Quaker Oats' Dark Historical Secrets

since launching back in 1850 Quaker Oats has grown to become a globally known company that earns a ridiculous 3.8 billion dollars per year if your childhood was anything like mine then Quaker brings you back to a wholesome time when you will wake up to a healthy and nutritious breakfast to warm you up before heading out to school so you will probably be surprised that there was actually a time when they purposely fed oatmeal filled with radioactive isotopes to over 70 unsuspecting developmentally disabled and abandoned children as part of an experiment this is the dark story that Quaker Oats wished that you would never learn about but I'm here to tell you all about it let's get it this story starts at a small educational institution called the Walter E Fernand state school which was the first publicly supported Institution for people with intellectual disabilities in the Western Hemisphere Samuel greatly Howell founded the school back in 1848 and it was initially called the Massachusetts school for the feeble-minded or at least that's what some sources report others say that it was initially called the Massachusetts school for idiotic children and if you look at the entire story of Samuel Gridley Howe then you really wouldn't think that the school he founded will one day become associated with so much controversy he completed his medical education in 1824 at Harvard Medical College and then he left for Greece and participated in the Greek war of independence against the Ottoman Empire next he returned back to the U.S and was appointed as the Director of the New England Institution for the education of the blind even though quite frankly he had no experience with blindness or with teaching blind people later in life he called public attention to the inhumane conditions of mentally ill people in the state's jails a fight that really still continues today fast forward to 1843 and he married Julia Ward who later wrote the poem The Battle Hymn of the Republic adding to his long list of accomplishments Hal created a brand new education model suggesting that students will learn better from patient and sympathetic teachers rather than those who use threats and corporal punishment so it's a bit ironic considering the amount of abuse that would take place in the fernald school years later but we'll come back to that he was also an early activist for the abolition of slavery and he founded the Boston vigilance Committee in 1846 through the committee he fought to protect fugitive slaves from Southern slave catchers then in 1848 he convinced Massachusetts lawmakers to fund the first resident Financial school for idiots which was the term used for intellectually disabled people at the time now we can only assume that in 1848 under the leadership of how the school did everything that it could to help its students but things would change around 1859 when Walter E fernald took a position as the third superintendent fernald was a massive believer in Eugenics which is a practice of improving the human species by selectively mating people with what are considered the most desirable hereditary traits his beliefs led to many sterilizations at the school during his time there he used these sterilization procedures to keep mentally disabled children from later reproducing thinking that he could force disabilities out of the Jane pool he died in 1924 and in his honor the school would change his name to the Walter E Fernand State School in addition to adopting his name they seemingly also adopted many of his ideals by the 1904 40s the school had changed completely students were now being beaten and deprived of food they were forced to do manual labor and maybe worst of all they were unknowingly used as guinea pigs and some very questionable experiments involving the Massachusetts Institute of Technology which is better known as MIT the Quaker Oats company and a bunch of radioactive materials and these crazy experiments will receive approval from the government namely the atomic energy Commission the atomic energy commission actually approved hundreds of radiation-based experiments and many of these experiments had a human variable as a result thousands of people were experimented on without ever even knowing the aec was a federal agency created in 1946 to manage the development use and control of nuclear energy for military and civilian applications the agency operated during a very dark time in U.S history between 1944 and 1984 the aec was one of three very questionable agencies including the Department of Defense and the National Institute of Health together they conducted over 4 000 secret radiation experiments on U.S citizens including small children between 1945 and 1946 for example hospitals in New York Tennessee Illinois and California took part in these experiments injecting subjects with various types of radioactive substances like plutonium uranium polonium and amerisium eventually reports about these agencies started rolling out the most significant was a three-part story in the Albuquerque Tribune by Eileen Wilson this report described government experiments on Americans during the Cold War and eventually it led to the creation of the advisory committee on human radiation experiments by President Bill Clinton the report described numerous instances where Americans were dosed with radioactive substances without their expressed knowledge or their full consent for example in one case 20 elderly adults were fed radium or thorium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during the early 1960s in another case six emotionally disturbed or homeless patients with normal kidney function were injected with uranium salts at the University of Rochester that happened between 1946 and 1947 and then 103 31 Oregon and Washington State Prison inmates had their testicles eradicated between 1963 and 1971 and that's only a few examples that were in the report