Translator: Yasmin Klär Reviewer: Sebastian Betti
The ancient Greek said
that the Milky Way was born from a stream of Hera's milk.
Zeus had a son with a mortal, that was called Hercules.
Hera was a goddess, wife of Zeus, she was not Hercules' mother.
and Zeus loved that baby so much,
that even when he was little he showed superhuman characteristics,
but he was not a god.
he wanted to give closer characteristics to that of the gods,
so he couldn't think of a better idea than to take him to the Olympus,
so that he could drink some milk of Hera's breast
and in this way turn into a god.
Since it was likely that Hera didn't agree with this proposal,
Zeus waited for her to fall asleep, then he smuggled Hercules to the Olympus,
then he attached him to her breast.
But Hercules, since he was little, had a lot of strength
and when he got attached to the breast,
Hera woke up, was surprised, detached the baby, that wasn't hers, from the breast
a milk stream came out that crossed the sky and formed the Milky Way.
The human milk is part of what we are:
we are mammals, and that helped
our ancestors to survive and develop.
If we look at art as a history chronicle of mankind,
we see demonstrations of this nourishing function of the breasts,
which are the organs of the body that practice breastfeeding
and we see that the breast, in its nutritional function,
was the protagonist of the history of mankind
throughout time, from the beginning of time.
We can see, for example, the Paleolithic Venus,
with big breasts, that appear to be filled with milk,
and we see images of different cultures and different movements,
for example the ones of Maria Lactans,
of the Virgin Mary breastfeeding baby Jesus.
Again, looking at art as a chronicle of history,
at some point we notice a break
and we see it clearly in this picture of the French School,
where you can see Madame d'Estrées,
who was a lover of Henry IV, the king of France,
preparing to receive the king
with breasts that no longer seem to be filled with milk.
And behind of Madame d'Estrées,
a nurse breastfeeding the son of Madame d'Estrées.
This shows the first appearance of the breast
no longer in a nutritional function, but in a erotic function
and the breast then takes this changing role:
it is no longer a source of life and food, but it is an object of desire.
Lactation and breastfeeding are something that
I want to delegate or replace.
If possible, women hired a nurse
like Madame d'Estrées to breastfeed their children
and even lactation had a role
in the survival of that baby.
Those who couldn't hire, or didn't want to hire,
delegate breastfeeding, they appealed to some replacements that,
if we look at them now in retrospect, they seem horrific to us.
There were babies, for example, that ate bread dipped in broth;
other babies ate meat,
new born babies,
lightened meat with some water or broth
so they could swallow it.
Other babies were given beer.
And others were given raw milk from animals,
with the danger that entails,
because raw milk was not safe food
and less in those hygiene conditions
And those replacements were what they had,
and to be honest, they did not have good results.
There were tragic situations:
babies got sick, and some also died.
In 1861,
a enterprising man, Swiss, named Henri Nestlé appears,
who finds a way to preserve the overproduction of milk
from Swiss cows,
because they are very efficient, as they are Swiss
and in the 19th century they produced more milk
so that the Swiss could consume even cheese.
So, they had to preserve it in a certain way.
And this man came up with dehydrating milk
and he invented milk powder.
And, Mr. Nestlé was an innovator and said:
"Ah, if I add
a little bit of carbohydrate and a little bit of fat,
I call it Nestlé milk flour
and I sell it to feed it to the kids."
And so it was: the milk flour from Nestlé
was the first massive replacement of the human milk.
The apparition of this substitute, or the replacement of the human milk,
already much safer than the previous ones
that have been practiced throughout the history,
allowed that --
plus the fact that women joined massively the labor market,
after the industrial revolution,
breastfeeding was not necessarily
the normal way of feeding babies.
And throughout the 20th century,
what became normal was to feed with formula,
to the point that the bottle,
that is used to feed with formula
is the symbol of a baby
I am sure you must have seen the stickers,
that shows the places to change a baby
with a bottle,
the ones we stick to cars and say:
"Attention, baby on board," also with a bottle.
The bottle is a symbol for a baby.
The formula is an industrial product
it is a derivative of the Nestlé milk flour.
The formula is based on milk from the cow
The cow is a mammal just like us,
but that produces milk for their offspring that has four stomachs.
Then, the cow's milk is difficult to digest for a baby,
so what the process to manufacturing the formula does
is the thermally treatment in order to be digestible.
In this process it loses nutrients.
nutrients that got lost are added and some others too,
as we get to know a little more about human milk,
to make it more similar to mom's milk,
and finally, there is a process which is the industrial, dehydration,
homogenization, pasteurization, aggregate of nutrients, canning and distribution.
It is an industrial process.
It is an industrial product.
As an industrial product, it consumes resources and generates waste
in all of its processing steps.
We know that stockbreeding
is one of the big contributors
that generates gases of the greenhouse effect.
