Emily Oster (0s):

Kids develop tastes, and they take repeated exposures to like different things. And that, that is more true with bitter vegetables than it is with fruit early exposure to a variety of things can help develop the taste for that.

Katie Ferraro (15s):

Hey, there I'm Katie Ferraro, Registered Dietitian college nutrition professor and mom of seven specializing in baby led weaning here on the baby led weaning made easy podcast. I help you strip out all of the noise and nonsense about feeding, leaving you with the competence and knowledge you need to give your baby a safe start to solid foods using baby led weaning. Hello, and welcome to this episode. We're going to be talking about making data Driven, Feeding Decisions for our baby. I am super excited about today's guest it's Emily Oster. Emily is an economics professor at Brown University. She's a very well-known author in the parenting space.

Katie Ferraro (58s):

I would say I would argue at least me personally. She's the only economist I know. And I know that because of her work in the parodic space, she's written a number of books on parenting and pregnancy with her overarching goal is to create a world of more relaxed pregnant women and parents. So Emily uses an analyzes data to help clarify some of the questions that we as parents all wonder about. So things like how long is it best to breastfeed or how damaging is long-term pacifier use? And of course she addresses decisions about feeding your baby. So Emily authors, a highly engaged sub stack newsletter called parent data. It's a twice weekly newsletter about data parenting and pregnancy. I'm so excited. She's here to chat about that data stuff, as it pertains to feeding our babies and baby led weaning.

Katie Ferraro (1m 41s):

So if you haven't already picked up on it, I am a full on Emily Oster fan girl. So getting to interview her and ask her some of these really specific questions about baby led weaning and infant feeding was really cool. I know she's the only interview I've ever done where the guest actually talks faster than me, but we got to review for the podcast the other day. And some reviewer said Katie's podcast is the only one I don't have to listen to on 1.5 X because she talks so fast. So Emily Oster talks even faster in shameless plug. If you do like the podcast and you would like to leave a review, your written reviews really, really, really matter. I read every single one of them. So thank you. Some of you put your episode ideas in there, which I love. I get a lot of good episode ideas from the reviews, but also writing a written review helps this information get found by other parents.

Katie Ferraro (2m 27s):

So if you enjoy the baby Led Weaning Made Easy podcast, please leave us a written review on apple podcasts and with no further ado here is data-driven feeding decisions with Emily Oster, PhD.

Emily Oster (2m 43s):

Thank you for having me.

Katie Ferraro (2m 44s):

Okay. I've been a huge fan of your work for a while, but it was literally when I saw the cover of your book cribs sheet that came out in 2019, it said how to calm down about milestones. And I was like, yes, like everyone freaks out about milestones. I need to read this book. And I love that you have the whole data driven decision-making as parents. And for us to learn from before we dive into the data-driven stuff, could you share a bit about your background and how you came to be known as the parent data decision person.

Emily Oster (3m 11s):

So I'm an economist, that's my training. I have a PhD in economics and I was sort of like trucking along as an economics professor. I work on my academic work is about data and how we learn from data and about health. And then I got pregnant and my daughter is now 10, almost 11, but I got pregnant and I sort of started doing a lot of pregnancy research, sort of with the lens of like, I'm a person who understands data. And I want to dive into this data and understand what it says about my pregnancy. And I pretty rapidly got quite frustrated with the conventional pregnancy wisdom or the conventional pregnancy approaches. And I sort of started to build a little bit of my own kind of here is what happens when you really dive into data.

Emily Oster (3m 54s):

And I dive into trying to understand the studies behind some of these recommendations and ultimately the work that I did really in the service of my own pregnancy ended up in expecting better, which was my first book, which came out in 2013 later after a second kid, I wrote a second book and now I write a newsletter. And I, so I've sort of turned like kind of those books into really a whole, I dunno, enterprise of trying to dive into data and translate data for people.

Katie Ferraro (4m 20s):

And I love that. I think some of the best ideas in parenting are born out of necessity. And especially from a nutrition standpoint, when the answer is when in doubt, leave it out. It's like for real, for everything like this, this as good as we can do. And I get it like to test drugs and stuff. I mean, there's a very, very short period of time where you will be pregnant. And so it's not really in the interest of lots of different industries to spend a ton of time studying what's actually safe or not safe in pregnancy.

