Anecdotally Yours

The following facts are true and freely donated to you via the deep recesses of my brain, which is a fountain of mostly-useless knowledge. Most facts are stolen from articles and lectures encountered over the past ten years or educational television of the 1990s. Enjoy.


Nestlé Kills Babies

Well…‘killed’ babies. But still, dead babies. The story is this:

Back in the early 1970s, the majority of babies in Europe and North America were fed on formula, not breast milk, and Nestlé was the major producer of infant formula for these Western babies. All that changed when the World Health Organization issued a statement that breast milk was nutritionally superior and generally better for the health of babies everywhere…Nestlé was not pleased.

As breastfeeding became more and more popular, Nestlé was desperate to make up for the loss of customers and income. To do this, they turned to a yet untapped baby market - in Africa.

Nestlé began aggressively marketing to poor and uneducated mothers throughout Africa, providing free samples, professing the benefits of formulated milk, and in some cases dressing up as nurses, going into maternity wards, and placing infants on formula themselves.

As the mother’s own breast milk dried up, many women found they could not afford to buy Nestlé’s no-longer-free infant formula. Their babies starved to death. Others did not have electricity or refrigerators necessary to keep the formulas cooled and heated appropriately. Their babies died of infection. And countless others did not have access to a clean water supply necessary to prepare the powdered formula. Those babies were eaten away by parasites.

And in the end, over a million African babies died.

This was a long time ago, and a lot of our ethical business laws came to be in the 70s precisely because of the magnitude of Nestlé's heinous crimes...or, what we would now call heinous crimes, which happened to be perfectly legal in the early 1970s.

Today, Nestlé still produces infant formula for Western consumers as part of its vast food empire, but it is strictly forbidden from marketing any infant formula in the third world, despite many ongoing requests and a large hissy-fit in the early nineties. And as recently as two years ago, a nursing coach in Surrey, BC quit her job after employees of her hospital were all invited to a ‘conference’ run by Nestlé to extol the virtues formula feeding…such activities are considered unethical, and are also largely illegal.

Nestlé remains the most boycotted brand in the word. And now you know why I never eat Stouffer’s, or Kit Kats, or Haagen Daz, and only succumb to Turtles on very special, rare occasions.

You Use More Than 10% of Your Brain

Image by alles-schlumpf via Flickr

This popular belief is hard to disprove because there are a lot of stupid people out there. However, stupid people, just like the rest of us, use a full 100% of their brain…not 10% or 30%, or whatever you remember believing was true when you heard it as a child.

Part of the reason that this belief persists is that very few people have any understanding of how the brain works at all, and no one understands it completely. However, every person who’s ever read a CAT scan, or a functional MRI, or completed three years of a degree in behavioural neuroscience knows…people use all of their brains. All the time. Every neuron has a function as is being constantly used; the only variance is in the intensity of activity in different structures and parts of the brain. But every neuron is being used, at least a little bit.

Which is why, when a person gets shot and loses half of their head, the emergency room doctors don’t respond by saying ‘Oh, no worries, that was part of the 90% of his brain that he wasn’t using. He’ll be fine!’

And if that doesn’t convince you, perhaps this will…the entire concept of using 10% of your brain emerged in the 1930s as part of an advertisement campaign. A company selling flash cards which were supposed to improve mental acuity to make you into the next Einstein insisted to would-be consumers: “You only use 10% of your brain.” Their product, assumedly, could help you use the rest of it, and the slogan, repeated over and over, made its way into the popular culture as an anecdote, a phrase, and a ‘fact.’

And now you know.

And finally...

Image by kalandrakas via Flickr

Dolphins are Assholes

Pretty and intelligent they may be, but your flippery friends are not the cuddly marine mammals that animal advocates would have you believe.

For starters, dolphins regularly practice infanticide. Much like lions, male dolphins regularly kill the offspring of their rivals in order to expediate the impregnation of the bereft mother. There is also a great body of evidence that some dolphins enjoyed killing babies so much that they then began to practice their skills on infant porpoises...the bodies of battered baby porpoises began washing up on the beaches of Northern Scotland, causing a great deal of environmentalist alarm, and until finally the deaths were traced back to a wayward band of lovable dolphins.

And when it comes to getting female dolphins pregnant to start with, dolphins love to gang rape. A group of three or four male dolphins will cordon a female off from the pod, bite and beat her repeatedly, and have sex with her for days at a time before finally releasing her. Many female dolphins die during this violent act, or miscarry as a result. Which makes one question the Darwinian benefit of male dolphins' actions...the only conclusion I can reach is that dolphins are the modern incarnation of Satan himself.