Katherine Carroll, NTP, Green Med Info
Waking Times

Feeding babies is Big Business – Deep-State style.

The essence of the Deep State is “a combination of government and private businesses, working arm in arm to take advantage of the public.“^[1]

Here, that public is “mother and child.” Where infant and follow-up formula (FUF) are concerned, whether purchasing, consuming, or investing in that increasingly lucrative market, the question for the health and health-freedom advocate is,

Whether in the financial market or the supermarket, do your purchases represent your ethics, beliefs, and principles or do they satisfy a less noble demand?

Consumers drive markets. You hold an exquisite balance of power to move markets by boycotting products lacking integrity and demanding what you want and deserve. Are you taking on the Deep State by flexing intelligently based consumer power? The National Health Federation (NHF) completed another year of work in the Codex Committee for Nutrition and Foods for Special Dietary Uses, going head to head with the Deep State in Codex’s electronic and physical Working Groups. It is despicable how the Deep State drives infant formula and FUF; how it impacts every segment of certain formula markets. It is certainly not supportive of children or their mothers.

Demand Due Diligence

Strangely, in light of GMO contamination, recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBST), MSG, sugar, and other contaminants in U.S. and/or international infant and follow-up formulas including cupric sulfate^[2] (a known herbicide, fungicide, and pesticide), key private investment advisor Porter Stanberry plugs the Mead Johnson ticker[3] to potential investors, stating that “Enfamil and other Mead Johnson brands already have a reputation for uncompromised quality.” (emphasis added)

Does the term, “due diligence”[4] ring a bell – the care that a reasonable person would exercise to avoid harm to one’s (or others’) persons or property?  Stansberry clearly failed to do due diligence to support the “uncompromised quality” label claim he pitched to potential investors who hopefully do theirs. Depending where an investor, consumer, or referring doctor’s mores lay determines if Stansberry’s quality claim was researched with healthy skepticism as part of due diligence. Note Stansberry’s expansion on his already wild claim for “uncompromised quality” while leveraging the power in the marketplace of doctor-referred brands: “But when doctors actively dissuade moms from ‘shopping around,’ it provides some additional width to an already wide competitive moat.”^[5]

These statements, to the critical thinker,[6] reflect Deep State implications: Doctors, manufacturers, and governments coalescing to take advantage of the trust many parents place in their pediatrician’s feeding recommendation. The product is also expensive, if purchased, adding perceived value when its label reads more like a witch’s brew. Moreover, it is underwritten by the U.S. Government in entitlement programs and is the Number-1, pediatrician-recommended formula despite the unpronounceable, dangerous ingredients – proving that recommending physicians do not do their own due diligence either. Just google some of the ingredients on the Enfamil and Similac labels yourself. This is a perfect example of the Deep State in action. Can you ethically support this investment either financially or as a consumer?

This “#1 choice of pediatricians,” infant formula, Enfamil, contained GMOs as recently as October 2015.  Even now, only these two Mead Johnson products (for infants and children up to 12 months), discontinued GMOs,^[7] children over 12 months get GMO-contaminated formula. Parenting challenges us to unleash our inner activist, take control, research, and reach the critical decision as to what children will eat and how the health of mother and child will be impacted. Otherwise, innocent children are prostituted simply to make a market; their health and the health of the mother sacrificed on the altar of an investor’s portfolio, a bottom line benefitting doctors, manufacturers, and investors. America-based Mead Johnson clearly has other interests to feed at home and abroad and it apparently is not the good health and well-being of children as evidenced by the ghastly industrialized ingredient list.

“We cannot waste our precious children. Not another one, not another day. It is long past time for us to act on their behalf.” –  Nelson Mandela and Graça Machel in their letter to the people of the World, May 2000

Ethical Investing versus Colluding with Deep State

How did this particular Deep State activity begin? Mead Johnson, founder of Johnson and Johnson, needed a solution. In 1888, he enlisted the help of Dr. Abraham Jacobi, the “father of pediatric medicine” to develop a formula to feed his failure-to-thrive son. A thousands-year-old respected profession of wet-nursing went into decline when Jacobi and Mead’s formula came to market even though it was based on potato starch. Later, the government facilitated distribution with entitlement programs. Remember, the essence of the Deep State is “a combination of government and private businesses, working arm in arm to take advantage of the public;”^[8]in this case, innocent children.

