Breast-feeding lobby criticises Jordan for infant formula 'stunt'
Photos in 'OK!' magazine show Katie Price feeding her new child bottled milk. Critics say this is just a cynical way to get round the ban on advertising baby milk
Sunday, 5 August 2007
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A furious row has broken out over what campaigners are calling a cynical product placement stunt that features a former topless model apparently promoting formula baby milk in a magazine.
Pictures of the model Katie Price, also known as Jordan, feeding her new baby Princess with infant formula during World Breastfeeding Week have angered the National Childbirth Trust, which has condemned OK! magazine for carrying the photos, which clearly show the model using SMA baby milk.
The next page of the magazine is given over to an advertisement for SMA formula designed for older infants. Wyeth, the pharmaceutical company that makes SMA, said it was merely a coincidence that the advert had appeared in the same edition as the photos of Jordan and her baby.
The NCT condemned the promotion as "appalling". Its chief executive, Belinda Phipps, said: "It is an extremely cynical way of getting round the ban on advertising infant formula."
The pro-breastfeeding group Baby Milk Action, which campaigns to inform mothers about the benefits of breast-feeding, plans to complain to the Advertising Standards Authority and Trading Standards about the advert, alleging that product placement is being used in order to get round a ban on promoting infant formula for babies under the age of six months.
That the article will hit the shelves in the midst of World Breastfeeding Week has further angered campaigners. Government figures show that in this country only 48 per cent of six-week-old babies are breastfed, while a quarter of babies get no breast milk.
In developing countries, the World Health Organisation estimates that 1.5 million children die every year because they are not breast-fed, largely due to malnutrition and a lack of sterile water with which to prepare the formula.
The article is accompanied by an interview in which Price enthuses about the wonders of shop-bought baby milk. "It's brilliant. I don't have to sterilise or heat anything, you literally take the teat out, screw it on, and throw it away. I don't care what people say - you don't have to breast-feed."
She adds: "I don't want a baby drinking from me."
