Science Friday - Infant Formula, AI Weirdness, Venus Fly Traps. Nov. 8, 2019, Part 2

Episode Date: November 8, 2019

Would you feel comfortable consuming a product that listed “whey protein concentrate” and “corn maltodextrin” on its list of ingredients? What about feeding it to your baby? Most of the ingredients found in baby formula are actually just carbohydrates, fats, and proteins, and are perfectly safe—and necessary—for infant health. But this inscrutable list of ingredients is one reason why many parents are opting to buy European formula for their little ones. Word is spreading around parenting blogs and websites—and among parents themselves—that European formulas, with their simpler ingredients lists, are “cleaner” and therefore healthier for babies. But is there any truth to this claim? Baby formula expert and clinical researcher Bridget Young, PhD and professor of pediatrics Anthony Porto, MD, MPH, join Ira to discuss what the data says about the differences between infant formulas, as well as what those ingredients actually mean for your baby’s health. And, AI may be short for “artificial intelligence,” but in many ways, our automated programs can be surprisingly dumb. For example, you can think you’re training a neural net to recognize sheep, but actually it’s just learning what a green grassy hill looks like. Or teaching it the difference between healthy skin and cancer—but actually just teaching it that tumors always have a ruler next to them. And if you ask a robot to navigate a space without touching the walls, sometimes it just stays still in one place.  AI researcher Janelle Shane, author of a new book about the quirky, but also serious errors that riddle AI—which, at the end of the day, can only do what we tell them to.  Plus, learn about the surprising facts and common misconceptions about the Venus flytrap. In our latest Macroscope video, researchers Elsa Youngsteadt and Laura Hamon are rushing to understand more about the Venus flytraps found in North Carolina before it’s too late. Science Friday video producer Luke Groskin joins Ira to talk about what we know and don’t know about this famous carnivorous plant.  Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Artificial intelligence. AI. It's a fact of life, right? Facial recognition algorithms that recognize who's in your photos, email filters that keep your inbox, relatively spam-free. And even your airplanes autopilot, they're all powered by forms of AI. But AI is not omnipotent. In fact, artificial intelligence has severe shortcomings. It can only really do exactly what we tell it to, even if what we're telling it to do is to learn and evolve. And this has consequences for everything, from how well AI can identify tumors to whether self-driving cars decide to stop in time to avoid hitting a pedestrian. Dr. Janelle Shane is an artificial intelligence researcher, blogger, an author of the new book.

You look like a thing, and I love you. How artificial intelligence works and why it's making the world a weird. weirder place. She spends her time teaching neural nets to write recipes, tell knock-knock jokes, and even flirt. Yes, these are all harder than they sound. And she's here to talk about how AI works and why things go wrong and how AI is making our world weirder. Welcome, Dr. Shane. Hey, great to be on the show. Thank you. You know, I read a lot of books and I come across a lot of titles, but your, you're, you look like a thing and I love you. How did that come about? Well, this was one of these experiments where I was trying to get one of these artificial

intelligence algorithms to imitate pickup lines. You know, these kind of cheesy one-liners that nobody uses in real life, but you're supposed to use to pick up strangers. And, you know, so I trained this computer to try to imitate these. I gave it a whole bunch of examples of existing pickup lines and I had it try to do its best to produce more of them. And as it turns out, the algorithm wasn't quite capable of latching on to kind of the gross innuendos or the bad puns or anything like that. And instead, what came out was these sort of sweet, direct, uncomprehending lines. And the one that was my very favorite was, you look like a thing and I love you. Well, give me an idea of the process.

How do you begin? How do you teach an algorithm to flirt? Yeah, so you need to give it examples because it's going to start with no idea of what English even is or, you know, what pickup lines are, has no clue of any of that. So I have to give it a whole bunch of examples. As far as it knows, you know, this could be a grocery list and finish. This could be, you know, cookbook recipe. It could be anything. And so then it has to look at this text that I gave it and look at the patterns, analyze the patterns, and try to predict which letters come after which other letters.

So then do you have to tell it, oh, that's wrong, try again? I mean, this is a long learning process? It does this process without any direct help from me. Basically, it's doing a lot of trial and error just by itself looking at these examples I gave it, making guess. and saying, okay, how close did I get? And so it's pretty hands-off for me, actually. I let it start, give it the data, I let it start learning, and I come back a while later to see what it's doing.