Emily Oster (4m 45s):

Yeah, I think that's right. But I mean, I think the sort of flip of that, that sometimes I find very frustrating is that this is a lot of people we're affecting. And sometimes, you know, we're talking about a deli sandwich and you can say, well, you know, what's the big deal, but sometimes we're talking about like SSRI and then, you know, it's an antidepressant and you're like, well, actually that is kind of a big deal. And so our lack of information can be, I think quite damaging

Katie Ferraro (5m 6s):

The deli beat would always kills me. Like it's heat the deli meat until steaming like, dude, that sounds so gross for like a cold deli sandwich, but then like certain people in certain parts of the country be like, no way I totally eat like a hot bologna sandwich, like okay, cool to each their own. But it is a little frustrating. I loved your book expecting better why the conventional pregnancy wisdom is wrong and what you really need to know then the second book, crib sheets. So that was a data-driven guide to better, more relaxed parenting from birth to preschool. And so for my audience here on the baby led weaning made easy podcast. They're interested in the feeding stuff. And I, I loved that chapter that was called beyond the boobs, introducing solid food. You talk about Penelope and fin in your book and you share personal stories and anecdotes on top of the data. So wondering if you wouldn't mind sharing with our listeners, what approach did you do with your kids for starting solid foods?

Katie Ferraro (5m 52s):

And did you do anything different with your second kid once you realized if you're like a lot of that, like a lot of us overthink the solid food thing made a done that with the first.

Emily Oster (6m 1s):

Yeah, absolutely. So I'm more than happy to share that. So with Penelope, I think we did like what the textbook, you know, whatever is the textbook for this. Like we did that. So it was like iron

Katie Ferraro (6m 11s):

Fortified, rice cereal spoon fed at four to five months of

Emily Oster (6m 14s):

Age. And we had her, we took pictures. She was in a Bumbo, you know, we'd made sure that we like documented that. Then we moved on to oatmeal. Then we moved onto the single source veggies and the jars. And we did three days between them to make sure that like she wasn't allergic to peas. Even though later I learned, no one's allergic to peas fine. We made a little bit of our own, you know, with no salt. Right. And so we were like, just really, and we had these pallets of Earth's best like baby food. And we had this whole closet, there was like coats and like pallets of like different stage baby food. And so, you know, that worked like sort of broadly fine. We had the second kid and it was sort of different in two different ways. One was like, I could not like we didn't have the same kind of house and have a closet for the palette.

Emily Oster (6m 57s):

Like I just couldn't like, I couldn't take it with the pallets. And I gained as we gave him some rice cereal at some point. But like basically we just adopted a sort of, you kind of eat what we eat and when you are ready to eat the things that we eat, then you start eating those. And until then, like you sort of be can like sit with you. We can pretend you're at the table, whatever it is, but we're not going to go into the, the jarred foods. And I think that, that, it's interesting because I think part of what happened is my fin is like my younger is, was like really into food and very, at a very young age, very interested in eating food and good at swallowing and all that kind of stuff. We actually like started eating sort of fairly, normally quite early.

Emily Oster (7m 37s):

And so it made that approach somewhat easier than it might've been for some other people.

Katie Ferraro (7m 41s):

In 2016, I created the a hundred FIRST FOODS approach to baby led weaning. And it's a practical way to implement some of the data that you cite in crib sheet about the importance of diet diversity and the early development of flavor preferences. So regarding the introduction of solid foods, you touch a little bit in your books on the advice that a lot of parents hear from their pediatricians. And one of the big ones, which is to wait three to five days between foods, and this is still the party line to this day in some AAP publications. And I always like to point out, there's absolutely no data that supports that recommendation saying you have to do this, or it's unsafe to go faster. We know that if babies are going to have a reaction to food, a food allergy reaction, the majority of those reactions occur within minutes and up to no more than two hours following ingestion.

Katie Ferraro (8m 22s):

So I love that you pointed out like common sense. If you plan to introduce all the foods to your kid before they're one, you're gonna have to speed up at some point. Exactly. So what are you doing? I mean, we know more than 90% of physicians in this country have never had a dedicated nutrition class. So when you go to your pediatrician and you ask them a question about feeding and they say the it piece says we have to wait three to five days between foods, what do you do when they're getting advice? That's not supported by data? How do you talk to your doctor about that?