but it's also important to understand the time at the dawn of the atomic age we didn't have the same medical ethics that we have Today medical experiments didn't necessarily require consent and things that would be Unthinkable today well they were just kind of standard practices back then maybe the saddest part about all this is that these experiments were usually performed of the most vulnerable groups of people people that the government thought they could just throw away like minorities abandoned children and elderly folks in fact Congress didn't pass federal regulations to require more oversight for these types of studies until the Tuskegee experiment and that experiment doctors studied the effects of untreated syphilis on black sharecroppers while telling them that they were getting free medical treatment again yet another case of weird ass testing on vulnerable communities and so needless to say the times were [ __ ] up the medical sector was [ __ ] up and our federal organizations were [ __ ] up so it wasn't surprising that Quaker MIT and the fernald school would create an experiment that fed radioactive materials to developmentally disabled kids and that an organization like the atomic energy commission would actually approve it [Music] but why would Quaker be involved in these experiments anyway they aren't a school they aren't a hospital and they're not a scientific organization I mean they sell oatmeal well during this time the breakfast industry was exploding instant breakfasts were quickly replacing the daily servings of eggs toast and bacon the Department of Agriculture produced its first dietary guidelines in 1943 and it included oatmeal as a whole grain that position Quaker to take over the market the company was launching expensive TV commercial ads and in post-world War II years they reached sales of over 277 million dollars people were becoming more aware of how food impacts health and those Health guidelines positioned Quaker as a super healthy meal but their powerful position was threatened when a series of studies came out suggesting that Quaker Oats had a high level of phytate which could interfere with the absorption of iron in the body an even bigger bloated Quaker was that the studies found that this wasn't the case with cream of wheat which was Quaker's largest competitor all of a sudden the tables had turned and cream of wheat had the scientific Advantage Quaker decided that in order to get science on its side it will host its own scientific experiments it will partner with MIT and the fernald schools to prove that it was healthy to consume Quaker would provide the cereal MIT raised funding for the research and the school provided a controlled environment and well they also contributed a huge selection of abandoned and developmentally disabled children for them to perform experiments on over three separate experiments the boys at fernald unknowingly ate oats coated with radioactive tracers and milk with radioactive calcium tracers which are radioactive atoms whose Decay is measured in order to understand the chemical reactions taking place in the body some of the kids were even given injections of radioactive calcium and just in case you're totally unaware of the potential effects of radiation high doses can damage the DNA in our cells lead to acute radiation syndrome and could also cause cancer later in life the first two experiments gave Quaker a ton of Hope since they showed that Cream of Wheat was no better than oatmeal when it came to absorbing iron and calcium in the bloodstream the third experiment showed that calcium entering the bloodstream goes straight to the bones and this test will actually prove super important in later studies on osteoporosis so yes these experiments did prove importance to science and our understanding of our bodies and nutrition however Quaker Oats didn't commission these experiments for that specific reason this wasn't a study on osteoporosis and it wasn't meant to help us learn about our health they participated in these tests for one reason to compete against Cream of Wheat and basically to secure the bag and if a few kids ended up with cancer answer sometime later in life well so be it because just like Corporate America has always proven it's profit over people pretty much 100 of the time [Music] and of course if it were up to Quaker Oats they would have continued making billions of dollars and this information would have never been made public however as they say everything that's done in the dark will eventually come to the light in 1993 the public finally learned the details of these experiments when Hazel O'Leary the Secretary of Energy Declassified several documents from the atomic energy Commission in December of 93 Scott Allen a Boston Globe journalist read the documents and found the details of the experiment hosted at the fernald state school one day after Christmas he published an article titled radiation used on [ __ ] and yes I know that that word is no longer an acceptable word but in the early 90s unfortunately that's how the media categorized developmentally disabled people I hate to say it but that's just the world that we live in in 1994 there was a hearing before the Senate's committee on laboring and resources which was meant to investigate the fernard experiments during the hearing the committee chair Senator Edward Kennedy asked aren't you appalled at the fact that the most vulnerable people in our society which are young people seven eight years old that are in an institution aren't you appalled that they were the ones selected in other words why didn't they choose healthy adults for their experiments why not private school kids or Quaker employees or MIT scientists well that should tell you something about our world and why the most vulnerable communities and groups of peoples are always targeted for the government's weird ass experiments maybe it's because we live in a classist