So it will stop and come up with something it's figured out that might be correct, and you look at it and say, well, it's not really what it is. Yeah, so I can stop it at any point and look at how it's doing and say, oh, I better let it learn for a little longer, or I can say, oh, I made a mistake and I gave it the wrong data set. And I thought, you know, I accidentally gave it the cookie recipe data set again and it's doing cookies because it doesn't know I want pickup lines now. And you also say in your book that it doesn't have much of a memory, short memory.

Yeah, that's one of these things that you see is a real hallmark of computer generated text actually is that it loses its train of things. thought a lot. So even the most sophisticated text-generating algorithms we have today, they can do full sentences now, which they weren't able to do a while ago. But still, if you look at them trying to write a story, you'll see it's almost like looking at a story in a dream. So it kind of forgets where you are. Suddenly you're not in an airplane anymore. You're in a shop and you don't know exactly how. And there's a new character in the room. And now we're talking about something different. So, yeah, It is a kind of surreal experience reading these stories that these things generate. Yeah, you had an example of that about writing recipes.

It didn't have a whole lot of... Didn't do so well, did it? Yeah, it'll be asking you to take a pie out of the oven that you never put in there in the first place, and it'll ask you to use ingredients that it definitely didn't call for, or it made the title of the recipe maybe say, oh, yeah, we're making cookies, and then by the end, you're making soup now for some reason. Huh. And your big thesis is that AI makes the world a weirder place. So where exactly does the weirdness come from? Well, this is a thing that I really like looking at. There's

these a lot of things that AIs do that really reveal how very different they are from a human-level intelligences. And I find that particularly interesting, because we often to forget that a lot, just because the AIs in our science fiction tend to be pretty human-like. But what we have today in the real world, it's a lot simpler. Like it's maybe the rough computing power of an earthworm, something like that. And so because it doesn't have this kind of understanding and this kind of context that we have, it will do weird things. So, you know, and that brings up the question in my mind,

if it's doing weird things, why are we putting so much effort into, you know, depending on it? Well, it is really successful for a lot of problems we've had trouble solving before. So one of the first big commercial successes was translation, like language translation. So Google Translate rolled out this AI-powered machine translation, and it was this huge leap in the ability. of algorithms to automatically translate text. And it's still not perfect. There are definitely glitches, but it's pretty functional for a lot of basic purposes.

A number 844724-8255 if you'd like to call in. 844-8255 talking about artificial intelligence, with a Janelle Shane, author of You Look Like a Thing, and I Love You. So, you know, facial, there's a serious side to it. you say, it is successful at doing certain things. For example, let's talk about self-driving cars. An investigation recently revealed that Uber's self-driving car hit and killed a pedestrian last year because the software wasn't told that pedestrians could be outside the crosswalks. That's a pretty big limitation and a mistake. Yeah. Yeah, and this is these things. Like,

the AIs do exactly what we tell them to do. So if we tell them that you're not ever going to find pedestrians outside of a crosswalk, well, that's a heck of a thing to tell a self-driving car. But these things don't have the common sense that a human might, and they don't realize that this is a bad directive and they should question this. Or maybe this thing could be a pedestrian after all. And then there are other mistakes layered on top of that, too. Like, you know, even if you don't know what it is, maybe you should break. Well, that goes back to my earliest days of my computing life, where if you don't put

good information, you're not going to get good results. They used to call it garbage in, garbage out. And you talk about that. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that absolutely still holds true, almost even more so with these kinds of algorithms, because they just imitate what they're given or they'll do exactly what they'll given. And where do you see the frontier of artificial intelligence going now? What is the hardest nut to crack here?

Gosh, these hard nuts to crack, they end up being in unexpected places. One thing I see is that people are generally really bad at guessing what's a broad project and what is therefore a really tricky one to give AI. So things like, you know, content moderation, human language. Language is really, really complex, and sometimes we don't realize that until we try to get a computer to understand what we write and see all the different ways in which it trips up. Well, I was thinking one of the interesting areas where it has been successful has been in medicine and diagnosing diseases and famous case of looking at slides of melanoma and the computer doing so much better than human doctors. because it was told, you know, how to look for them. Yeah, there's a lot of promise there,

and there's a lot of people working on AI for medicine. There's a lot of really repetitive tasks that we'd like to be able to automate or we'd like to be able to at least use AI as like a second layer of examination on some of these slides or these images. So, yeah, there's a lot of promise in medicine for sure. I see if I got a quick call in before we go to Tom in Milwaukee. Hi, Tom. Hi.

Go ahead. Sure. Hi. Hi. I'm just from your descriptions of how the computer is programmed and how it's trying things, it sounds sort of like an analog to biological evolution and just trying things to see if they work. Do you see that? Isn't that not applicable?

