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Loading...The Real View of Free Formula Samples – Open Your Eyes
Written by Melissa Bartick, MD
Whoopi Goldberg and friends on The View just threw a Molotov cocktail of ignorance into the middle of the Mommy Wars. This time it’s about whether hospitals have the right to market formula to new moms with free samples. The women of The View give a unanimous, “Yes.” But the proposed ban on marketing is not about women being bullied into breastfeeding. It’s about standing up for our freedom to make our own feeding choices, freedom from commercial influences in the one place where they certainly don’t belong—the hospital.
Let’s be clear. Formula companies distribute free samples in hospitals for one reason: to sell more formula. Specifically, to sell more high-priced brand-name formula. Abundant market research shows that women stick to the brand of formula they got in the hospital. Knowing that babies often don’t tolerate formula well, moms wisely stick to a brand that’s worked for them. That’s why the makers of those pricey brands compete, often viciously, to be the brand a hospital uses. These brands will cost a family at least $700 more per year than store-brand formula, which may be every bit as good, since the government regulates what ingredients must be included.
Those free samples to moms come with a hitch. They are not just “free” to the moms. Formula companies want your business so badly that they will vie for the privilege of supplying most of the hospital’s formula for free. Yep, you heard that right. Unlike any other product, the formula company representatives bypass all hospital purchasing policies and quality control, and wheel their cache right up to the maternity ward, in the hopes that nurses will dole it out like confetti.
It’s a brilliant strategy. It helps make the United States the biggest single consumer of infant formula in a $10 billion a year global market. Hospital staff love to be helpful. They went into health care to help people. The formula companies are well aware of this instinct for well-meaning nurses to rain freebies down on moms.
Think you’ll get more sleep if that helpful nurse takes your baby to the nursery? That’s another myth the formula companies prey on. One nurse may be looking after 5 or six babies. It’s no wonder research shows that babies do better next to their moms, and moms get just as much sleep whether their babies are with them or not.
For moms who chose to breastfeed, the abundant supply of free formula is even more problematic than it is for moms who choose formula. Research shows that one of the biggest predictors of breastfeeding failure is giving babies formula in the early days when there is no medical reason for it. (For more information on these issues, check out these sites: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18563999, http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5723a1.htm)
This interferes greatly with the mom’s ability to establish an early and abundant milk supply, and interferes with the well-choreographed dance between baby’s hunger and mom’s body. As many moms will tell you, one bottle then leads to another, and pretty soon mom’s milk supply dwindles to nothing.
When that happens, moms have to buy formula for the rest of their baby’s first year, just as surely as the diabetic has to buy insulin. Formula companies sell a product with only one market, babies, and there are only so many babies born every year. So the only way to sell more formula is to sell less breastfeeding. It’s as simple as that.
Those free bottles of formula come in handy at home, when a mom is at her wits’ end in the middle of the night. And that’s the whole point of them. If breastfeeding doesn’t get off to a good start in the hospital, we know that it’s much more likely that a mom will go home and struggle. A bottle of premixed, ready to use formula is awfully tempting, even for those of superhuman willpower. Then that mother-baby dance is interrupted, and for most babies, breastfeeding is likely to go from bad to worse.
Contrary to popular belief, breastfeeding doesn’t tend to go badly because of maternal factors. It tends to go badly because of hospital factors. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention conducts a biannual survey of how well hospitals conform to evidence-based maternity practices around infant nutrition and care, the mPINC survey. Out of 100 possible points, the average US hospital scored just 65, a solid D. Even average hospital the top scoring states were only in the low 80s.These evidence-based practices, the Ten Steps to Successful Breastfeeding, make a huge difference to long-term breastfeeding rates. What happens in the hospital is crucial for breastfeeding success.
When there’s abundant free formula around, it’s a lot harder for hospitals to change their long-established routines and implement the WHO’s Ten Steps to Successful Breastfeeding, the protocol upon which the mPINC survey is based. So, why are hospitals marketing baby formula instead of implementing the Ten Steps? That’s the question we should all be asking.
We would find it absurd if hospitals’ cardiac units gave out coupons for Big Macs. Commercial marketing doesn’t belong in hospitals. No matter how you feed your babies.
For more information, go to www.banthebags.org.
This post was originally published by MomsRising.
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Read more: breast feeding, breastfeeding, formula, hospitals, infant formula, momsrising
Photo from jenpilot via flickr
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Recent Comments from Causes
does seem to be misplaced values worthy of objecting to in whatever way garners attention
After shootings like Sandy Hook, CT, I have sympathy for the principal and those involved in this situation.…
Sarah I dodnt know how to break this to you but we don't LEAD the world. We have very little to say…
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77 comments
+ add your ownMy mom wanted to breastfeed me, but the nurses kept giving me formula in the nursery, so I was never hungry when they brought me to her, so, of course, she gave up. I wish she'd been able to, if only because breastfed babies grow up with less of an obesity tendency.
Shame on The View. They should know better.
Stick to breastfeeding it is so natural and give the child a great start in life.
Baby formula companies are so hypocritical.
While breast feeding is always best, there are a few unfortunate mothers who are, for various reasons, cannot suckle their babies. But if they can't. they should receive proper advice, from qualified professionals, about the best formula milk for their babies. They will probably be very upset and confused by their failure to breast feed and it is an abuse to inflict advertising of this kind in hospitals.
Stick to breast feeding. It's the only way to go.
My children are not fashion accessories, I am a mother, I did want to be a mother, and I did bond with my children. I bonded with them in utro, at birth and every day since, for the last 17 years. I also gave birth to them in a hospital (that is not the most natural way, at home is). Choosing to breast feed doesn’t make you a mother it won’t make the bond stronger, I did it with the first one. Then I gave him a bottle with my second he also had a bottle both kids are happy and healthy. But they are far from a fashion accessory. A mother gives up her whole life for her children a choice I made with a bottle and I am glad I did it. Breast feeding may be the best way but it is not the only way and it is not the measure of weather you love your child or not. BTW I would not step in front of a charging moose with 2 calves for a purse or even you kid, but I did for mine.
A woman who chooses formula over breast milk for her child is not a mother but a woman who considers a child as just another fashion accessory.
Ko hoce i moze da doji nek izvoli.Ko nece njegov izbor,neke mame i ne mogu pa sta bi
one trebale.
Another reason to have my baby in a natural birthing center. The hospitals tend to run the whole operation and over ride the mother's wishes and desires. I want to give my baby the best start possible from preparing my body before the pregnancy to not giving them formula. It is frustrating to make all of these decisions and take time to prepare so that the hospital can muck it all up. No thanks!
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