world where the people at the top take care of the people at the top and look at everyone else as disposable but that's a video for another day just like in true corporate fashion Quaker Oats and MIT both denied putting the children in any danger David Lester of MIT said that the oatmeal experiments only exposed the boys to 170 to 330 milligrams of radiation which is basically equal to receiving 30 chest x-rays back to back Quaker would minimize their involvement by saying that they had no leading part in the experiment but only provided some funding and some oatmeal to MIT they passed the blame by saying that the plan to use radioactive tracers mostly came from MIT researchers although this claim has not been confirmed either true or false furthermore in 1994 a Massachusetts state panel released the results of their studies concluding that none of the students suffered significant Health impacts in fact radioactive tracers are still used in medicine today so maybe the kids didn't suffer from long-term effects but saying that we didn't have a true measure of what we're safe or harmful levels of radiation back in the 1940s I would bet that the scientists had no idea what long-term impact the study would have on the children ultimately they just got lucky and they're still the fact that they did all of this with no consent from the children or from their parents and they chose to do these studies on children who were deemed mentally or developmentally disabled and they did all of this solely for their commercial interests so maybe these experiments didn't lead to cancerous tumors or long-term radiation effects but it definitely went against everything that we know about medical ethics and it was definitely a violation to those children civil rights this information led to a 60 million dollar lawsuit in 1995 which included around 30 former students of the fernald school the lawyers honed in on the fact that Quaker only held these experiments for their commercial interest and that they leveraged the health of these children just to maintain their Market position President Clinton apologized to the students since the atomic energy commission had indirectly sponsored the study and the settlement of 1.85 million dollars was reached in January of 1998. ultimately the Quaker experiments were highly unethical but not illegal as you know the company still operates today and earns billions of dollars annually but there have been many medical companies that committed crimes for the sake of commercial gang like theranos who lied to investors and customers about their game-changing medical testing devices that actually never even existed and if you haven't heard that story well that's a wild one and you can check it out right here I hope you enjoyed this video If so make sure to hit the like And subscribe button so you don't miss any of our updates I'll see you in the next one until then take care and keep doing amazing

since launching back in 1850 Quaker Oats has grown to become a globally known company that earns a ridiculous 3.8 billion dollars per year if your childhood was anything like mine then Quaker brings you back to a wholesome time when you will wake up to a healthy and nutritious breakfast to warm you up before heading out to school so you will probably be surprised that there was actually a time when they purposely fed oatmeal filled with radioactive isotopes to over 70 unsuspecting developmentally disabled and abandoned children as part of an experiment this is the dark story that Quaker Oats wished that you would never learn about but I'm here to tell you all about it let's get it this story starts at a small educational institution called the Walter E Fernand state school which was the first publicly supported Institution for people with intellectual disabilities in the Western Hemisphere Samuel greatly Howell founded the school back in 1848 and it was initially called the Massachusetts school for the feeble-minded or at least that's what some sources report others say that it was initially called the Massachusetts school for idiotic children and if you look at the entire story of Samuel Gridley Howe then you really wouldn't think that the school he founded will one day become associated with so much controversy he completed his medical education in 1824 at Harvard Medical College and then he left for Greece and participated in the Greek war of independence against the Ottoman Empire next he returned back to the U.S and was appointed as the Director of the New England Institution for the education of the blind even though quite frankly he had no experience with blindness or with teaching blind people later in life he called public attention to the inhumane conditions of mentally ill people in the state's jails a fight that really still continues today fast forward to 1843 and he married Julia Ward who later wrote the poem The Battle Hymn of the Republic adding to his long list of accomplishments Hal created a brand new education model suggesting that students will learn better from patient and sympathetic teachers rather than those who use threats and corporal punishment so it's a bit ironic considering the amount of abuse that would take place in the fernald school years later but we'll come back to that he was also an early activist for the abolition of slavery and he founded the Boston vigilance Committee in 1846 through the committee he fought to protect fugitive slaves from Southern slave catchers then in 1848 he convinced Massachusetts lawmakers to fund the first resident Financial school for idiots which was the term used for intellectually disabled people at the time now we can only assume that in 1848 under the leadership of how the school did everything that it could to help its students but things would change around 1859 when Walter E fernald took a position as the third superintendent fernald was a massive believer in Eugenics which is a practice of improving