Emily Oster (8m 48s):

I mean, I think a piece of this, actually, in some ways, a lot of what, what I think the goal is of both crib sheet and expecting better is to kind of bring like, sort of give people enough information that they can have a different conversation that, you know, you're not like sometimes we come into those conversations, like, what do you think? And then they sit and they say something in sort of that moment. You're like, okay, wait three to five days. And then you get home and you like calculate it. And you're like, well, wait a minute. Like my kid's never going to eat any foods. If I wait three to five days, like, what are you? You know? But then you just kind of too late. So I think that learning something about this before I come in and saying, okay, like, we're going to start solid foods later. Let's talk about this. And then I have some background or I've, you know, I've thought a little bit about this in advance. And then when, if somebody says, you know, wait three to five days and can say, you know, that doesn't like, can we talk a little bit more about whether that makes sense?

Emily Oster (9m 32s):

I, my guess, is that in some reasonable share of those cases, your pediatrician will be like, yeah, that's kind of the general party line, but actually like, you know, if you're comfortable doing it, like there are some things you want to be a little careful about. There are some small number of foods that are caused almost all the allergies. And so, you know, when you first give your kid strawberries or eggs or not, you want to like peanut butter, you want to be paying a little bit of attention, like being a little bit more cautious, not cautious, but conscious relative to when you first give them Brussels sprouts or something, but that's a different approach than wait three days.

Katie Ferraro (10m 6s):

Or as you said, peas, like, yeah, technically a legume, but like really how many documented cases of Anna Filactic reaction from P shock exactly very shocking P shock. It's a thing. No, you say it though when people will be like, but it could happen. Yes. It's not absolute zero, but is it a reason to wait five days after feeding her baby peas? And by the way, babies can't even pick up piece. So do peas when they're older, when they have their pincer grasp. But I mean, we're talking about the allergenic food. Yeah. We have compelling data for peanut, pretty strong for egg, a little bit less for milk that early introduction of these helps prevent food allergy. And for the rest of the big nine allergenic foods, it's a little bit like the wild west out there as we wait for more data to come out. So as a practitioner, my advice always is, listen. We know that there's definitely no benefit to withholding the introduction of allergenic foods.

Katie Ferraro (10m 48s):

And because we can do this safely at six months of age and beyond with food, you might as well get those other allergenic foods in there early and often, too. What do you recommend when we're in this holding pattern, especially regarding the other six allergenic foods, not a lot of data for, but definitely no data against what do you do for the introduction?

Emily Oster (11m 4s):

I think, you know, for me sort of thinking about how this would work and looking at the data that we do have, you know, there's data on peanuts in particular, but also on exit milk is really quite strong. You know, the reductions in peanut allergy from early introduction are enormous. They're enormously large. And so he kind of goes, the logic would suggest that that would extend to other allergens, right? It's not like we haven't shown it. It hasn't been like shown in randomized trials, but it makes sense, but it makes sense as something that would happen and the absence of evidence that it's problematic. I think that I would err towards if the Basie and updater would say, do the other allergens also early,

Katie Ferraro (11m 43s):

We talked a lot about the leap trial in one of your books. I can't remember which one it was, but the leap trial, the learning early about peanut allergy. And they're like very good data that we have that early introduction of peanut can prevent peanut allergy. Did you actually talk to Gideon lack? Like, did you interview him for the book? I did not. He was like, I'm on my dream list of interview.

Emily Oster (12m 2s):

Yeah. I think that would be amazing. I don't do that much of that kind of interviewing because I tend to just, I mean, in that particular can read the data, you can read the data, like it's comparing means it wasn't complicated paper. Although I think the story there is really amazing.

Katie Ferraro (12m 18s):

The story's amazing, right? Like they site Bamba like an actual food brand in the paper that never happens. Like that was really interesting.