Oh, no, you are absolutely right. It is totally applicable. And in fact, there are a lot of these AI systems, their method of trial and error, and their structure even is drawn direct inspiration from biology. So computer versions of evolution, evolutionary algorithms, genetic programming. This is one big area of artificial intelligence and one that's had some really nice successes, too. So absolutely. And then also it gets really weird, too, in the same way, like, biology gets weird and you get things that, you know, look like bird poop, or they eat hydrogen sulfide, or they eat the weirdest things.

You'll get these artificial organisms that are, you know, really simple. They're being trained in simulation, and they'll learn to do things like harvest energy from the simulation's math errors. It is so interesting. The sources of energy they find. All right, we're going to come back and hang around, Janelle. We'll talk to you after the break. Janelle Shane, artificial intelligence researcher, author of You Look Like a Thing, and I Love You. It's a really interesting book.

I love your little hand-drawn pictures in there, too. Janelle, they're kind of fun. Stay with us. We'll be right back, taking your calls 844-724-8255. You can also tweet us at SciFry talking about AI weirdness. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. For better or for weirder, artificial intelligence is changing our world and the way we live in it.

And we've been talking about some of the strange things that happen when you ask AI to write a recipe or tell jokes, even flirt. Or you just don't give it good instructions with my guest, Janelle Shane, author of You Look Like a Thing and I Love You. And while we were preparing for our interview, we asked you, Janelle, to do something for us. You had a neural net generate some new Science Friday show ideas from a list of past topics. Now, these topics are generally two or three word phrases that briefly summarize what we talked about. For example, we give the topics names like News Roundup or volcanoes or insect extinction. And my producer sent you a couple of hundred of these. What did you do with them next?

Well, since there are a couple hundred, I decided to use a neural network, one of these AI algorithms that had already been pre-trained, because I knew just a couple hundred words would not be enough for it to really learn much English or much, very many ways of doing anything other than just like copying the existing list. and spinning it back to me. So I turned to a big neural net that had been already trained by a group called OpenAI, and they trained it on a couple billion pages of Internet text, like a really huge data set. So in this training data, in the course of this training, you know, rather than just seeing Science Friday topics, it was seeing everything from, you know, recipe blogs to news sites to Harry Potter fanfiction. like anything you can imagine is somewhere in the data that this algorithm learned from.

And so it learns things like what words tend to be used together, how do you copy a phrase. And so I figured that if I gave it some of, if I gave it this list of existing topics and just said, try and add to the end of this list, that it would come up with something that it thought went along with the list of topics. Science Friday's done in the past. And so I used this website, talk to transformer.com, to actually do the interfacing with this big neural net. And I got some pretty fun results. Yeah, let me list some of the results we got. Here's a list of them.

Woof, bear and pumpkin, trees, Joe, and more. California drawers, big cows, spider buster, cats and bones. pancakes, pigeon foes, muscles in the earth, horse cobra, grass to beard ingredients, vaporized shoes, dungeons of lessing crystals. So I don't know if these are going to make it on any of our future shows, but that is some of the weirdness that you are talking about. And that brings up an interesting topic I want to get into, and this is from a tweet that's coming in. Now, Matthew wants to know, can we discuss the differences between machine learning and true AI? seems most discussion has actually been about machine learning. Yeah, so this is one of these things where AI is used to mean a whole bunch of different things, depending on who's talking.

And so for the course of, for my book, actually, I had to really choose between those different definitions. So if I'm saying AI, am I going to mean like science fiction AI, or am I going to mean like remote workers who are typing in the answers from some distant location? So what I ended up going with is the definition that a lot of computer programmers use today in which I'm using AI to mean the same thing as machine learning. So these kinds of algorithms that learn via trial and error to achieve some kind of goal rather than being given exact instructions. Are we eventually going to get the weirdness out of AI or do these unexpected results have things to offer us? Yeah, I think the weirdness that we're seeing in stuff like the Science Friday topics is really symptomatic of something that we're going to have as part of AI. It's kind of what results from a really simple, narrow artificial intelligence, one of these, it's so much simpler than a human brain and yet is trying to understand. really complex world, a really complex, the full complexity of what humans do, and what results is

often mistakes that happen from this lack of context. So yeah, I think we're, we are going to be stuck with these narrow algorithms for a long time yet. You know, you kind of say compared to C3PO, it's a lot closer to toasters that we're working with. That's interesting. Now, your book, it's a great primer on how AI actually works. It takes shortcuts. It does literally what we tell it to. It's sometimes fine solutions that we rather it didn't. But is it also capable of learning and evolving to a pretty sophisticated degree? This seems like a pretty fun mix of possibilities and limitations. Yeah. So it is interesting. It was basically the narrower the problem you give one of these AI is the smarter that it seems. So if you choose something that's really narrow like chess or

