Bovine Somatotropin: The Myth and the Message

Take a look at the Shatto Milk Company advertisement to your right. Now, Shatto, which I had never heard of (considering I have never been to Kansas), is clearly advertising hormone-free milk to its consumers. This is cool by me, I checked out their Web site and it seems to be a smaller family farm that does not use growth hormones in their dairy cattle.

So what's my issue?

Cows naturally have growth hormones.

I'm not sure if you knew that, but they do. Therefore, there's an issue with saying ANY milk is hormone free, because it probably isn't, unless you have some crazy genetically engineered cows (if this ever happens, please expand research into genetically engineering women to skip the whole menopause thing, I beg you). Plus, you kind of have to have hormones to HAVE milk in the first place. These naturally-ocurring hormones include thyroxine, insulin, estrogen, progesterone, a whole list of others, and GROWTH HORMONE.

Here's what you, as a savvy animal agriculture shopper, need to understand. When Shatto Milk Company (and a host of others) say they're selling you hormone-free milk (or other dairy products), it means they're not putting additional growth hormones into their dairy cattle.

A growth hormone is literally exactly what it sounds like--a hormone that increases either growth or production in an animal. According to the Food and Drug Administration, taking growth hormone from the pituitary gland (that's in the general brain area) of cattle and injecting it into dairy animals increased the amount of milk produced. With the use of recombinant DNA technology, it was suddenly possible to mass produce this hormone for use in dairies, and a phenomenon was born. In American dairy cattle, the growth hormone bovine somatotropin is an injectable known as Posilac. Up until 2008, Posilac was produced by the pharmaceutical company Monsanto; now it is produced by Elanco, the animal health division of Eli Lilly and Company. It is not an antibiotic or any other type of medication.

Numerous studies have studied the effects of Posilac on pretty much everything related to dairy animals, and they've all come to similar conclusions that many consumers still do not believe. Basically, when approved amounts of bST are injected into dairy animals, it increases their milk production. From a dairy standpoint, this means that it takes fewer head of cattle to make the same amount of milk a facility produced before the use of Posilac. Below is a direct quote from the studies FDA did in order to decide whether or not to allow the production and use of Posilac by Monsanto:

FDA believes that the available data confirm that biologically significant amounts of rbGH are not absorbed in humans following the consumption of milk from cows treated with rbGH. Oral toxicity studies of longer duration are not necessary because rbGH at dietary levels found in the milk of rbGH-treated cows is not significantly
biologically available.

What does that mean? The studies (and others done by the USDA, WHO, AVMA, etc) show that you can't "contract" growth hormone from drinking milk from cows that have been injected with Posilac. The hormone is not active in the oral state, only in the injected state where it gets into the bloodstream. Plus, even if you do for some bizarre reason absorb some bST into your bloodstream, it does not make a difference, as the FDA showed the levels of bST in milk are not enough to adversely affect consumers.

Now, here's something the FDA also talked about in the same document. Posilac was shown to somewhat increase levels of mastitis (bacterial infection of the udder). Mastitis is usually treated with injectable antibiotics, which are not allowed in the human food chain. These treated cows cannot have the milk produced by their infected quarters sold for a certain period of time following treatment,so that could mean decreased profit in some cases depending on the size of the herd.

Those are the scientific facts that lots of groups tend to ignore about the use of bST. Personally, I don't care if you drink non-bST milk or not, because half the time you're not going to know unless the bottle is labeled. I just hope you're making that choice for the right reason, and not because you are misinformed about the use of Posilac. A lot of the misconceptions come from animal rights groups and lobbyist groups, who take the FDA study's discussion about mastitis/antibiotics and exploit it to show how horrible bST is.

*Just a side note, until today I thought the Center for Food Safety was an actual government organization, since I hear it quoted in a lot of news stories. Sadly...it's more of a lobbyist organization, and does not appear to be affiliated with the US government in any way. Looking at the Web site, it seems to ignore and purposely misconstrue research, and instead play on consumers' fears and marketing schemes of hormone-free milk*

My suggestion to you is to do some research of your own on this issue...which actually shouldn't be an issue. The CFS is making a mountain out of a molehill, in my opinion. Do a little experiment. Try some hormone-free milk (one that is clearly labeled as such) and some that is not labeled that way...and see if you can taste a difference.