Emily Oster (12m 25s):

I just have this image of Gideon lack, like basically coming up with the idea because he was like talking to his friends in Israel and he was like, I can't send my kid peanut butter. And they were like, everybody here, it's peanut butter at lunch. Like, I'm sure it's completely made this up. I'm sure Gideon like is not a person who like wanted to pack peanut butter and jelly. But like in my head, that's what happened. He wanted to give his kids peanut butter for school and his friend in Israel could. And he somehow like,

Katie Ferraro (12m 50s):

You're like, they're just compared means it's not a complicated paper. It's like, well, we'll link to the original leap study. Like it's pretty involved like, oh, you want the summary

Emily Oster (12m 56s):

Guys do. I'm just saying that like reading the results, wasn't

Katie Ferraro (12m 59s):

Complicated. But also it's like bottom line. It's pretty obvious feed your babies. Peanut at six months of age is protective against peanut allergy. So Emily, I love your sub stack. I'm a relatively new subscriber, but I've read everything you wrote about baby led weaning. You cite a lot of the practitioners and researchers that we've had on the podcast talking about things like the research behind baby led weaning and why you don't have to wait three to five days between foods or how we don't know much about how much of the allergenic foods to feed, but feeding them is still a good idea. There's a lot of gray area, which I know is frustrating to data-driven parents. So curious what your bottom line recommendation is based on what's been published when it comes to doing baby led weaning versus traditional parent led spoon-feeding.

Emily Oster (13m 39s):

So I think that there's a kind of piece of this where people will say, you know, you have to do baby led weaning, or your kid is going to be fat. And you know, Baby led weaning is the way is like sort of the magic. It's going to make your kid a super hero. And I think that, you know, we don't have strong data that suggest that. But I think on the flip side, there's absolutely nothing that would suggest that this is something that you shouldn't do. And I think for a lot of families, I guess this gets us out of a broader point about, about the make and crib sheet, which is that like a lot of how you should be thinking about what works for you in these choices where we don't have a recommendation that says you must do this is you should think about what works for you. You should sort of think about what works for the family in general.

Emily Oster (14m 19s):

The thing that draws me, I will be totally Frank to Baby led weaning is that it is easy. Yeah.

Katie Ferraro (14m 24s):

You can call it like the lazy parent approach. And like, if I said that people would slaughter me, but like, I'm not calling you lazy. I'm calling myself lazy. And that's what appealed to me with seven kids.

Emily Oster (14m 32s):

Like, oh my God, that's a lot of

Katie Ferraro (14m 35s):

Kids. I kind of cheated though. I had a set of quadruplets at a set of twins. So I only had three pregnancies. I got seven kids out of it, but still there's a lot of babies to feed. Like I'm not going to shove food down their mouth. If there's no one here to help me, they need to learn how to feed themselves.

Emily Oster (14m 46s):

Yeah. I think also for me, actually, one of the big considerations is like, I care a lot about able to about this sort of like sitting as a family at meals. That's like a big piece, not only thing for everybody, but for me, for our family, that that's a really important part of our kind of family routine and how we connect. And actually the earlier we could have the baby involved in that, you know, like real, like sort of sitting at the table, kind of eating from a tray like the rest of us were doing that was worth a huge amount. And I think that that's that kind of like getting to a place of normalcy for a family meal, if that's a direction that you want to go, I think this is pretty valuable for doing that

Katie Ferraro (15m 24s):

And not to like cite you directly from your book. But I like your approach thing. If you want to try baby led weaning, there's nothing in the evidence to say it's a bad idea. And if you do not, there's nothing compelling to say you should go out and do it. So again, the onus is on you as the parent then to make the decision. But I like that you put it out there like, Hey, nothing's super good about it or proven you have to do it this way. Also nothing as far as the drawback goes, if it works for you. And I think a lot of it is waiting until the right time, which is my next question. This idea of starting solid foods. And unfortunately in this country, the American academy of pediatrics still has published things that say start solid foods at four to six months. That is infuriating for parents because in the lifespan of an infant, it's too big.

Katie Ferraro (16m 6s):

And developmentally the changes that take place from four to six months are monumental with regards to a baby being preparing themselves to safely swallow something besides breast milk or formula. So your writings and cribs sheet, you said, yes, technically, you know, you could, you didn't use these words. Like you could shove a spoon of food into a four months old mouth, but just because you can do something doesn't mean we should. And from a nutrition standpoint, as a dietiian, we know listen, breast milk. And our formula is sufficient to meet baby's needs until six months of age. Isn't that cause enough to advise parents not to start solid foods prior to six months of age. And why does doctors still do it? Then

Emily Oster (16m 41s):

I think that that is enough to recommend. I'm not sure. I think this is one of these things where, because you know, we don't have like some randomized trial that says there's an exact right age to do this. I think what has happened is that this has gotten into a place where it's like somehow earlier is better. Like swallowing food is a milestone that you need to achieve.