Go, AI is really good at these kind of games, and it will completely astonish human players and come up with new strategies that people never heard of, really beautiful strategies. On the other hand, you give it a task like folding laundry, and that's much harder in many ways. It's really interesting. You know, we talked about it, and to amplify on that, As an example, we were speaking of self-driving cars and how the Uber self-driving car hit in a pedestrian. I know in my Tesla now, and I know it's an evolved, they're upgrading it all the time, I actually can see pedestrians, little figures of them on my screen, no matter where they walk. So you can evolve and make it a lot smarter.

Yeah, and I think there's a lot of incentive that people have to keep working on these algorithms. and we're going to see them rolled out in a lot of different areas. They are very useful. There's also, you know, stuff we have to watch out for, of course, as, you know, we don't want to place too much trust in these, you know, little warm-level intelligences. All right. Should we be fearful then or not fearful of the supposed singularity that some very smart people say,

you know, the AI is going to be smarter than we are and take over? Well, you know, I actually tend to, from what I've seen, I tend to agree with the researchers who say that we're not going to see that kind of AI in our lifetimes, probably not even close. I think brains in general are a lot more complex than we tend to give them credit for. And the human world and just the world in general is a lot more complex than we give things credit for. So you always see people trying to build AIs to do something and then do. discovering once they try this, that it is actually a lot harder than people thought. And humans are amazing. Humans are doing really broad tasks like laundry, for example, without realizing what level of sophistication you really need for that. I mean, maybe someday. So I'm a fan of

science fiction, and it's fun to speculate about what may happen someday and what future intelligences might look like, but I don't think we'll see that anytime soon. I take heart of knowing I can't do laundry yet, so that's very... Thank you, Janelle. Yeah, alas, no butler bots. Janelle, Shane, artificial intelligence researcher and author of a really cool little book, you look like a thing, and I love you, and we have an excerpt of the book on our website, ScienceFriety.com slash weirdness.

Thank you for taking time to be with us today. Hey, thank you so much. Now I'm going to read you a list of ingredients on a package. Way protein concentrate, corn syrup, vegetable soy oils, lactose, corn maltodextrin, safflower oil, milk protein isolate. I could go on naming dozens of more ingredients in this product. Would you feel comfortable consuming this product yourself? Well, what about feeding it to your baby? Because these ingredients come from the back of cans of baby formula from American baby food companies.

weigh vegetable oil and lactose and layman's terms are actually just carbohydrates, fats, and proteins the stuff every infant needs, right, for a well-balanced diet. So why does it feel like you need a Ph.D. and nutrition to understand what you're feeding your baby? It's one reason why many parents are choosing European formula brands. They say they trust the European companies to be more transparent. Use organic ingredients over their FDA-approved U.S. counterparts. And word on the street among parents, if you talk to them, is that European brands are, quote, cleaner and therefore healthier for baby.

But is there any truth to this claim? There's a private Facebook support group with over 13,000 members discussing the merits of European formulas and how to best safely import them for personal use. So for all you sleep-deprived parents who find yourselves awake at 2 a.m. searching the Internet for answers, we've decided to bring in some science experts to help us out, joining me to share with what data that says about the difference in infant formulas.

And what everything on those ingredients list actually mean for your baby are my guests. Let me bring them on now. Dr. Anthony Porto, a pediatric gastroenterologist, associate professor at Yale School of Medicine. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi. Dr. Bridget Young, a Ph.D. and clinical researcher at the University of Rochester Medical Center and founder of the blog, babyformulaexpert.com. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, nice to be here. Dr. Porto, what are the basic nutritional ingredients that infants need to

survive? How many are there? Well, when you think about it, since most children at birth, for the first at least four to six months of life, will get their nutrition either from breast milk or infant formula. An infant formula is made to have all the necessary ingredients. So you need, as you said, carbohydrates or sugar, protein, fat, and other minerals and micronutrients. Dr. Young, I know you actually have a PhD in nutrition, maybe the only one who can understand what's on these labels because I counted over 60 ingredients in one can on the back of the labels of one can of formula. Do they give babies everything they need or more than everything they need? Well, a little bit of both. So all formulas in Europe and especially in the U.S. are very, very safe and have everything a baby needs to grow just perfectly fine from birth all the way up to when they're ready for solid foods. So the FDA, our regulatory agency in the United States, sets minimum requirements for the number of macronutrients, which are protein and carbohydrate and fat, and micronutrients, which are your vitamins and minerals. And so all formulas have

