Our Greatest Weapon is Fear...

Parents, do you like being scared out of your shoes for no good reason at all? What about guilt trips? Do you prefer to make your purchasing decisions based on how horrible you'd feel if something happened to your child, no matter than the product has nothing useful to offer? Do the latest buzzwords slide down your brainstem to lubricate the pathway to your wallet?

If so, then you are the target audience for the BabyBam Collection.

The rest of us may be forgiven if we take a pass.

I'll just quote the one relevant section here, although the entire press release has a rising gorge factor of ten.

As the number of infants with gluten, soy, and lactose intolerance rises each year - so do severe skin allergies. Our exceptionally soft onesies, pants, pajamas, and towels are naturally hypoallergenic, anti-microbial, moisture wicking and anti-bacterial thus preventing odor and skin irritations," added [BabyBam Collection CEO Jody Graziano] Jonas.

No indication exists that the number of infants with lactose intolerance is rising. Probably the opposite is true. Lactose tolerance is a dominant mutation. If you receive the gene from either one of your parents you will become lactose tolerant. The number of adults with lactose tolerance increases every year.

Very few babies are naturally lactose intolerant. Only the tiniest handful are born lactose intolerant. Most of humanity - that's the four billion or so of us who are lactose intolerant - do not lose the ability to digest lactose until after the age of weaning. Some babies do become temporarily lactose intolerant because their intestines are affected by common "stomach flus" - really gastrointestinal ailments - and a much smaller number are affected by more serious problems that damage the delicate lining in their intestines. Even if you add them all up, the vast majority of infants - more than 99% - are not and never will be lactose intolerant.

But let's say that all the lies are truth. Say that lactose intolerance is a scourge that is ravaging our precious children. Say that lactose intolerance is, despite all medical evidence, increasing rather than decreasing.

Even in that upside-down, Bizarro world, where day is night and sweet is sour, nothing - repeat, nothing - that you could put onto your infant would make one particle of difference. Lactose intolerance is not an allergy. It comes solely because of the lack of an intestinal enzyme, lactose. Contact with milk, milk products, or milk byproducts has never produced a single case of lactose intolerance in the history of humanity.

Using lactose intolerance to sell onesies is pure pig ignorant fear-mongering.

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. True. Still true. Always true.

Do not let your fear, your guilt, your hopes or dreams or nightmares, start you down the path to acting irrationally, to blindly blunder down the pathway to darkness, to imagine feverishly that you can avert the doom peddled by the ignorant or the cynical or the heartless, by swallowing their snake oil.