the human species by selectively mating people with what are considered the most desirable hereditary traits his beliefs led to many sterilizations at the school during his time there he used these sterilization procedures to keep mentally disabled children from later reproducing thinking that he could force disabilities out of the Jane pool he died in 1924 and in his honor the school would change his name to the Walter E Fernand State School in addition to adopting his name they seemingly also adopted many of his ideals by the 1904 40s the school had changed completely students were now being beaten and deprived of food they were forced to do manual labor and maybe worst of all they were unknowingly used as guinea pigs and some very questionable experiments involving the Massachusetts Institute of Technology which is better known as MIT the Quaker Oats company and a bunch of radioactive materials and these crazy experiments will receive approval from the government namely the atomic energy Commission the atomic energy commission actually approved hundreds of radiation-based experiments and many of these experiments had a human variable as a result thousands of people were experimented on without ever even knowing the aec was a federal agency created in 1946 to manage the development use and control of nuclear energy for military and civilian applications the agency operated during a very dark time in U.S history between 1944 and 1984 the aec was one of three very questionable agencies including the Department of Defense and the National Institute of Health together they conducted over 4 000 secret radiation experiments on U.S citizens including small children between 1945 and 1946 for example hospitals in New York Tennessee Illinois and California took part in these experiments injecting subjects with various types of radioactive substances like plutonium uranium polonium and amerisium eventually reports about these agencies started rolling out the most significant was a three-part story in the Albuquerque Tribune by Eileen Wilson this report described government experiments on Americans during the Cold War and eventually it led to the creation of the advisory committee on human radiation experiments by President Bill Clinton the report described numerous instances where Americans were dosed with radioactive substances without their expressed knowledge or their full consent for example in one case 20 elderly adults were fed radium or thorium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during the early 1960s in another case six emotionally disturbed or homeless patients with normal kidney function were injected with uranium salts at the University of Rochester that happened between 1946 and 1947 and then 103 31 Oregon and Washington State Prison inmates had their testicles eradicated between 1963 and 1971 and that's only a few examples that were in the report but it's also important to understand the time at the dawn of the atomic age we didn't have the same medical ethics that we have Today medical experiments didn't necessarily require consent and things that would be Unthinkable today well they were just kind of standard practices back then maybe the saddest part about all this is that these experiments were usually performed of the most vulnerable groups of people people that the government thought they could just throw away like minorities abandoned children and elderly folks in fact Congress didn't pass federal regulations to require more oversight for these types of studies until the Tuskegee experiment and that experiment doctors studied the effects of untreated syphilis on black sharecroppers while telling them that they were getting free medical treatment again yet another case of weird ass testing on vulnerable communities and so needless to say the times were [ __ ] up the medical sector was [ __ ] up and our federal organizations were [ __ ] up so it wasn't surprising that Quaker MIT and the fernald school would create an experiment that fed radioactive materials to developmentally disabled kids and that an organization like the atomic energy commission would actually approve it [Music] but why would Quaker be involved in these experiments anyway they aren't a school they aren't a hospital and they're not a scientific organization I mean they sell oatmeal well during this time the breakfast industry was exploding instant breakfasts were quickly replacing the daily servings of eggs toast and bacon the Department of Agriculture produced its first dietary guidelines in 1943 and it included oatmeal as a whole grain that position Quaker to take over the market the company was launching expensive TV commercial ads and in post-world War II years they reached sales of over 277 million dollars people were becoming more aware of how food impacts health and those Health guidelines positioned Quaker as a super healthy meal but their powerful position was threatened when a series of studies came out suggesting that Quaker Oats had a high level of phytate which could interfere with the absorption of iron in the body an even bigger bloated Quaker was that the studies found that this wasn't the case with cream of wheat which was Quaker's largest competitor all of a sudden the tables had turned and cream of wheat had the scientific Advantage Quaker decided that in order to get science on its side it will host its own scientific experiments it will partner with MIT and the fernald schools to prove that it was healthy to consume Quaker would provide the cereal MIT raised funding for the research and the school provided a controlled environment and well they also contributed a huge selection of abandoned and developmentally disabled children for them to perform experiments on over three separate experiments the boys at fernald unknowingly ate oats coated with radioactive tracers and milk with radioactive calcium tracers which are radioactive atoms whose Decay is measured