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Noam Hassenfeld (1:05)
If you've heard the name Emily Oster, it's probably because you or someone you know is having a baby.
Emily Oster (1:10)
Yeah, so I started writing about pregnancy when I got pregnant with my first kid, who is now 14.
Noam Hassenfeld (1:15)
And when she started talking to her doctors, she immediately heard about all the things she couldn't have.
Emily Oster (1:20)
You can't have hot dogs. You can't have deli meats. You can't have sushi. You can't have coffee, can't have alcohol.
Noam Hassenfeld (1:24)
There was a lot of can't, but not a lot of why. So Emily asked her doctors, what exactly was the risk she was avoiding? Like, how strong was the evidence?
Emily Oster (1:34)
Like, okay, if I avoided ham, how much would that change my risk of listeria? Like, how much do we really know and how large is any given risk?
Noam Hassenfeld (1:44)
Emily thought these were pretty basic questions, and she was kind of shocked when her doctors just didn't have the answers. Emily's a health economist at Brown, so in order to get the kind of answers she was looking for, she decided to go straight to her comfort zone. The actual studies. Some of what she found lined up with conventional wisdom. Like cigarettes. Definitely bad, but a lot of it wasn't as black and white as she'd been told. The data said a ham sandwich every once in a while wasn't so bad. Neither was a cup of coffee. But then some things that seemed helpful, like bed rest. Way riskier than you might think. And then when her friends started getting pregnant, they started coming to her for advice. So much that she decided to write a Book. It's called Expecting Better, and it was an instant bestseller. There were clearly lots of people out there who wanted something like this. At the same time, the book was kind of controversial. It went against lots of conventional wisdom about what pregnant people should or shouldn't do. Some people thought Emily was being a little cavalier. But Emily just saw herself as laying out the evidence. She didn't want to tell people what to do. Her point was that pregnant people shouldn't be talked down to, that they can handle the data and they can make their own decisions.
