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Comment by barbazoo | Hacker News Reader

I wonder where that came from. It's kinda obvious that baby food doesn't need to be heated up beyond body temperature but it's definitely a thing people tell you when you have kids.

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The powder is not sterile. The advice I got was to mix it with 80C water to sterilize it and wait for it to cool.

But that doesn't make sense. As a microbiologist, I can tell you that plenty of bacteria can survive 80C. if you were were worried about sterility, you'd boil the mixture for several minutes (even so, there are extremophiles that can survive that but they aren't in general dangerous)

Sterilize was the wrong word, but a that high of a temperature will kill the germs that most commonly infect the infant human gut. You may have heard about cronobacter contamination being an issue a while back. If 80C doesn’t kill everything, but those germs pass through harmlessly, then it’s not a problem.

If that doesn’t make sense to you as a microbiologist, you should let the US FDA know.

https://www.fda.gov/food/foodborne-pathogens/cronobacter-sak...

Pretty much everything we and babies eat are not perfectly sterile (I don't think it's common practice to sterilize the mother's nipples?). I would be surprised if it is normal for baby powder to not be safe to consume without sterilization.

Not only that, but barring babies with compromised immune systems, you really don't want to get too crazy about sterility. They need to be exposed to pathogens in order to develop immune responses!

My doctor recommended it. The packaging on my infant formula recommended it. The US FDA recommends it.

https://www.fda.gov/food/foodborne-pathogens/cronobacter-sak...

But you do you.

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