Today, Mead Johnson controls about 40% of the U.S. infant-formula market, according to Stansberry’s December 2015 Investment Advisory,^[9] and is supported significantly by State and Federal entitlement programs that buy its products. Abbott Labs’ Similac controls another 40% of the market. Some of their products’ ingredient lists begin with sugar and GMO ingredients. Similac is also supported in part by government entitlement programs. 76% of Mead Johnson’s company revenues are outside the U.S. with China in the lead.

Porter recommends putting Mead Johnson on your watch list as revenues grew 10% in 2014 and volumes and revenues are up again this year, between 5% and 7%. Further he states,

“We truly consider Mead Johnson one of the best consumer products businesses in the world,”

and he goes on to detail return on investment capital, return on equity, gross margins, earnings, and more. It’s a winner, right? As an investment advisor and in Stansberry’s defense, yes it is. But, ethically, to health and health-freedom activists, advocates, and consumers, no one wins in this losing trade.  Our future depends on healthy, sound children growing into healthy, sound adults.

The question remains, “Where do you draw the line when investment opportunities profit some and hurt or damage others, particularly in such primary and vital areas as food and health?” We must determine our own ethics of investing, whether in the financial markets or at the supermarket. For many of us, ethical consideration begins by investing in mothers’ nutrition and education for successful pregnancy and breastfeeding, which is supported at home, in the workplace, and in society. Some marketing tactics of formula-makers include the caution regarding “low DHA and Vitamin D in breast milk,” as if their formula was the solution. Tricking mothers into believing formula is superior because their milk might be deficient is inappropriate since any deficiency that might be present is easily corrected with targeted nutritional supplementation, not turning to formula supplementation.

NHF Faces the Deep State at Codex

The National Health Federation (NHF) has faithfully shown what goes on behind the closed conference room doors at Codex and throughout the year in electronic working groups coordinated around the Globe.

Because of NHF’s direct involvement as food activists helping to shape food standards at Codex Alimentarius, we help to shape policy in the global infant and follow-up formula market and many others. Whether fighting against misleading, illicit marketing methods or substandard nutrition, dangerous additives, contaminants, hormones, and GMOs inherent in many of these products, NHF takes on the Deep State internationally for you and your loved ones.

We began years ago working in the Codex Committee for Nutrition and Foods for Special Dietary Uses (CCNFSDU) of which Follow-up formula is a part. Children and their mothers, their health both protected by breastfeeding, is compromised – even directly challenged – in the marketplace and by their own pediatricians and investment advisors who recommend FUF. Sadder still are parents who continue, despite living in the “information age,” to avoid taking full responsibility for feeding decisions for their children, trusting label claims and pediatrician’s recommendations.

Arguing at Codex, the International Baby Food Action Network (IBFAN) said that,

“The adoption of the Follow-on Formula standard in 1987 is universally acknowledged by health advocates as a mistake that has been used to establish and expand a market for unnecessary risky products to the detriment of child health.”

Of the many hundreds of country and industry delegates at Codex, there is majority agreement that FUF is unnecessary. Potentially misleading marketing can confuse parents due to the age of introduction on FUF labels that may suggest replacement of breast milk with these products. The “industrialized” product is completely unsatisfactory for health when weaning to indigenous foods has historically been the way children progress. NHF, along with others at Codex, has been the guardian of the health of those who cannot speak for themselves.

NHF President and General Counsel, Scott C. Tips is a veteran. In 2009, it was Scott who kicked the clod of dirt that became an avalanche and stopped a melamine exemption in dry infant formula from advancing after the production and sale of melamine-adulterated milk that killed at least six children, made almost 300,000 sick, and hospitalized more than 54,000 infants with kidney problems in 2008. In our view, the safety of thousands of babies had been sacrificed for monetary gain through the sale of dangerous product. NHF fought melamine’s continued use as a lining material where it could still leach into infant formula without limit.

Although we do our best for children at Codex, many country and Independent Non-Governmental Organizations (INGO) delegates, including NHF, noted that science at Codex is lacking to create a defensibly good product. Chairwoman Dr. Pia Noble herself failed again.