that same base. Some specialty formulas add, what I call these kind of sexy ingredients, that are things that are found in breast milk, that as research progresses and as formulation companies are able to replicate some of these individual ingredients, they become present in some formulas. So, and those are usually the source of a lot of marketing. So things like, again, scary sounding words, but like lactoferrin or milk fat globule membrane, which is a mouthful, are things that aren't required an infant formula, but are present in some infant formulas based off of those

types of ingredients being present in breast milk. Now, I talked to a number of mothers who have infants on formula. You know, it's this anecdotal research, and it's sort of what, you know, I mentioned in the intro about people talking to each other. And one of the things they kept saying over and over again is why is there sugar or corn syrup in my formulas, you know?

And is my baby going, to get a sweet tooth and get used to wanting to have sweet things. Yeah, well, that's a great question, and I tell you. I hear that question all the time, too. Well, the simple answer of why is there sugar in some baby formula is sugar is a carbohydrate. So babies absolutely need carbohydrates to grow. The main carbohydrate in breast milk is lactose. And actually, most standard infant formulas provide lactose as the carbohydrate as well.

There are actually many options of formulas that are what in medicine we call quote unquote lactose reduced, where they take some of the lactose out. And so they have to replace it with something because the baby needs a set amount of carbohydrates. And infants are not just super tiny adults. They can't have things like vegetable fiber or complex carbohydrates. They're not capable of digesting those. They need something simple that their body can break down for nutrients. So if the baby's not having lactose, there's actually a really reasonable. limited number of other carbohydrates and infant can digest. And that includes glucose-based

sugars like corn syrup is the most common and sucrose, which is table sugar. So while it seems a little scary, they are perfectly safe to feed a baby. And there has to be something in there if you take the lactose out. So that's why you see it in a lot of formulas. And there are a lot of situations for individual babies who may need either a temporary or a permanent amount of lactose. reduction in their diet. I get it. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking with Dr. Bridget Young and Dr. Anthony Porto about baby formulas. If you have a question, our number is 844-724-825-8-24-Sight-4-Sight-Tock. Dr. Porto, the big trends these days is parenting, and I mentioned this at the beginning, choosing the European formula brands over the USDA approved

once. Why is this happening? It's a good question. You know, we, I'm a pediatric gastroenterologist, and my partner and I were looking at what the trends were. We saw anecdotally in our offices that people, as you said, were trying to use these formulas. We did a survey in a large practice in New York City, and about 20 percent of those who are formula-fed were using and importing European formulas. As you said, they thought was that they were doing it because there's stricter standards in the European Union as well as higher quality. And I think one of the things that came up when we looked at it in our study was that there was why are sugars other than lactose being used.

And what's interesting, when you look at the type of formulas, so what we did was we did Google searches and we used a search engine called Duck Duck Go, which is a search engine that's very rigid and won't give you certain responses based on what you searched before. And what we found was that most of the information on European formulas were blogs or stores trying to sell. And these were usually third-party vendors. And when we looked at the reasons why they were doing that, again, it was the stricter regulations and the use of lactose in what usually said is most of the formulas. When you looked at what was being imported, what was being imported were the intact protein. So what we were just talking about, there are different types of proteins, and most infants will do well on intact calzumac-based protein formulas.

And in the United States, most of those formulas are also lactose-containing. We use the other types of sugars or carbohydrates when it's a more broken-down protein or for a low-lactose formula. And so, for instance, that basically means that most infant formulas are made with lactose, and that is usually what's being imported. What's not being imported right now are the other more specialized formulas for kids, say, with chalasmal protein allergy. All right. We're going to take a break. Lots of calls coming in. 844-724-8255 talking about the science of baby formula and nutrition.

Your questions are going to also tweet us at SciFri. Stay with us. We'll be right back. Hey there. Ira here. Coming at you with some great news about how you, yes, you can make a big impact. right now. Science Friday has a dollar-for-dollar donation match in effect, which means that if you make a donation right now, it will be doubled. Yes, I said doubled. You heard me say this before.

Any size donation makes a difference, and that's never been more true than now. I know you care about Science Friday, so don't wait on this opportunity. Go to ScienceFriday.com slash give and double your impact. Thanks. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We're talking this hour about how to parse the ingredients and baby formula. What does it mean for infant health? What's the difference between European and American formulas?

