All I've got to say is Ho-ly Shit. I've got some leaked Monsanto documents here and WOW! If only more people knew...
When many Americans think of milk, they envision a wholesome product produced on bucolic farms. The first hint to burst that bubble is that some milk comes chock full of extra hormones. The controversy over rBGH started before it was even legally marketed commercially in 1994. In 1990, a dairy industry publication, The Milkweed, obtained and published several documents from Monsanto.
It may be hard for you to believe that the company responsible for Agent Orange is also less than honest about cow hormones, but suspend your disbelief for a moment as you read on.
UPDATE To counter some of what's been said in the comments, my argument is not meant as a scare tactic. Rather, my point is that rBGH should have been tested far more thoroughly before it was declared legal.
Last summer, I attended the National Family Farm Coalition summer meeting. The last presentation before I left to go home was about rBGH - recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone. I believe the presenter was Pete Hardin, who publishes The Milkweed, but I can't find my notes at the moment so I'm not sure.
The presenter told an AMAZING story about rBGH. The audience was mostly farmers, many of them dairy farmers, so the talk went into quite a bit of detail, given how knowledgeable the audience was about the subject.
I didn't really cover it here because I'd already done one diary on rBGH and I didn't want to repeat it. Then a few weeks ago, I sat down to start writing a section in the book I'm working on about rBGH. First I emailed a dairy farmer for information, and he gave me some info but directed me to read a booked called What's In Your Milk? by Samuel Epstein.
I checked the bookstore and the library, but neither one had the book. Finally, I located a folder of handouts I brought home from the NFFC meeting, including 2 copies of The Milkweed with articles about rBGH - one from 1990 and one from 2006.
As soon as I opened the 1990 paper, I was shocked by what I had in my hands: an article by Pete Hardin and Samuel Epstein (the author of the book I was looking for) that reprinted some leaked Monsanto documents they had gotten a hold of and interpretted the results. This stuff is 16-years-old and yet in early February 1994 the government allowed Monsanto to sell rBGH commercially and it's still legal today.
If that wasn't enough, the 2006 paper had another several articles about a recent report in the Journal of Reproductive Medicine - it was like having "before" and "after" pictures of the effects of rBGH on people.
What The Leaked Documents Showed
Before Monsanto could legally sell rBGH (which they market under the name "Posilac"), they had to prove that it was safe for people and for cows. (I suppose they use the terms "prove" and "safe" very loosely... you know, injecting a cow with Posilac doesn't result in instant death so it must be OK.)
Cows naturally produce bovine growth hormone (BGH), also sometimes referred to as bovine somatotropin (BST). It’s not news to us humans that increased BGH leads to increased amounts of milk. Prior to the age of biotechnology, people tried extracting BGH from the pituitary glands of dead cows. In fact, a study on the effects of BGH in humans was done in the 1950’s by obtaining natural BGH in this way and administering it to human dwarves. Sadly, many of the dwarves died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human brain-wasting disease scientists think is caused by Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow.
Back in the late eighties and early nineties, Monsanto wanted to fast track its genetically modified form of BGH to commercialization. Following the stock market crash of October 1987, biotech firms did not rebound quickly as they had few projects ready to bring to market. Biotech firms’ other money makers’ days were numbered – some, such as Monsanto’s Nutrasweet, had patents expiring soon, and others, such as petroleum-based farm inputs, were threatened as public opinion shifted away from supporting farming techniques that polluted soil and groundwater. Monsanto was determined to have its rBGH, marketed under the name Posilac, become a successful “first out of the gate” biotech product to prove the industry’s profitability.
Monsanto did not think dairy farmers would wish to inject their cows daily, so they created and tested a dose intended for injecting once every two weeks. The test consisted of 82 cows, divided into groups receiving no Posilac (as a control group) and one, three, and five times the recommended dose of Posilac every two weeks for approximately eight months. At the end of the eight months, they slaughtered and necropsied 35 test animals.
During the experiment, the cows injected with Posilac suffered several health effects, including enlarged organs, decreased rates of conception, and damage to the animals at the injection sites. If a farmer begins giving a cow Posilac, the cows natural ability to produce BGH becomes suppressed. Then if the farmer stops administering Posilac, the cow's suppressed BGH levels cause its productivity of milk to crash. Furthermore, Monsanto administered several illegal drugs to the test animals during the study. The Milkweed criticized the study, saying
Monsanto is using short-term measures (increased milk production) to extrapolate "safety" of recombinant bovine growth hormone treatments. The relative health of treated animals during subsequent lactations is of greater importance to the dairy farmer than just "increased milk production" during a short-term treatment period.
In other words, to a dairy farmer potentially using Posilac to increase his or her profitability, the farmer does not only care about increased profits in the short-term, but also profits in the long-term. If a cow receiving Posilac outweighs the value of its increased milk production with decreased value from difficulty becoming pregnant and a lower value at the slaughterhouse due to needlemarks, Posilac represents a net loss to the farmer.
Beyond the health of treated cows, one must consider the health of humans consuming those cows’ milk. In Monsanto’s study, BGH levels in the milk of treated cows rose as much as 1000-times greater than BGH levels of the control group’s milk. The FDA determined that BGH is “safe,” based on the 1950’s study of human dwarves. Well, if you define “safe” as “dying of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease,” then I’ll buy that.
While there is a world of difference between injecting humans with hormones from dead cows and humans drinking milk from cows injected with synthetic hormones, basing our judgment that rBGH is safe for humans on a decades-old study is ridiculous. We obviously do not have a Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease epidemic on our hands now that Posilac has been used commercially for over a decade, but "profit first, ask questions later" isn’t a good way to find that out. At the very least, more research was needed before proclaiming BGH or rBGH as safe.
A secondary hormone, insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1), raises even more cause for concern. Whereas BGH and human growth hormone are structurally different from one another, human and cow IGF-1 are identical. Cows injected with Posilac do not only produce milk high in BGH, their milk also contains high amounts of IGF-1.
In 2006, Gary Steinman, M.D, Ph.D., published an article in The Journal of Reproductive Medicine linking Posilac with higher rates of human twinning. IGF-1 spurs cellular growth function (recall the enlarged organs in Posilac-treated cows) and, according to Steinman,
increases the sensitivity and responsiveness of ovaries to follicle stimulating hormone (FSH).
His data shows an increase in the rate of multiple births in the U.S. by 31.9% between 1992 and 2002 (rBGH came on the scene in February 1994). This is just the beginning of the story, as IGF-1 is linked to breast, prostate, and colorectal cancers.
Before you swear off dairy products forever, keep in mind that many dairies are going rBGH-free. Consumers are increasingly vocal in their desire for rBGH-free milk and dairy processors are responding by telling their suppliers they will no longer accept milk from cows treated with rBGH.
The last time I diaried GMO's (genetically modified organisms), I got a mixed response from everyone. I don't believe the technology is inherently evil, but time and time again biotech companies and the government puts corporate profits over consumer safety. They've been doing it since the good old days of DDT and they did it again for Posilac.