Nestle Is Buying These Supplement Companies

A featured image showing a woman's palm with supplements. This is a featured image in a blog post about nestle buying supplement companies.

On December 5, 2017 Nestle announced that it would be buying Atrium Innovations for $2.3 billion.

For those of you who don’t know, Atrium Innovations owns the following brands:

Garden of Life	Orthica	Wobenzym	AOV
Pure Encapsulations	Minami Nutrition	Tropic	Genestra Brands
Douglas Labs	Klean Athlete	Pharmax	Orthica

This is just as awful as when New Chapter was bought out by Proctor & Gamble, a company that shared the same institutional owners as Monsanto.

MANY of these brands are available online and in Whole Foods, and even carried by Physicians.

Introduction on Nestle’s History:

Baby Formula:

A featured image of Nestle's Nan product

Nestle promoted their infant formula to areas in Africa that did not have access to clean water.

Many mothers were unaware that they needed to boil the water before adding Nestle formula to the polluted water, which made many children sick.

It is supposed that Nestle knowingly ignored this fact and encouraged mothers to use their formula even though they knew the risks.

Nestle ads say that their baby formula is the nearest thing in the world to breast milk, and so much like mothers’ milk, the infants’ tiny stomachs would not notice the difference.

“There is no food more nutritious, locally produced, affordable and sustainable than breast milk.

Artificial feeding increases the risk of not only childhood infections, but also of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) such as diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease and cancers, which are assuming epidemic proportions.

But two out of three infants, or 92 million infants out of 136 million babies, are either artificially or mixed-fed.

Breastfeeding has enormous benefits for maternal health, and is an important factor in child spacing for the millions of women who have no access to modern forms of contraception” – International Baby Food Action Network

And even though many mothers were able to read in their native language, they were still unable to read the language in which sterilization directions were written.

In 2013 Nestle had also tried to pull this in the Philippines as well.

According to the International Baby Food Action Network (IBFAN), Nestle used unethical methods to promote their infant formula to poor mothers in developing countries.

Nestle tried to replace the Philippines’ regulations with its own law. This means that the clear warnings will go. Instructions won’t even have to be translated into Filipino.

Privatizing Water:

In 2015, the former CEO of Nestle Tim Brown admitted that Nestle wastes 30% of the 700 million gallons of water per year.

Nestle takes out of California groundwater — then declared attempts by Nestle to reduce that water waste by 12%. Tim Brown is now the COO of Chobani, the Greek yogurt company.

Former Chairman of Nestle, Peter Brabeck has the philosophy that drinking water should not be considered a human right and believes it should be privatized.

Brabeck, pictured above was quoted as saying “The one opinion, which I think is extreme, is represented by the NGOs, who bang on about declaring water a public right. That means as a human being you should have a right to water. That’s an extreme solution.”

He also states that GMOs have never caused illnesses, despite hundreds of independent studies showing otherwise.

In 2000 at the 2nd World Water Forum, Nestle lobbied to stop water from being declared a universal right, to a need.

This is how they turn bottled water into a symbol of privilege in developing countries.

Child Labor:

“The use of child labor in our cocoa supply chain goes against everything we stand for. No company sourcing cocoa from the Ivory Coast can guarantee that it doesn’t happen, but we can say that tackling child labor is a top priority for our company.” – Executive Vice Pres for Operations, Jose Lopez

In 2005, the cocoa industry filed a lawsuit against Nestle on behalf of 3 Malian children who were trafficked to Cote d’Ivoire, forced into slavery, and abused on the cocoa plantation.

Unfortunately, in 2010 the US District Court for the Central District of California dismissed the lawsuit; stating that corporations can’t be held liable for violations of international law.

In 2012, The BBC News reported that an independent auditor of the Fair Labor Association (FLA) found multiple serious violations within the company’s own supplier code; including child labor, safety, and working hours.

The report also found rampant injuries, mainly with machetes that slice into the children’s legs as they harvest the cocoa pods, as well as both adults and children working long hours without pay.

The FLA found that Nestle was fully aware of where their cocoa was coming from and under what conditions, but did little to improve the conditions…they eventually agreed to map out the areas where the cocoa was coming from.

Sanitary Issues:

In 1997, in the UK, water pollution limits were breached 2,152 times in 830 locations that included Nestle!

In 2008, 6 infants were killed and 860 were hospitalized due to contaminated milk with melamine.

The Taiwan Health Ministry confirmed that 6 types of milk powders contained low-trace levels of melamine and were pulled from the shelves.

In 2009, the Nestle cookie dough was recalled due to contamination of E. coli. 50 people became ill in 30 states—requiring hospitalization, and 1 woman passed away from this.

Demanding Ethiopia to pay the debt of $6 million…while they were in extreme famine:

In 2002, Nestle demanded Ethiopia pay them back a debt of $6 mil for assets seized in the 1970s (petty much).

For a company that makes billions of dollars a year, asking a country going through an extreme famine is in poor taste.

The public outrage followed, and over 40,000 letters were sent to Nestle. The greedy company settled for a partial debt payment.

Promoting Unhealthy Food:

7 out of 15 breakfast cereals that contain the highest level of sugar, fat and salt—were Nestle products. Nestle denies any responsibility in promoting healthy food.

In an interview in 2003, the CEO of Nestle Peter Brabeck said, “I eat a small bar of dark chocolate every morning for breakfast, and I don’t think you could call me fat. Why do I eat this and nothing else for breakfast?

Because it gives me a good supply of calories and, what is more important still, there are good nutritional elements in the chocolate which also feed the nerves. It also has vitamins and even reduces cholesterol.”

(Of course, and it has nothing to do with the fact that you’re the CEO of a chocolate company)

‘In November 2002, police ordered Nestle Colombia to decommission 200 tons of imported powdered milk, because they were falsely relabeled, not only as a different, local brand, but also with a different production date.

Nestle bringing old powdered milk from a different country and labeling as local and new is not only unethical and illegal, but it poses health hazards for consumers.’ -Mihai Andrei

I hope you enjoyed this blog as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it!

All supplements are not created equally! They are created based on the standards of those who own the companies.

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