And the stockbreeding is the base of the formula of the industry
But not only that stage, also the other stages
generate greenhouse gases, waste
and consume resources.
To produce one kilo of canned milk, of formula,
throughout the process, from the cow til the end
four thousand liters of water is needed,
so formula is an industrial product.
Maternal milk, human milk,
instead, only needs a mom, or someone with a breast
and a baby who is willing to grab it.
It does not generate greenhouse gases, it does not generate waste,
virtually zero carbon footprint.
If we think of a sustainable human activity by its definition
it is the human breastfeeding.
Now, with what I said,
during the 20th century, the use of formula was normalized.
and today, 21st century,
with a worldwide lactation rate
of only 39 percent.
Only 39 percent of babies receive human milk
as the World Health Organization recommends:
Human milk exclusively up to six months.
After that, the rate is even less.
And if we know
that maternal milk is so complete,
why are these lactation rates so low?
Well, one of the reasons is, that the formula is a big business.
The formula business moves more money than Coke
Sorry, than the most famous soft drink of the world.
(Laughter)
Look, it moves more money than the most famous soda drink in the world.
And you think that a person drinks a soft drink for a lifetime,
while the formula
takes only a very short interval of life.
Why, then?
What is going on?
Does milk have no value?
The topic that I cannot define as a market product,
What? Can't I make advertisement?
Because, obviously, if I have a product that generates such a business,
I invest a lot in advertisement
And what happens to human milk?
Human milk does not have such possibility
of having the same marketing access, for example.
There are some calculated facts about the value of human milk
and, in fact, there is a milk market.
Milk is sold nowadays,
there are countries where it is allowed, but not in ours.
but in others it is.
For one liter of human milk, a person can pay USD 90 for one liter of human milk.
Now, I don't know if this represents the total value that milk has
but, for example, the milk of a mother of a premature baby
is different to the milk from a mother of a full-term baby.
And it has the nutrients
that the premature baby needs to finish developing,
and what he lacks, as he was born early.
If you are going to pick up your child at the kindergarten or day-care,
or wherever he is, there is a baby that has a cold.
and you are exposed to that virus
you will start generating antibodies
that you are going to pass on to your baby through milk.
What value does that have?
It is very difficult to give it a value.
And that is one of the problems that we have:
milk is "free," human milk,
but at the same time it is very valuable.
What happens then?
Why -again the question- are the lactation rates so low?
If we have the product that -as we know it- is made specifically for babies
that has lots of properties that we don't even finish of knowing,
why are the lactation rates so low?
The reality is that the idea has been planted
that lactation, breastfeeding is incompatible with modern life,
is very difficult to turn it compatible what a woman does outside her house
while breastfeeding a baby.
And it is true.
Mothers find many barriers to be able to breastfeed
For example, the maternity leaves,
that last less than the exclusive breastfeeding,
that last six months and the leaves last three.
Also, for example, social work pays the formula for you, if you use it,
but, if you breastfeed, they won't give you any incentive.
And in reality, you are improving the numbers
because one baby that is breastfed,
in average, breastfed babies get sick less.
Then, what do mothers need to breastfeed?
What does a mother who wants to breastfeed need?
She definitely does not need
to be removed from a place when she is breastfeeding,
like what happened in our country some time ago.
She neither needs a health system that says:
"Your milk does not work,"
or "it is not sufficient"
because it is not true.
The majority of the mothers produce sufficient and quality milk
to breastfeed their children.
And when there are difficulties, the difficulties can be solved.
It neither has to absorb all the negative experience
of other women who weren't able to breastfeed.
What happened to me was, when I was breastfeeding my older daughter,
I had her in another country where I was studying,
it was my husband and me alone, and my mother came to help us,
and while I was in the postpartum,
with huge difficulties to breastfeed my daughter,
my mother cried,
because she saw me breastfeeding and she got in a bad mood,
as she couldn't breastfeed us three:
my sisters and me.
Women who want to breastfeed
they don't need advertisements
that tell them what the baby milk three has and how good it is or which brand.
They don't need to receive information about lactation
from the manufacturers of the product that replaces them.
Women who want to breastfeed need support.
They need support from organisations,
like the organisation to which I belong.
Indeed, but they also need support from their family,
they need support from the health system,
they need support from their employees,
they need support from the kindergarten where their children are taken to
to be taken care of
they need support from their work colleagues,
from the communication media.
They need support from everyone.
There is an African saying that says
that a village is needed to raise a child.
I tell them that a village is needed to breastfeed a child.
A mother cannot breastfeed in society,
a family cannot breastfeed in society.
Breastfeed is not mandatory,
but reflection must be made
of whether we choose
how to breastfeed our children.
We can do motocross,
we must have reached the moon,
but we are still mammals.
Thank you.
(Applause)