Nick Clegg in Africa - a missed opportunity?

Nick Clegg and Lynne Featherstone went to Africa this week. Shortly after he picked up every banana skin left for him at Deputy Prime Minister's Questions by Labour and the incomparable Peter Bone, and lobbed them back with vigour, he took a flight to Mozambique and Ethiopia.

He was there to highlight the Girls' Education Challenge Fund set up by the Department of International Development. Its aim is to give a million of the world's poorest girls the chance to improve their life chances by giving them access to education. Nick said that this would help them escape HIV, domestic violence and poverty.

African women should be driving  economic growth, not be driven into poverty and dependency. From what I have seen today, I’m convinced that giving girls a good education is the single most effective thing we can do to break the cycle of poverty.

Africa’s recent economic success – growth rates from five to seven per cent – owes much to its women. Sustaining and increasing the pace of growth will depend on them too.

Projects such as this one are getting girls into good quality education and are vital to help African women escape poverty, disease and domestic violence. The girls I have met here are enthusiastic, committed and dedicated to learning. They are clearly the key to unlocking Africa’s potential.

He is absolutely right and this is exactly what we should be doing. His Letter from the Leader told us more about his visit to Africa:

In meetings with leaders from both countries I particularly highlighted the need for global action on tax avoidance and evasion. Developing countries have suffered from this for years but the developed world is now waking up too. Big companies can move quicker and easier than national tax laws and they end up playing us off against each other. Only by working together - developed and developing nations - can we make sure that tax is properly collected and spent on the public services we all need, whatever country we live in.

I also took a business delegation with me because the opportunity for British businesses in Africa are enormous. Seven out of the ten fastest growing economies in the world are on the continent and it's part of the job as a Government Minister to make sure they are getting the best access to these booming emerging markets.

I think there's one huge issue he's missing out, though. And it has to do with reining in corporate greed and improving the health of kids. If kids are going to benefit from education, we need to get them through the perilous first five years of life. A Save the Children report last year highlighted the importance of breastfeeding, amongst other things, in that.

There are lots of interventions Governments can make  to support breastfeeding. Some of them are very simple - like making sure babies are put to the breast and encouraged to feed within an hour of birth. Others are much more complex - getting the formula companies to behave. Nestle,and others, for example, is threatening the Government of the Philippines with withdrawal of investment if it does not reduce its regulations on the marketing of infant formula according to Baby Milk Action.

Friday's Guardian carried a horrific report by Zoe Williams on how the antics of the formula companies put babies in danger. Heavens above, a wee bit of horsemeat in our food, which won't harm us, and we all go mad. That's nothing compared to what's happening in Indonesia and elsewhere. The article highlights 20 year old Fifi who was given a sample of formula for her daughter by her midwife of all people.Now she has to spend half her husband's income on formula, but that's not the worst of it:

But at Fifi's home, it became obvious that the sanitation problem towers over this one – 45% of Indonesians have no access to clean water. There are only two places in the capital where anyone can drink from a tap, and that's the American embassy and Jakarta international school. But Fifi can't afford gas to boil water either. She has no kitchen. She has to pay every time she goes to the loo, which is shared between 26 people, and sometimes she cuts a deal with a neighbour where one of them goes to the loo while another has a shower, to save money.

Clean hands, clean utensils, clean bottles, clean anything, it's all a total pipe dream. A paediatrician in a separate Jakartan clinic, Dr Asti Praborini, said: "Selling formula is like the killing fields, in my opinion. The babies will die of diarrhoea and they will die of malnutrition.

The report highlights how formula companies work with midwives to get them to sell their products, flouting the law in the process.It is time that Governments did something about this.Otherwise babies will continue to die unnecessarily of diahorrea and malnutrition. I'd really like to see Nick Clegg and Lynne Featherstone get some international action going on this.

The countries they visited last week are classified "good" on Save the Children's scale. They still have room for improvement, though. Countries like Malawi and the Solomon Islands where they are putting a lot of effort into encouraging breastfeeding are seeing child mortality rates fall. Obviously.

And it'snot just in the poorer parts of the world where improving breastfeeding rates  makes a difference. You might be interested in this post I wrote last year telling Nick Clegg how action now could both save money and tackle inequality in health, quoting current research which says clearly that:

Breast fed children from lower socio-economic groups had better outcomes than formula fed children from more affluent families.

 It's time to take this issue seriously by making it easier for mothers to breastfeed and clamping down on formula companies both at home and abroad.

BBC reports flawed breastfeeding report as Holy Writ alongside new Vitamin D guidance

The BBC is reporting that the Scottish Government has issued some new advice to pregnant mothers, that they should take Vitamin D supplements. Much as I'm not keen on synthetic vitamins, I can't really argue with this one. We used to spend so much time outside in sunlight, but with modern busy lives, children often spend their early years being driven to nursery, spending all day there and then going straight home. There's not so much of the spending all day outside in the pram, either in the garden, or going for long walks, soaking up the sun's rays, and when we do, we sensibly slap on the sunscreen. Even La Leche League has conceded on the Vitamin D issue so I reckon this is a sensible move.

The thing that's made me absolutely mad is not what the Scottish Government has said, but the way the BBC has reported that there is no change to the age at which children are recommended to be weaned:

The policy was drawn up before evidence that babies should be given solid food before the age of six months was published in last week's British Medical Journal.