With Dr. Anthony Porto, a pediatrician and professor at Yale School of Medicine, Dr. Bridget Young, a PhD, and a clinical researcher, University of Rochester Med Center, founder of the blog baby formula expert.com website. And speaking of websites, I mentioned this. in passing earlier, there is a private Facebook group, is at least one of them that has over 13,000 members where they discussed the merits of European formulas, how to best safely import them for personal use. People in these groups are talking about how they can import these specialty formulas, Dr. Porto, that you talked about. But give us the other flip side of the coin here.

What risks do you run if you import the formula? Sure. I mean, I think the most important thing is that The guidelines and the regulations in both Europe and United States are good. What is concerning is when the European formulas are brought to United States and how they're brought to the United States. So if they're brought outside that chain of command, the good manufacturing practices that's part of these acts is lost. We don't know if these formulas when they're brought here are kept at the correct temperatures, which could lead to vitamin deficiencies in the formula.

We know that at extreme temperatures, you can have low vitamin A and C. Protein may be less soluble. And so these are all concerns that we are unable to sort of follow. When you purchase formula and formula is manufactured in the U.S., what happens is a formula is made, and every step of the way until it gets to the consumer is regulated and formulated. When I talk to mothers, they said, you know, I'm worried about the formula is just sitting on the dock for days or weeks or whatever. And going bad, right, Dr. Young? Yeah, and I think rightfully so, because, I mean, Dr. Porto is absolutely correct.

Once you cross that ocean, the regulations don't necessarily apply. The FDA regulates our formulas here, and the European Commission regulates European formulas there within their own boundaries. Another potential risk that parents take on to use a European formula is, you know, it's every parent's worst nightmare that there's a formula. that there's a formula recall of the formula that they're using. And if you're using a European formula, it can kind of be, for lack of better word, out of the system once it's exported. So you may not necessarily receive information that that formula has been recalled, which recalls are very unusual and they don't happen often. But if they do, you know, you want to be sure that you receive information about it. And in addition, the mixing instructions for these typical European formulas are different than the standard in the United States.

So you want to make sure that since most of these labels are not in English, that their patients and the families are understand that it's a one scoop in one ounce mixture versus a two-to-one, which happens in most of the American formulas. Or if they're using a scoop from an old formula they may have, it could lead to concentration issues, either low calorie or high calorie that could lead to vomiting and electrolyte imbalances. You have to do a lot of homework if you're going to use some, you know, a formula that is in German. or you have to go to the website where it gets translated to look at it. Right. Right. Let's go to Denver, Colorado. Talk to Kate.

Hi, welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thanks for taking my call. Hi, go ahead. Sure. So the reason that I'm calling, and I'm hoping the guests can speak to it, is I've been doing a lot of research. I supplement breastfeeding with formula, but I do have some concerns about the highly processed oil that are used in most of the formulas that I, I can find. I have bought some European formulas as well, but they all seem to contain like palm oil, sunflower oil, sunflower oil. And I think there's been some emerging research about,

you know, the chemicals that are used in the processing of those oils and whether or not they can make the omega-3s and sixes unstable and what the effect might be on a baby's developing brain. Dr. Young, you want to start? Take a whack-up. Oh, it's such a great question. And Kate, congratulations on your baby. And keep rocking breastfeeding. It is so hard to be a new mom these days. I can talk a little bit to that. But, I mean, the first thing that I always emphasize is all of the oils that we have available to us for formula usage in the U.S. and in Europe, for that matter, have been really well studied to be safe. And I know when it's your baby, you want, of course, the absolute, absolute best.

And when we put together a fat blend, because it's always a blend of different oils for formula, it's so. a really delicate balance because you want to have just the right blend of fatty acids in the total blend that does its best to replicate breast milk. Now, we can never actually replicate breast milk and breast milk is a little different from mom to mom, but we know roughly what we're shooting for to be sure the baby gets all the fatty acids that they need. So you have, so basically, you can't just give all of one new oil or all of another oil. It has to be this balanced blend. And because the FDA regulates safety so rigidly, it takes, there's basically only certain options for oils that can be put into baby formula. So while researchers such as myself are always actively studying breast milk and trying to improve and optimize how we feed our babies, it takes a long time to be able to incorporate that research into new ingredient availability.

but I will say that the oils that we do have available in the U.S., you have a lot of really great options. I feel as a practitioner, I help work with families who are having formula tolerance issues. I feel very, very safe and comfortable with the options that we have. And then there is a little bit of variability if you want to pick and choose a little bit. Of course, we have some organic options in the U.S., so at least you have an organic source of an oil, if that's important to your family. And then, for example, the system. Similac brand of formulas and some of the generic brand of Simulac, they don't use any palm oil in their blends.

