> Commercial formula kinda is a magical combination of ingredients, including a substantial number of supplements that aren’t gonna be available to home cooks.

Do you have a citation for that? I see all these articles that just say "don't try it yourself, it's too hard", but I'd like to know which specific ingredients are impossible to obtain.

This writeup on Reddit has a decent breakdown of the pitfalls: https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/uvcijm/a_pediatri...

Looks like osmolality is a major concern. Good luck explaining that in a 30 second clip on CNN.

> Good luck explaining that in a 30 second clip on CNN.

That's pretty much exactly my point, as I mentioned in another comment.

I'm having a difficult time believing that the ingredients or measuring devices are so difficult to replicate at home that it would be impossible to do. I think the more likely explanation is a large portion of the population, put generously, "lacks attention to detail", and so homemade formula would be dangerous for them.

Here's a good analogy. Saline solution (not disinfecting solution, just normal saline) for contact lenses is not complicated. It's salts and water. At one point it was possible to buy salt packets and mix it with water to make contact lense saline solution. However, it was critical the water be purified, distilled water.

Of course, a decent portion of the population thought plain tap water was good enough and ended up going blind, so the FDA banned the salt packets, and you can now only buy premixed saline.

So the FDA went out and said "Mixing your own saline solution can be really dangerous, don't do it." And they're right, mixing your own saline can be really dangerous, if you can't follow directions.

Yeah, even if it's possible in theory at home (I don't know, won't research it, and think it could very well be either - I think it's very likely the "100% correct" version isn't possible), it will result in harm statistically. Thus it's not standard of care, and recommending it will result in very expensive malpractice lawsuits.

Caffeine powder is also illegal these days.

It’s crazy that in the face of health authorities saying don’t do this, it’s dangerous, your reaction is “prove it”, rather than doing some research on your own to counter your skepticism. The lack of trust in public institutions is deeply saddening.

The problem with baby formula is that it needs to contain precise balances of nutrition in specific forms that can be absorbed by the body in specific ways. Much in the way that a calorie is not a calorie is not a calorie, a nutrient is not a nutrient is not a nutrient.

Water down your baby formula? Now it’s different. Babies are sensitive. This could be dangerous.

This took such little effort to research on my own. The bar is so low.

Breast milk is unique. In the past kids had wet nurses as a backup. And when they didn’t, infant mortality was very high.

If you just tel people you can go make this shit at home, a lot of babies will likely die.

> It’s crazy that in the face of health authorities saying don’t do this, it’s dangerous, your reaction is “prove it”, rather than doing some research on your own to counter your skepticism. The lack of trust in public institutions is deeply saddening.

I 100% disagree. I'm not an idiot. I can read a recipe, even a complicated recipe. And I'm not even saying they're wrong. I'm just asking for some simple example of why, for someone capable of following the instructions exactly, this would be too difficult to do at home. Not the right equipment? Fine. Ingredients that are not readily available? Fine.

But to go with some hand wavy bullshit, basically saying "Sorry stupid peon, this is just too complicated for you", is just dumb. On a site called "Hacker News" I think it's incredibly sad that a request for a more detailed explanation is met with "I think that's crazy".

Well for one, do some fucking research, as I suggested in the very passage you quoted, before you make bold assertions about what’s reasonable. The answers to your questions are easily found.

You do not have the ingredients. It’s not just foods. You cannot make safe baby formula from foods. You don’t have the equipment to produce it. It requires specific mixing and heating and what not to arrive at specific consistencies and sterility so that it is absorbable by the body correctly. You don’t have the measurement equipment to get the ratios correct to the margins needed. You don’t have the quality controls to check that they are ok for things like acidity. You don’t have the expertise to evaluate outcomes. You apparently don’t have the inclination to research it on your own either so it’s triply dangerous.

In the 20s people started using milk based formula. Babies got scurvy and rickets. They threw in orange juice. They got bacterial infections.

If you want to roll the dice with your baby’s health because you think you’re smarter than the government go ahead. Here’s Wikipedia, the simplest lowest bar of research you were unwilling to do but complain about either way. It has the basic progression. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_formula

Flour and milk mostly. Go nuts.

> I 100% disagree. I'm not an idiot. I can read a recipe, even a complicated recipe

This thread has shown me how many people think baby formula is just some complex recipe that requires pureeing the correct vegetables in the correct ratios.

Making infant formula is more akin to making medicine/drug than table food.

We have home drugs (meth, heroin, cocaine, etc). Yes, they can be made safely, but they often not.

I wouldn't claim that the required supplements are literally not available on the commercial market, but the FDA requirements (https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/cfr...) include over a dozen nutrients to track, some within a relatively narrow safety range. It's not practical to expect that stressed, busy new parents are gonna buy all these supplements, much less break out their scales and carefully measure 2-7 micrograms of selenium per 100 kcal.

> It's not practical to expect that stressed, busy new parents are gonna buy all these supplements, much less break out their scales and carefully measure 2-7 micrograms of selenium per 100 kcal.