in order to understand the chemical reactions taking place in the body some of the kids were even given injections of radioactive calcium and just in case you're totally unaware of the potential effects of radiation high doses can damage the DNA in our cells lead to acute radiation syndrome and could also cause cancer later in life the first two experiments gave Quaker a ton of Hope since they showed that Cream of Wheat was no better than oatmeal when it came to absorbing iron and calcium in the bloodstream the third experiment showed that calcium entering the bloodstream goes straight to the bones and this test will actually prove super important in later studies on osteoporosis so yes these experiments did prove importance to science and our understanding of our bodies and nutrition however Quaker Oats didn't commission these experiments for that specific reason this wasn't a study on osteoporosis and it wasn't meant to help us learn about our health they participated in these tests for one reason to compete against Cream of Wheat and basically to secure the bag and if a few kids ended up with cancer answer sometime later in life well so be it because just like Corporate America has always proven it's profit over people pretty much 100 of the time [Music] and of course if it were up to Quaker Oats they would have continued making billions of dollars and this information would have never been made public however as they say everything that's done in the dark will eventually come to the light in 1993 the public finally learned the details of these experiments when Hazel O'Leary the Secretary of Energy Declassified several documents from the atomic energy Commission in December of 93 Scott Allen a Boston Globe journalist read the documents and found the details of the experiment hosted at the fernald state school one day after Christmas he published an article titled radiation used on [ __ ] and yes I know that that word is no longer an acceptable word but in the early 90s unfortunately that's how the media categorized developmentally disabled people I hate to say it but that's just the world that we live in in 1994 there was a hearing before the Senate's committee on laboring and resources which was meant to investigate the fernard experiments during the hearing the committee chair Senator Edward Kennedy asked aren't you appalled at the fact that the most vulnerable people in our society which are young people seven eight years old that are in an institution aren't you appalled that they were the ones selected in other words why didn't they choose healthy adults for their experiments why not private school kids or Quaker employees or MIT scientists well that should tell you something about our world and why the most vulnerable communities and groups of peoples are always targeted for the government's weird ass experiments maybe it's because we live in a classist world where the people at the top take care of the people at the top and look at everyone else as disposable but that's a video for another day just like in true corporate fashion Quaker Oats and MIT both denied putting the children in any danger David Lester of MIT said that the oatmeal experiments only exposed the boys to 170 to 330 milligrams of radiation which is basically equal to receiving 30 chest x-rays back to back Quaker would minimize their involvement by saying that they had no leading part in the experiment but only provided some funding and some oatmeal to MIT they passed the blame by saying that the plan to use radioactive tracers mostly came from MIT researchers although this claim has not been confirmed either true or false furthermore in 1994 a Massachusetts state panel released the results of their studies concluding that none of the students suffered significant Health impacts in fact radioactive tracers are still used in medicine today so maybe the kids didn't suffer from long-term effects but saying that we didn't have a true measure of what we're safe or harmful levels of radiation back in the 1940s I would bet that the scientists had no idea what long-term impact the study would have on the children ultimately they just got lucky and they're still the fact that they did all of this with no consent from the children or from their parents and they chose to do these studies on children who were deemed mentally or developmentally disabled and they did all of this solely for their commercial interests so maybe these experiments didn't lead to cancerous tumors or long-term radiation effects but it definitely went against everything that we know about medical ethics and it was definitely a violation to those children civil rights this information led to a 60 million dollar lawsuit in 1995 which included around 30 former students of the fernald school the lawyers honed in on the fact that Quaker only held these experiments for their commercial interest and that they leveraged the health of these children just to maintain their Market position President Clinton apologized to the students since the atomic energy commission had indirectly sponsored the study and the settlement of 1.85 million dollars was reached in January of 1998. ultimately the Quaker experiments were highly unethical but not illegal as you know the company still operates today and earns billions of dollars annually but there have been many medical companies that committed crimes for the sake of commercial gang like theranos who lied to investors and customers about their game-changing medical testing devices that actually never even existed and if you haven't heard that story well that's a wild one and you can check it out right here I hope you enjoyed this video If so make sure to hit the like And subscribe button so you don't miss any of our updates I'll see you in the next one until then take care and keep doing amazing

Transcript for:Quaker Oats' Dark Historical Secrets

Transcript for:
Quaker Oats' Dark Historical Secrets