Katie Ferraro (17m 0s):

It's like, my baby can read at one, oh, well guess what my baby can eat at three months.

Emily Oster (17m 5s):

Oh, that's not, that's not a thing. So I think you're you're right. That it's not that that messaging is not especially helpful. And I think it leaves a lot of people actually do a sort of kind of anxiety because you know, your kid is four months and one day you'll plop them down and their Bumppo, they don't have a lot of good core control. You stuffed some food in their mouth. They probably can't like, there's a good chance. They're not gonna, they're not gonna swallow it. And then people are gonna feel anxious like, oh my baby's broken.

Katie Ferraro (17m 29s):

It was supposed to take like grandma's whispering into you're like that baby's four months old. You've never had a baby before. Does a baby start eating solid food at four months of age? Well, the doctor says four to six months. Well, he'll be the, can't even sit up on their own. If you're slumped over, how do you think they can learn as well as something besides breast milk or formula. So like, it's literally, it's kind of my soap box. And like my goal is to go to every single medical school, because I think there's someone at medical school, like literally whispering in the pediatric medical students' ears, like start solid foods at four months of age. Look, who's teaching you guys this and I want to go around and teach them that like nutritionally it's not needed, like let your baby be a baby and do things in their due time. But also we know waiting too long to start solid foods leads to increased rates of picky eating and other issues as well. So there's not an exact day where every baby is ready because all babies are different, but four to six months, like we can both agree.

Katie Ferraro (18m 13s):

Like that's infuriating,

Emily Oster (18m 14s):

That's too long. I agree. And I think there's also, we could message to people much in a much more meaningful way like that your baby can sit like that. There's variation that you may be able to Learn something

Katie Ferraro (18m 24s):

'cause even some babies. We do six months plus one week, not sitting six months plus two weeks, not sitting six months put three weeks, boom, that baby sitting up reaching for food, grabbing food. Like that's a, still a six month baby. And it was a six month baby, three weeks ago, but it's a remarkably different baby with regards to his readiness to eat.

Emily Oster (18m 40s):

Exactly. And I think we could sort of train people better to look for those cues rather than sort of telling them there was some arbitrary time that you'd like you pick as opposed to like your baby here.

Katie Ferraro (18m 48s):

So when parents say, Katie convince me of the benefits of baby led weaning, one of the potential upsides is increased potential for diet diversity and food acceptance down the road. And I love that encrypt sheet. You cite and purchase study from 2017 that showed babies who consume a wide variety of fruits and vegetables at nine months of age were also more likely to eat a very diet of vegetables at age six. Now, is there any causation there or impetus for us to keep on the track with offering vegetables, even when it's like way easier to do fruits for babies? Yeah.

Emily Oster (19m 19s):

So of two minds about this. So I can tell you, so first of all, that kind of correlation and very hard to think that that's causal because it's like, like the people, what you're offering the people offer their baby vegetables at nine months are also offering their vegetables at six. Right? And so like, you know, is that about the parents? Is that about the kids? It's a little complicated. What we do know is that kids develop tastes and they take repeated exposures to like different things. And that, that is more true with bitter vegetables than it is with fruits, right? So it's a lot easier to like a pair than it is to like a brussel sprout. But if you have more exposure to Brussels sprouts, you are more likely to like them.

Emily Oster (19m 59s):

And we know from experiments with toddlers, that if you like introduce things and you introduce them in a way the kids like then, like they're more likely to sort of develop the taste for those flavors. So on the one hand, some of that's correlation on the other hand, there's a lot of reason to think just from the sort of almost the biology of how taste developed that sort of early exposure to a variety of things, causes kids to can help develop the taste for those flavors.

Katie Ferraro (20m 22s):

Can we talk about supplements for babies and in particular vitamin D drops in iron. I know personally, I always forgot to do those. This is purely anecdotal, but I have seven kids who do not have rickets. So I'm feeling like less bad about it these days. But when it comes to supplements, vitamin D and iron for breastfeeding moms, are these imperative or is there a little bit of wiggle room? So I think,

Emily Oster (20m 40s):

You know, in general, if you live in a cold place without a lot of sun, your kid is covered, you know, like it's good to have some vitamin D for breastfed infants. I think we get into a place where people are like, oh, if you forget one day, like, you know, you're going to develop records. It's not really the way it that's the way it works. And so I think that, you know, people probably overstate how important this is. It is nevertheless perhaps, you know, good idea to try to remember it on, on occasion iron sort of similarly, it kind of depends on like, that's gonna depend more on the other aspects of, you know, your diet and how much iron there is in breast milk. And then ultimately once they're eating some food, how much iron they're getting in their, in their food.

