War II all major infant food firms, particularly the large international concerns, have carried out advertising and promotional compaigns in competition with each other in less developed countries. The methods employed in such promotional compaigns include the widest use of mass media. Over the past 20-year period, response to the harmful promotion of formulas in developing countries has evolved in 3 stages--papers in professional journals, meetings between pediatricians, nutritionists, and representatives in the infant food industry, and journalistic and legal. Industry has achieved an overdominant role in molding infant feeding practices. There is a need to devise mechanisms to monitor the promotion of processed infant foods.
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