9 Vintage Baby Formula Ads Tell Us What Crap Companies Said To Discourage Breastfeeding

To properly bookend World Breastfeeding Week, it’s worth nothing that you can’t really talk about breastfeeding without talking about formula’s history. The two are intricately linked in every debate about formula bans, commercial incentives for formula companies, formula stigmas, finger-waving PSA announcements, and pressures to breastfeed. But regardless of how modern parents feel about hospitals shelling out baby formula samples left and right — or at all — it’s worthwhile to visit where formula advertising has been. “Breast is best” may be the current mantra in every maternity ward, but back in the 1960s, your breastmilk was spun as innately deficient for the sake of moving product. A couple of decades prior, Formulac made no pretenses about selling the sophistication of keeping your baby girl on a very glamorous “diet,” as pictured above.

Formula has come a long way, baby. From the depicted height of 1920s science to the powder you secretly hope no one sees you buy in the checkout line, the shift couldn’t be any more dramatic. So while the more sensitive terrain of contemporary breastfeeding choices are being debated on one corner of Mommyish, let’s all gather round and see what companies were once willing to say to discourage breastfeeding.

[ITPGallery]