Katie Ferraro (21m 17s):

So I just finished your newest book, the family from a data-driven guide to better decision-making in the early school years. So I have seven kids age seven and under, and I want you to know, I know this is not your intention, but you're a book like officially scared the crap out of me about what's to come like mainly the phone stuff. But what really caught me off guard, you mentioned like at the very beginning that the quote unquote big kid stuff makes early parenting worries seem incredibly tractable. So as an economist, but also a parent who you've seen now, both the early in the school age, big kid stuff. Do you think the things that parents worry about are harder to deal with in a data-driven way early in the lifespan, like birth and toddlerhood or later like in school age?

Emily Oster (21m 56s):

So I think that there's two things that are more complicated about the older kids. One is that the data is just not as good. So, you know, things like, like we talked about like the data on, on Baby led weaning is incomplete and all that kind of thing, but there are places in toddlerhood where we have good data. And even in places where we don't, I think we often have some data and then we're sort of, we can conclude something like we don't have strong evidence in either direction. And that in and of itself is fairly comforting. When you get into some of these older kid questions, like what's the right school, or, you know, how much extra curricular do they need or like, should I worry about screen time and social media? There's not any good data that would help us. And it feels like probably it is important.

Emily Oster (22m 36s):

Like probably social media, like whether my kid has Instagram, it seems like that could be like really bad or really good. But I have no idea. Whereas with somebody that baby led weaning, it's like, I don't have a great idea, but probably it is sort of a small differences in either in either direction or what's the right age for potty training. They all end up pooping in the potty, like eventually

Katie Ferraro (22m 57s):

Food, like for millennia, we've been doing this, but they've only had phones for like a decade.

Emily Oster (23m 1s):

Right. So I think that's, what's hard about the older kids. Okay.

Katie Ferraro (23m 4s):

I am a big organization buff, big spreadsheet person. I really want to know more about your brother that you said at the book has four kids and uses a Google sheet for figuring out their summer camps. But I've been dying to ask you, do you really use Asana for family tasks? Yeah.

Emily Oster (23m 18s):

There were some very big projects when our kids were little that will use it for

Katie Ferraro (23m 21s):

A lot of summer camps. Like what's a big project. I don't know, like

Emily Oster (23m 24s):

House renovations. Okay. So house renovations, nanny searches, like babysitter searches. That was like a big time

Katie Ferraro (23m 31s):

Thing. Like the interview process. Yeah.

Emily Oster (23m 33s):

The interview process sort of tracking applications.

Katie Ferraro (23m 36s):

Sweet. You assign your husband tasks and then he checks them off. Or is it like vice versa? You can assign each other stuff. You can say,

Emily Oster (23m 42s):

Everyone can assign a

Katie Ferraro (23m 42s):

Chance. Oh my God. I'm gonna think about doing it.

Emily Oster (23m 44s):

I think in the last few years, maybe as the kids of age, we've moved much more towards like the Google suite thing. So we do a lot of like, there's a lot of Google docs, so it's probably, cause it are the things that have come up are less like task assignee and more just like we need documentation. Like we've so many checklists. My husband has like whole complicated checklist, like seasonal school checklists that he like prints on.

Katie Ferraro (24m 7s):

It's seven different places. My husband doesn't even know what school our kids go to. Guys don't have to take a lunch to school the other day. Someone forgot it. He didn't know what grade they were in. And it was like, oh my God. But,

Emily Oster (24m 15s):

Okay. So I'm going to catch you lunches. I will say like, you know, it's like you kind of get to these things where like, you're like my husband cannot pack the lunches. I don't know. We just look at a mental block about it. Okay. Well,

Katie Ferraro (24m 23s):

Project management for daily tasks. What is the deal with the paprika meal planning app? You seem to mention a lot. I've never heard anyone talk about it, but do you like really do a week's worth of dinner ideas in 20 minutes? Yeah.

Emily Oster (24m 34s):

If we get such a good menu, it's so good. And so it like stores the recipes. And so I do, I sort of look at the week and then I scroll through the recipes and I think about, you know, yeah. What we're going to have and I just plugged them in. It's so great. Okay.