Brown Rice contains selenium. Even when not breastfeeding, real foods contain micro and macro nutrients that are beneficial for babies.

> Brown Rice contains selenium. Even when not breastfeeding, real foods contain micro and macro nutrients that are beneficial for babies.

Slight variation in too little nutrients, or too much, or in forms that aren’t absorbed at the intended rate can be very dangerous. Throw in some rice? Ok now there’s extra sodium in there. The milk does too. Uh oh. Suddenly this is a complicated optimization problem requiring fine measurements and specific blending techniques.

I can also buy 20 proof ethanol at my local gas station. It'd kill me, but hey way is gasoline any different than gin. They're both 10% ethanol.

It's surprising our species made it the first 8 million years without the FDA...

A lot of us didn’t! Infant mortality used to be orders of magnitude higher, and malnutrition in babies who couldn’t be breastfed adequately was a big contributor.

Now imagine if they had cheap vegetables, milk and blenders.

This is very dangerous. Do not give advice on things you don’t know. It’s not just a vague nutrition profile you’re trying to hit.

Stop being ridiculous. It's not advice, it's an argument. Find your revipes elsewhere.

Well it’s a shit argument. You cannot create safe baby formula with vegetables and a blender.

Just saw this earlier today: https://www.insider.com/tiktok-doctors-say-diy-formula-recip...

Basically there are viral recipes going around, and this supports that formula in particular is something that we cannot trust the average person to diy. Infants are extremely vulnerable and have unusual dietary requirements.

People will die due to this.

EDIT: I see this is contentious. Check the reddit post and go argue with them: https://old.reddit.com/r/nottheonion/comments/v07nh0/tiktok_...

That's all the more reason to publish and promote good instructions.

Good instructions to a lay populace aren't necessarily helpful. Babies are pretty fragile. Slightly undercooked ingredients, slightly improper ratios, or just substitutions made out of ignorance can kill them. It's not DIY chocolate milk powder. A slightly off recipe or preparation won't just taste funny while being otherwise safe.

I think people would trust the government and authorities generally more, if those authorities weren't constantly lying to them. The authorities could say "Here is a rigorous procedure for DIY formula. We strongly recommend against using this, except in an emergency, because slight deviations could result in harm or death for the baby." Instead, they seem to give the impression that DIY formula is never advisable or borderline impossible - which is probably wrong, and that misrepresentation makes people distrust authorities more generally.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. This is the same bullshit that happened with masks early in the pandemic. Instead of being truthful and saying "It's really important that there be enough masks for hospitals, and we just don't know if masks for the lay populace are helpful because there haven't been enough studies yet," authorities lied and said "masks don't work for the general population". Zeynep Tufekci's article on this topic got it exactly right IMO: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-...

A rigorous procedure involves precise measurements, ph testing, and other things many people do not understand let alone have the capability to execute.

But could easily attempt anyway and fuck up

I don't know anything about the safe DIY manufacture of baby formula, but, even if I assumed what you are saying is true, and I'm pretty confident you're wrong, that isn't even an argument. We should deny people good instructions, forcing those who want to try to use bad instructions, because some people might incorrectly follow the good instructions?

There is no safe DIY manufacture of baby formula. It’s just not something you should attempt without being an expert. Step one is to become an expert.

The reason to not put out a set of instructions that people cannot follow is because they cannot follow it, and those that attempt to follow it will likely make serious mistakes. It would do more harm than good to put out a government sanctioned recipe, no matter how many warnings.

It's amazing how people people fail to understand that making baby formula is the equivalent to making a drug. Yes, you can make coke, meth, and heroin at home.

However, it's also extremely easy to mess it up and kill yourself.

That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

That applies to assertions of fact, not reasoned arguments. There is plenty of evidence that incorrectly produced baby formula is dangerous. There are many studies showing the narrow range of nutrition and form of the baby formula that is safe.

Yes, and the claim that there are no safe DIY formula instructions is an assertion of fact. The question of whether incorrectly produced formula could be dangerous was never at issue.

Well we’ve demonstrated that the requirements are very strict, that manufacture standards are precise and include steps not available to laypeople such as ph testing, and that the outcome of a bad creation is potentially fatal. So it seems reasonable to say it follows that there are no safe DIY formula instructions because DIY implies lack of expertise which is required to understand the points listed above.

You haven't demonstrated any of that. You've asserted it, as I mentioned, without evidence.

You can't provide "good instructions" for something that needs high levels of control in the manufacture. The process is as much a part of the recipe as the ingredients. It's much more rational to put resources into fixing the shortages rather than having people get their babies sick because they didn't completely sterilize a pot because it wasn't explicitly outlined in the recipe.

I see two parts to your comment.

The first part is obviously wrong. You can provide good instructions for things that need a high level of control. Baby formula is not made by magic and I doubt very much that it needs some impossible level of precision to create.

The second part of your comment is simply a false dichotomy. Releasing high quality instructions would not affect the rate at which the baby formula shortage is addressed.

As others have said, it is impossible to verify your statement because the verification method is kept hidden because "it would be dangerous".

You can easily find a list of many steps formula producers go through.