So families that are looking to avoid palm oil for either sustainability issues or potential constipation issues, you do have that option to kind of pick and choose, along with your pediatrician to, you know, pick an oil blend that's best for your baby. So I know that wasn't exactly the answer you were hoping for, but I hope that's helpful. Because one of the things that mothers were telling me about the European formulas is that they believe they have more organic, ingredients than the American formulas have in them. Let's go to Bill in Tallahassee. Hi, Bill. Welcome to Science Friday.

Thank you very much. I just wanted to ask about, you know, we're talking a lot about beneficial bacteria and the implications of the beneficial bacteria in actual breastfeeding and the implication that would have for like the infant mortality rate for poor black women as opposed to using formula. So you want to know how you can make up for the lack of bacteria in breast milk in the formula? Right, right.

We have a little controversy here in Tallahassee where a black physician is asking about the benefits of formula as opposed to teaching poor black women to breastfeed and have, you know, healthy breast milk. Okay, let me see. Dr. Porto? Sure. I mean, this is a great question. And I think when you think about it, breast milk in general is still, the formula is really always trying to bridge that gap between formula and breast milk to make sure it's comparable because their gold standard really is breast milk. And so breast milk, as we know, has not only the adequate nutrition for the first six months of life, but also has also the immunogenic properties that are very, very helpful. And so I think to your point, we don't, we know we do add some prebiotics and we do add some ingredients to formula. But right now, I would say that, you know, again, the breast milk has always been the gold standard and what formula always tries to compare itself to, to have these extra ingredients to help make things as the gold standard, which is breast milk. I know there are some people, mothers were telling me they add their own

probiotics to the food that they feed their babies. I have about a minute left. Dr. Young, Dr. Porto, what is the Holy Grail for formula that we don't have yet? Is it possible to achieve it? Sure. I mean, I think I'll just say briefly, I think that we're right now with research going on, as Dr. Young alluded to and spoke about really the gold standard is really to have these kids grow and get adequate nutrition. And I think that both the U.S. and Europe is doing a really good job to make sure that

we keep on enhancing and trying to get to that gold standard of breast milk. And also, I think, education on how to breastfeed and sort of to make sure that parents have support as much as possible to make that choice. All right. Thank you very much. Thank you both for taking time to be with us today. Dr. Anthony Porto, pediatrician and associate professor at Yale School of Medicine, and Dr. Bridget Young, a Ph.D. and clinical researcher, University of Rochester Medical Center

and founder of the blog, Baby Formula. expert.com. Thanks for taking time to be with us today. Thank you. Yeah, thanks, Ira. That music means only one thing. It's a special video coming up. Did you ever have a Venus flytrap as a kid? You know, I did. Don't you think it, you know, think it came out of a mysterious tropical island, right? Guess what? The fly traps are, they're not tropical. They're endemic to a tiny area of land in North and South Carolina right here in the good old USA. No wonder I couldn't keep my heart. I've lived in the wrong place. And did you know that Venus fly traps?

They rarely eat flies. They prefer ants and other things that crawl into their traps. But the most worrying fact of all is that Venus fly traps are being threatened by climate change and development where they live. And in our latest macroscope video, that's what the sounds were for, researchers are hurrying to figure out what else we don't know about Venus fly traps before it's too late. Joining me now to talk about it is Science Friday video producer Luke Graskin. Welcome back. Hi, Ira. From the land of the Venus flytrap.

Indeed. So we don't know that Venus flytrap plant as well as we think we do. What are some of the surprising things that you learned about them while you were going out there? Well, the first thing that's, to me, most surprising, is that it has a flower. I mean, I've seen them in plenty of hot houses, but I'd never actually notice that they actually have a flower because most people don't grow them properly, so they don't actually flower. So there's this big, beautiful, bucolic white flower, the little yellow in the center. So that was pretty amazing, also that they have multiple traps. That was pretty fascinating to learn about.

And it was also fascinating to learn that they have, you know, they don't, they grow in non-tropical areas, as you mentioned, and that they live in poor soil. So that was also fascinating to learn about. There's a lot about these plants that we don't know about. I mean, we know a lot about their traps. They're well-studied. But the basic ecology and what is the life cycle of these plants and how they reproduce, not a lot is known about it. And speaking of the flower, one of the things you showed is in a beautiful video stuff of you flying,

you watch the, they're not flies that get trapped. No. They're right there. Bugs that crawl in there. No, it's usually ants and spiders. Ants and spiders. Yeah, but then how does the fly trap avoid eating the animals that it needs? to pollinate the plant.