“It’s not our task to determine the latest scientific position, it’s our task to see how to deal with it,” she said, referring to precarious products already on the market. This ludicrous statement was made in light of the majority of delegations’ agreement to “seek scientific advice to speed up our work.”

We are regulating FUF ingredients without enough science on board to create efficacious labels or to insure health for the infants consuming FUF. It is astonishing. It is wrong. Post-facto regulation of a deleterious product needs to be accomplished quickly yet Dr. Noble was even challenging DHA’s continued use in formulas as “necessary.” Anyone with nutritional knowledge is aware that DHA is an essential fatty acid and must be provided exogenously as our body does not make it. These are just some of the inane frustrations NHF endures trying to protect children internationally. And this is before the investment advisors, pediatricians, and governments join in.

The same science claimed to be lacking for global delegates to make confident decisions on FUF is easily found; www.greenmedinfo.com alone has literally hundreds of current research articles available for professionals and laymen alike. Yet Codex insists on using its own Recognized Authoritative Scientific Bodies (RASBs). This is the place to begin a serious assault on the Deep State because alternatives with true integrity (and even some – but fortunately not all – organic infant formulas lack integrity[10]) must overtake the infant-formula and FUF market if we are to protect children.

At this year’s meeting many crucial decisions were put off until the next (38^th) session of CCNFSDU. Another year of inadequate DHA, of GMO being allowed in U.S. markets where the FDA has deemed them and rBST safe for infant formula, and inadequate nutrients (and available science per Codex) compounding the problems facing our children. With an accelerated vaccine schedule, increasing chemicals, additives, and toxins in food and the environment, our children deserve to have clean, nutritious food to offset these assaults at least in part.

For infants, lack of breastfeeding is associated with an increased incidence of infectious morbidity, including otitis media, gastroenteritis, and pneumonia, as well as elevated risks of childhood obesity, Type-1 and Type-2 diabetes, leukemia, and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Among premature infants, not receiving breast milk is associated with an increased risk of necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC).^[11]  Formula provides an unspoken “kickback” – increased business – to the pediatricians who recommend formula. UNICEF itself cites a Lancet 2013 study, “Optimal breastfeeding of infants under two years of age has the greatest potential impact on child survival of all preventive interventions, with the potential to prevent over 800,000 deaths (13 per cent of all deaths) in children under five in the developing world.” (emphasis added)

Don’t overlook the deleterious impact on mothers who choose against or are unable to breast feed as well. “For mothers, failure to breastfeed is associated with an increased incidence of premenopausal breast cancer, ovarian cancer, retained gestational weight gain, type 2 diabetes, myocardial infarction, and the metabolic syndrome.”^[12] This is just a partial list.

Deep State Delusion

Besides being “a combination of government and private businesses, working arm in arm to take advantage of the public,”^[13] the Deep State is defined as a “government within the government” directing the whole, an alternative network of power running the country regardless of who is in the White House, with the Deep State serving insiders at the expense of the public. Additionally, the December Bill Bonner Letter describes it as

“permanent government run as a collusion between the elite of corporate America and the national security industry … the ‘military industrial complex’ that General Eisenhower said ‘we must guard against,’ in his farewell address of 1961.”

Blatantly underscoring the suspect relationship, Stansberry notes that

“[t]he government won’t let anyone compete with these guys {Mead Johnson}. And according to the consulting firm UBIC Consulting, government programs, like food stamps, support one-third of the U.S. formula market. And with the number of food-stamp recipients skyrocketing, this trend is bound to continue. Essentially, Uncle Sam is fending off potential competitors with one hand and cutting Mead Johnson a check with the other.”

It is clear: bottle-fed children are a market like pork bellies and cotton. In China, the one-child ban was just lifted over concerns about the lack of enough young workers to support for the graying population. Thirty-six years of compulsory abortion, sex-screening, infanticide, and harassment just ended. The formula market shot up instantly.