Katie Ferraro (24m 45s):

It's called paprika, right? Yeah. Okay. We'll link to it on the show notes because I was really good. I'm like, oh, a meal planning app. I kind of ignore those. But then you mentioned a whole week's worth of dinner ideas in 20 minutes. I was like, oh, that sounds efficient.

Emily Oster (24m 58s):

The big thing is it's like a little bit of investment upfront in sort of what are the things you typically have, but actually it has like very good. I think it's made us try more things because it like, you can like link into like the times cooking app in the browser, in the thing. And I'll like, and then it like adds the recipes automatically. And then if I have them, when I'm meal planning, I'm like, oh, maybe we'll try that.

Katie Ferraro (25m 16s):

The only cooking thing I've ever paid for us, New York times cooking app, it's fabulous to close out the interview. I want to thank you and economist for pointing out what every dietician already knows. Quote, nutrition. Science is notoriously bad for parents who are really interested in being data-driven any final tips for dealing with somebody like infant and early child feeding choices for which we do not have hard and fast data on. And I know you always tell you like the data's not going to make the decision for you, but any summary thoughts.

Emily Oster (25m 42s):

I think what I would say is like that you have some role in shaping the way that you interact with your kids on food and on, on meals. And that it's worth thinking a little bit carefully about kind of what are you trying to craft and not that you can control what they eat. You cannot control what they eat, but you can control kind of how the meal goes and what is the scaffolding you have around interactions with meals and that being deliberate about that has some value. So if you're going to want to have family meals, if you're going to want to have some kind of rules about food, thinking a little bit about those in the kind of broad sense, not just in the, in the moment when you wish your kid would sit down a little more quietly, it has some real value.

Katie Ferraro (26m 20s):

Thank you so much for taking time out of your very busy schedule to do this interview for our audience. I am a huge fan. I can't thank you enough, but tell the people where can they go to learn more about and get more Emily Oster in their life.

Emily Oster (26m 32s):

So you can look at my books, but the easiest ways to find me is parent data on sub stack, which is my newsletter or I'm prof, Emily Oster on Instagram.

Katie Ferraro (26m 40s):

And I will link to all of Emily's resources, including her three different books that we mentioned in today's episode on the show notes for this episode, which you can find at blwpodcasts.com. Emily, thank you so much. Thank you. Well, I hope you guys enjoyed that interview with Emily Oster. It's always a little nerve wracking. Like when you meet someone who you think you like, like I'm like, oh, I totally know her because I read everything she writes. I don't know her. I'm like, what is, she's not as nice in real life as she appears to be super nice in real life, very down to earth and also no offense to other economists. But like I would argue that they're not a lot of economists out there who can really, really connect with parents in the way that she does. So I am going to link up all of Emily Osters resources in the show notes for this episode, which you guys can find blwpodcast.com/204.

Katie Ferraro (27m 25s):

And I just want to point out that we normally have credentialed feeding experts on the podcast and the guest interviews, Emily Oster is not claiming to be a feeding expert. She is an economist who helps parents decipher data and all of the data. Cause I read, I've read every single word that she's ever written about. Baby led weaning all of the citations. She nailed the right ones. She's got everything appropriately cited with regards to the baby led weaning research and data that's out there. And we've actually had a lot of the different researchers that she is citing in her work. They've been on the podcast explaining the research. So I just want to lay that out there that she's not claiming to be a feeding expert, but rather an economist who helps parents interpret data. She's got a fair amount of feeding stuff in her books, but also a lot of other information beyond feeding.

Katie Ferraro (28m 8s):

And I like looking down the road to like, Ooh, what are the next things that my kids are going to be encountering? And then like, can I talk to people who've already been through it. So like maybe they can cut to the chase and tell me what to pay attention to. And apparently it's cell phone. So let's be grateful that we don't have to worry about feeding babies right now. And for those of you who are dealing with cell phones, if you have any tips for me, my oldest is only seven. So I'm hoping it's still awhile away, but I did really enjoy her newest book family firm, because it was a little bit about like bigger kid stuff. But if you're looking for the Emily Oster book, that's kind of about infant of babyhood toddlerhood stuff. That's in her book called a crib sheet. Again, I'll link everything up. Show notes for this episode at blwpodcast.com forward slash 2 0 4. Thanks for listening.