As a new century dawned just over 20 years ago, a new war began, this one on expectant mothers. Companies, and their paid influencers, began to trot and even fund "studies" which correlated whatever they were selling to some positive outcome. Organic food meant better grades, abstaining from coffee meant higher IQ, you name it and someone was blastly already worried mothers will fear and doubt.

Most often they were selling placebos - a product that your brain thinks is doing something, like acupuncture or meditation programs - but sometimes they were selling "nocebos", the idea that giving up something makes you better. Chemicals, unless they have some arbitrary sticker on them, food, like the 65,000 products that fraudulently carry a Non-GMO Project label, and that abandoning formula would make your baby healthier.

Eventually that even got down to something as beneficial as infant formula. Moms were implicitly shamed if they chose not to breast feed, a real setback for women in the workplace, and even shamed if they could not provide enough milk.


Pre-2022, this kind of thing was common. If the infant formula wasn't terrifying mothers, the bottle was. It was all bogus correlation, often manufactured for money by environmental groups, that would be called fraud if government scientists or epidemiologists did it.

Even formula companies adopted the 'breast is best' mantra, conceding that they were ashamed of their own products. 

Now there is a formula shortage and people are rallying around the problem, and noting how important it is, and that is a cultural switch that should stick around long after QA and supply chain issues have been resolved.

Fed is best. There is some benefit to breast feeding but hundreds of millions of healthy people were raised on formula just fine. Let's stop letting companies and Karens talk down to moms who have enough to worry about, and don't need to be fed nonsense like that using formula will stunt their child's growth. Or worse, that their all-natural alternative is just as safe.