Undermining breastfeeding services future markets. The Deep State’s negative feedback-loop goes directly to pediatricians, manufacturers, and investors while undermining the health of consumers. But it may get worse. A 2010 study in Nature^[14] by Cleveland immunologist Dr. Vincent Tuohy of the Cleveland Clinic’s Lerner Research Institute claims that a single vaccination with the antigen alpha-lactalbumin prevented breast-cancer tumors from forming in mice. The downside: destruction of a protein allowing the woman to breastfeed. Preying on breast-cancer fears, authorities drive parents into making poor health choices. Parents need to rely on their own due diligence instead. Breastfeeding provides a 50% reduction in breast cancer and provides the child protection against cancer as well as infections, obesity, diabetes, allergies, and more. The Mediterranean Diet shows similar statistics. Health isn’t found in a needle.

Know Your Enemy

Fight Deep State activity by empowering women to breastfeed, make it user-friendly in the workforce, acceptable in any setting. Educated breastfeeding is the most cost-effective and best way to foster health. There are great resources available such as UNICEF and the La Leche League, the latter of which I used when breastfeeding three children; one to nearly two years of age. In terms of investments, this was the best I have ever made. My children never had formula. We were not victim to the diseases listed as possibilities for non-breastfed children and mothers. It is possible to work and breastfeed. We can protect the children of the World against ignorant decisions based on blind trust, prostituted to a market made at the expense their health and development by the simple act of encouraging and supporting breastfeeding.

When we are willing to stop enabling the Deep State and those who abuse us by cutting off their source, when we are willing to forego hefty investing profits if it means pimping our children out on a lucrative global market, and when we realize that the last terrain to conquer is the sanctity and integrity of the human being and choose instead to fight, we will take back ground and win. 2015 was the year of the consumer. You have far more power than you have ever imagined to move a market by creating and supporting healthy ones.

Action Steps:

• Encourage and support educated breastfeeding with family, friends, and in the workplace.
• Business owners: create space for on-the-job-breastfeeding and/or pumping.
• Provide breast pumps if the lack means stopping nursing prematurely.
• Provide organic formulas of high integrity if parents must supplement or stop breastfeeding.
• Give toward NHF’s work on behalf of children, mothers, and parents at www.thenhf.com.
• Do not offer children and mothers up for harvesting by Deep-State market-makers, investors, or the medical community, who actively or inadvertently support anti-health regimens, practices, and products.
• It’s never too late to change. Don’t berate yourself for choices that were not the best as parents, consumers, business-providers, and investors. Make healthy choices!

© 2015 Katherine A. Carroll

References

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[1] Bill Bonner, “How Deep is the Deep State,” The Bill Bonner Letter, Volume 2, Issue 11, December 2015.

[2] Sayer Ji, “Why Is Pesticide Used As An Ingredient In Infant Formula?“GreenMedInfo.com, December 7, 2012.

[3] Porter Stansberry, “The End of an Atrocity,” Stansberry’s Investment Advisory, November 2015.

[4] http://beta.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/due%20diligence.

[5] Porter Stansberry, supra.

[6] Katherine A. Carroll, “NHF Leads in the Future of Health Freedom: The Need for Critical Thinking,” Health Freedom News, Vol. 33, No. 2, at p.32.

[7] See http://www.enfamil.com/site/search/non%20gmo

[8] Bill Bonner, supra.

[9] Porter Stansberry, supra.

[10]Sayer Ji, “Chemicals As “Nutrients” In “USDA Organic” Infant Formula,” GreenMedInfo.com, March 2012.

[11] Alison Stuebe, M.D., MSc, “The Risks of Not Breastfeeding for Mothers and Infants,” Rev Obstet Gynecol, 2009 Fall; 2(4).

[12] Ibid.

[13] Bill Bonner, supra.

[14] Ritika Jaini, Pavani Kesaraju, Justin M Johnson, Cengiz Z Altuntas, Daniel Jane-wit, & Vincent K Tuohy, “An autoimmune-mediated strategy for prophylactic breast cancer vaccination,” Nature Medicine Letter 16; 30 May 2010.

About the Author

Kat Carroll, NTP, Associate Editor enjoys hosting guests at Adytum Sanctuary in the Pacific Northwest as well as writing for several blogs and magazines and is Associate Editor of NHF’s Health Freedom News. Additionally Kat is a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner and clinic administrator at her and her husband Donn Carroll’s Optometry clinics.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of WakingTimes or its staff.

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