Today is Saturday, June 11th. A major and ongoing story in the news lately has been a baby formula

shortage in the United States. It's left many parents scrambling to find enough to feed their

children, and it could still be several more weeks before their significant relief. The shortage

started after a critical manufacturing plant shut down, and some products were recalled.

That Abbott nutrition plant in Michigan reopened last week, but the company warns it could still take

nearly two more months before much of the formula is back on store shelves. To help explain how

any of this could happen, what parents should do and not do about it, and what the data shows for

the decades-old debate about breastfeeding versus formula, we spoke with the economist New York Times

bestselling author and mother Emily Oster. Time magazine recently named her one of its 100 most

influential people of the year, citing her data-driven and popular advice about parenting and pregnancy

in her books, Expecting Better, Crib Sheet, and The Family Firm. And now she's sharing the latest

data-driven information with us, too. Welcome, welcome to The Newsworthy Special Edition

Saturday, when we sit down with a different expert or celebrity every Saturday to talk about

something in the news. Don't forget to tune in every Monday through Friday for our regular

episodes, where we provide all the day's news in 10 minutes. I'm Air Commandy, it's now time

for today's Special Edition Saturday. Dr. Emily Oster, thank you for coming on The Newsworthy.

Thank you so much for having me. On top of the pandemic era supply chain issues,

we saw one formula manufacturer have some issues with a recall and then a facility shutting down.

So can you help explain how one company can have such a profound impact on the formula available

for families? The central issue is that industry of performance is concentrated in two ways.

So one is that there are a very small number of manufacturers of formula

who are making FDA-approved formula, and that's partly because the regulations that the FDA puts up

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