The BBC are treating a report by 4 people, 3 of whom have connections with the baby food industry, as Holy Writ even though it is not based on a shred of new evidence, just them putting their spin on older research. I wrote about this in more detail last week. Honestly, journalists are all over politicians at the slightest sniff of a conflict of interest, yet they print this sort of stuff unchallenged. I am not impressed.

Moving on, the new Scottish guidance suggests that the introduction of lumpy foods too late can cause a baby to be fussy eaters and can exhibit strong dislikes even at 7 years old. There's a bit of chicken and egg about this, I think. Anna would have nothing to do with lumpy foods, despite being offered them on a daily basis from before 6 months, until she was a fair bit over a year. And she is quite a fussy eater. Looks like an open and shut case, but is it?

I have always resolved never to make food a battleground. I will take no guilt on this, as I believe it's my job as her mother to offer her healthy, nutritious food several times a day, and it is her job to eat it. If she doesn't want to, I'm not going to force her. Yes, she has strong food preferences, but as she grows older, the range of things she'll eat is getting bigger. This is a child who wouldn't touch an apple or a banana if her life depended on it, but who will  happily down grapefruit, brocoli and mushrooms. My point is that the refusal of lumps may have been an indication that she was already a fussy eater. Her diet has caused me stress over the years, but she's healthy and a perfect weight for her height and age so we're doing something right somewhere..

My health visitor, who was lovely, and often right, told me when I mentioned the lumpy food issue that I'd have to sort that or she might have speech problems. At that point, at the age of around a year, Anna had a vocabulary of over 100 words, so I took that particular bit of advice with a pinch of salt.

I tried so many things to try to get her to eat lumps and finger food in those days, but she was seriously having none of it, but, like everything else, it all sorted itself out in the end. I find the fact that it's been confirmed that there is a relationship between lump refusal and fussy eating interesting, but not really surprising and I'm not really sure what parents in the same position as I was are supposed to do.

What is really behind today's reports undermining breastfeeding?

When I see a report which undermines breastfeeding, like this one today saying that introducing solids to a baby earlier than the recommended 6 months,  I always look for the connection to the baby food industry. And I have never seen such a study where there is no connection.

The study today suggests a link between delaying solids until 6 months to iron deficiency and allergies.These are serious allegations to make, which are going to worry parents. Headlines like "Prolonged Breastfeeding may harm Babies' health" in today's Herald are quite inflammatory - and unnecessarily so, as the experts today haven't conducted any new research, they have just put their spin on studies which have already been carried out.

As Baby Milk Action points out, three out of the four of today's experts have connections to the baby food industry, one in particular having even appeared in defence of a formula company when they were being successfully prosecuted for illegal advertising.

Why now, though? Why are these people all of a sudden publishing their concerns about the Government's recommendations that mothers should exclusively breastfeed for 6 months? We now have a new Government which isn't keen on regulation. Could this be the first step in a campaign to persuade the Coalition to relax some of the restrictions around the marketing of infant formula, starting with the weaning age recommendation? If so, I hope that ministers will have none of it. I've written before about the huge body of evidence showing the benefits of breastfeeding and in particular the Dundee infant feeding study where Professor Stewart Forsyth stated that:

"Breastfed children from lower socio-economic groups had better outcomes than formula fed children from more affluent families"

If you're worried about when you should introduce solids to your baby, have a look at UNICEF's detailed response  which basically takes a coach and horses through the BMJ report's arguments in turn.

One of the most bizarre points made in the BMJ report was that if you didn't introduce solids early enough, then babies wouldn't get to like bitter tastes, such as found in green, leafy vegetables, leading to poor diet and obesity in the future. This is so ridiculous to me as to be almost funny. So our obesity problem is to do with breastfeeding, and not to do with the fact that over the past few decades a vast industry has built up around sugar and foods which have been refined and processed within an inch of their lives. You also have the fact that artificial baby milk always tastes the same whereas breastmilk changes in flavour depending on what the mother has been eating. And just as an aside, although it's not strictly relevant to this debate, artificial baby milk often has something called maltodextrin - it's a carbohydrate that's quite like sugar.

If you're worried by what you've read today in the press, have a look at some of the stuff I've linked to here to get the other side of the argument.  I've known a lot of babies in my time, and they have all sorts of preferences and habits where solids are concerned.  Some babies want a bit more than milk sooner rather than later, but I've also seen some totally reject solids completely for much longer than six months and they've been absolutely fine too. Most will look for solid food somewhere round about the middle of the first year and it kind of makes sense to introduce them when they're learning to sit up and taking an interest in what the rest of the family is eating. With all these rites of passage, I'd always say don't worry what anyone else's baby is doing, just look at all the arguments for yourself and make the decision that works for you. I was always relaxed about when Anna did things - I always presumed she'd get there with crawling and walking and sleeping through the night and eating solids (it was well over a year before she'd tolerate any food with lumps in it) in her own good time. There were times I did worry about some things, but it all worked out fine in the end.

Insects found in artificial baby milk

Imagine your absolute horror if you've gone to the trouble of sterilising all the various bits and pieces of equipment to make up bottles for your baby, and then find creepy crawlies actually in the milk powder?

I was shocked to see that's what happened to a dad in Derby who describes how he found two beetle like insects in a tub of powdered infant formula.

We are well aware of the risks of formula feeding in places where there isn't a safe, clean water supply, but we don't tend to expect that there'll be any problems in this country.

The manufacturer of the Aptamil milk for extra hungry babies (ok, get the jokes about extra protein out of your system now, please) was at great pains to point out that this was the only complaint of this nature - but one is more than enough.