“Each year over one and a half million mothers and fathers are tricked by industry marketing into making catastrophically bad consumption decisions on the part of their babies.”
Gerard Hastings, PhD, co-author of the paper, The political economy of infant and young child feeding: confronting corporate power, overcoming structural barriers, and accelerating progress
Lancet 2023 Breastfeeding Series introductory video (19:31)
Last month, The Lancet released its 2023 Series on Breastfeeding, with three robust articles detailing how aspects of politics, economics, and wider society affect parents’ choices in infant feeding. The series builds on the journal’s 2016 breastfeeding series and corroborates 2022 findings of the World Health Organization on the exploitative marketing strategies of commercial milk formula companies.
All three articles in the series are available with open access:
- Marketing of commercial milk formula: a system to capture parents, communities, science, and policy Rollins et al.
- Breastfeeding: crucially important, but increasingly challenged in a market-driven world Pérez-Escamilla et al.
- The political economy of infant and young child feeding: confronting corporate power, overcoming structural barriers, and accelerating progressBaker et al.
The Lancet held four launch events for the series last month, in the UK, southeast Asia, South Africa, and the Pacific region, and a US launch is scheduled for April 18. The US launch will take place at the UNICEF headquarters in New York City at 11am Eastern time. The event will also be broadcast over ZOOM (register here). At the launch, we’ll hear from the studies’ authors as well as a panel of experts.
Among those attending the UK launch live on February 7 at the Royal Society of Medicine in London were Healthy Children Project’s Executive Director Karin Cadwell and faculty member Anna Blair.
Read the related post, Efforts to curtail dubious marketing practices of commercial milk formula industry, on the Our Milky Way blog.