So this is the big, I mean, there's a question about its conservation. You can't protect a plant without understanding how it reproduces. But then there's a bigger, you know, evolutionary question, which is, you know, you have a carnivorous plant that eats insects. And it needs those same, that needs insects also to reproduce, to pollinate itself. Right. It has very large pollen. And so it's very unlikely that it's going to pollinate itself. And so these researchers at the North Carolina State University, they're studying, you know, how to,

how does a plant, a carnivorous plant, get by? And they have a couple of theories. I mean, the first is that, you know, there's a big distance between the traps and the flower. There's about a foot, usually. And so, you know, most of the things that pollinate the plant are going to be flying bugs, like little sweat bees and butterflies and things like that. And the rest are all on the ground. So there's the distance.

And then there's also, could be the color. The plants are, the flowers are this bright white, and the plants, the traps are this green with a little bit of hues of purple and red. And then lastly, there's the smell, and they're studying that this past summer and in an upcoming field seasons when they put little cups in front of the flowers and cups in front of the traps, and they actually try to collect the actual chemicals, volatile chemicals coming out of them to see what could be inducing different insects to come over and check it out. And, of course, you're like, okay, this seems like a lot just to find out how a plant doesn't eat its own pollinator.

But if you really want to protect these plants and they do need their pollinators, you've got to figure out how they reproduce. Talking with Luke Graskin on Science Friday from WNIC Studios, talking about his latest macroscope video, these Venus fly traps. And we learned that they're in danger, right? They live in that part of the world. Who knew? Exactly. Like you said at the top, that you would think it's a tropical species. It's not a tropical species.

There's only a tiny, tiny section of North Carolina, a little bit of South Carolina as well, where these plants live. And so they require, they have very specific environmental requirements. So they need a lot of fire. The fire burns away the taller shrubs and the grasses so that the plant can get sunlight. And if you have a lot of development going on, you probably don't want a lot of fire going on. So there's that problem. And then there's this other problem where people are actually going out there at night and collecting them by the hundreds and selling them on the black market. So, yeah, there's a black market for fly traps.

Yes, there's poachers. They're not orchids, they're flytra. Yes. Yeah, and it's actually a crime in North Carolina to actually go out and take these with some serious penalties. And there's been several cases in the past five years where people have been caught and they're facing jail time. So, yeah, these people are going out and taking them. And if you take a hundred or several hundred of these plants from an area and they only live in a small area and there's not that many of them, you are making a significant hit on the population. So, yeah, the black market trade of fly traps is real.

So you got to be careful if you buy one at the store that it's not poached. Yeah, I mean, if you go to a greenhouse and you see one of these plants, find out where it came from. Just ask, like, hey, where do you get it from? There are not many distributors of fly traps in the world, and most of them are not getting their fly traps from North Carolina from where they're found. So just ask. Yeah, it's not hard information to find out. Thank you, Luke. Thank you.

Luke Roskin, it's a wonderful macroscope video. It's up on our website at Science Friday.com. One last thing before we go, 28 years ago, today, November 8th, 1991, the first episode of Science Friday aired. Can you believe it? We're entering our 29th year, and one of our first guests was the late Sherwood Rowland, who explained the phenomenon of how chlorofluorocarbons, CFCs from spray cans, were creating a hole in the ozone. Went to the atmosphere up into the stratosphere above most of the ozone layer. And when they get above most of the ozone layer, they can absorb short-wave-length ultraviolet radiation from the sun.

What this does is release chlorine atoms. The chloro-fluorocarbons contain chlorine, fluorine, and carbon. And when they release the chlorine atoms, a long chain reaction in which each chlorine atom can take out 100,000 molecules of ozone ensues. Dr. Sherry Rowland later went on to share the Nobel Prize. in chemistry for that work. So as we enter our 29th year, we plan to bring you even more of the same important research, big thinkers

with plenty of time for whimsy, curiosity, and discovery too. Thank you for listening to all these years. That's about all the time we have for today. I'm Ira Flato in New York. And if you missed any part of the program and you want to go to listeners in San Francisco Bay Area,

we're welcoming, we're going to Science Friday, Saturday, November 16th, for a special night of science, conversations, live music and entertainment, talking about environmental justice, artificial intelligence, and yes, the tiny arachnids that live on your face. We're going to be there Saturday, November 16th. That's a special night. Don't miss it. More information at science friday.com slash San Francisco. Science Friday.com slash San Francisco for the San Francisco Bay Area Saturday, November 16th.

We'll see you there. Have a great weekend. I'm Ira Flato in New York.