Post by bingbong on Jul 6, 2007 0:09:28 GMT 12
Don't Cry Over rBST Milk 
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By HENRY I. MILLER
Published: June 29, 2007
Stanford, Calif.
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Jonny Hannah
MILK occupies a special place in our lives and language. It has been dubbed "nature's most perfect food," and we speak sentimentally of the "land of milk and honey" and the "milk of human kindness."
But things are turning sour for consumers of milk. The average price of a gallon of milk nationwide is up 37 cents since January, to $3.47. Strong demand and limited ability to increase production quickly are expected to increase prices more, and experts have speculated that the price per gallon could reach a record $5 by year's end. High feed costs associated with the ramping up of American corn-based ethanol production are making it difficult to produce more milk.
Worldwide, prices are also at historically high levels. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization's price index of traded dairy products has risen 46 percent since last November.
One way to ease the shortage and lower the prices is to take greater advantage of a proven 13-year-old biological technology that stimulates milk production in dairy cows — a protein called recombinant bovine somatotropin (rBST), or bovine growth hormone. The protein, produced naturally by a cow's pituitary, is one of the substances that control its milk production. It can be made in large quantities with gene-splicing (recombinant DNA) techniques. The gene-spliced and natural versions are identical.
Bad-faith efforts by biotechnology opponents to portray rBST as untested or harmful, and to discourage its use, keep society from taking full advantage of a safe and useful product. The opponents' limited success is keeping the price of milk unnecessarily high.
When rBST is injected into cows, their digestive systems become more efficient at converting feed to milk. It induces the average cow, which produces about eight gallons of milk each day, to make nearly a gallon more. More feed, water, barn space and grazing land are devoted to milk production, rather than other aspects of bovine metabolism, so that you get seven cows' worth of milk from six.
This may not seem like a big deal, but when applied widely the effects are profound. For every million cows treated with rBST each year, 6.6 billion gallons of water (enough to supply 26,000 homes) are conserved, according to Monsanto, which makes rBST. With much of the nation enduring a drought and many cities in the West experiencing water shortages, this is a significant benefit.
The amount of animal feed consumed each year by those million rBST-supplemented cows is reduced by more than three billion pounds. This helps to keep the lid on corn prices, even as much of the nation's corn harvest is diverted to producing ethanol for cars. And the amount of land required to raise the cattle and grow their food is reduced by more than 417 square miles.
At the same time, more than 5.5 million gallons of gasoline and diesel fuel (enough to power 8,800 homes) are saved, greenhouse gas emissions are lowered by 30,000 metric tons (because fewer cows means less methane produced by bovine intestinal tracts), and manure production is decreased by about 3.6 million tons, reducing the chances of runoff getting into waterways and groundwater.
Comprehensive studies by academics and government regulatory agencies around the world have found no differences in the composition of milk or meat from rBST-supplemented cows.
And consumers are apparently happy to drink milk from supplemented cows, in spite of efforts by biotechnology opponents to bamboozle milk processors and retailers into believing that consumers don't want it. In various surveys to ascertain the factors that influence consumers' milk purchasing decisions, the predominant considerations have been: price (80 percent to 99 percent), freshness (60 percent to 97 percent), brand loyalty (30 percent to 60 percent) and a claim of "organic" (1 percent to 4 percent). Only the "organic" claim is even remotely related to rBST supplementation. Unless prompted, the consumers surveyed didn't mention rBST as a concern.
Some milk suppliers and food stores have increased the price of milk labeled "rBST-free," even though it is indistinguishable from supplemented milk, and offer only this more expensive option, pre-empting consumers' ability to choose on the basis of price.
Activists' purely speculative concerns about rBST — ranging from the destruction of small family farms to the risk of cancer — have proven baseless. Before approval by the Food and Drug Administration, rBST underwent the longest and most comprehensive regulatory review of any veterinary product in history. Three years before the F.D.A. approved the marketing of milk from supplemented cows, its scientists, in an article published in the journal Science, summarized more than 120 studies showing that rBST poses no risk to human health.
Their conclusion was affirmed over the next several years by additional scientific reviews conducted by the National Institutes of Health, the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the drug-regulatory agencies of Britain, Canada and the European Union, and by an issues audit done by the Department of Health and Human Services inspector general. These reviews noted that traces of BST are found in milk from all cows, supplemented or not. They also pointed out that, like other proteins, rBST is digested in the human gut. Moreover, even if it is injected into the human bloodstream, it has no biological activity.
Largely as a result of bullying by several members of Congress, the F.D.A.'s review of rBST took nine years, while the evaluation of an almost identical product for injection into growth hormone-deficient children had taken a mere 18 months.
Cynical activists have unfairly stigmatized a scientifically proven product that has consistently delivered economic and environmental benefits to dairy farmers and consumers. In a more rational world, they would embrace — and enlightened consumers would demand — milk with a label that boasted, "A Proud Product of rBST-Supplemented Cows."
Henry I. Miller, a doctor and fellow at the Hoover Institution, headed the Food and Drug Administration's Office of Biotechnology from 1989 to 1993. He is the co-author, most recently, of "The Frankenfood Myth."
Bioengineered Milk? No Thanks (7 Letters)
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Published: July 5, 2007
To the Editor:
Skip to next paragraph
Related
Op-Ed Contributor: Don't Cry Over rBST Milk (June 29, 2007)
Re "Don't Cry Over rBST Milk," by Henry I. Miller (Op-Ed, June 29):
Monsanto's genetically engineered hormone has not held up to scrutiny. When recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH; also known as rBST) is used, it elevates levels of insulin-like growth factor 1 in milk, which has been linked to increased risk of breast, prostate and other cancers. No wonder rBGH has been banned in Europe, Canada, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.
Seventy-four percent of Americans are concerned about negative long-term health effects from rBGH, while Starbucks, Publix and Safeway supermarkets and others have refused to use rBGH in many locations.
I dispute Dr. Miller's assertion that rBGH-injected cows can help reduce milk prices. The only national study on the subject contradicts his claims. Farms using rBGH are likely to use more grain, water, fuel, emit more greenhouse gases and spend more on feed and other inputs, offsetting any economic gains.
Dr. Miller's argument distracts from the real concerns over rBGH. Consumers are right to be wary; rBGH threatens to undermine the safety of nature's most perfect food.
Andrew Kimbrell
Executive Director
Center for Food Safety
Washington, June 29, 2007
•
To the Editor:
Henry I. Miller argues that we should "embrace" the use of bovine growth hormone (rBST) in order to feed people more cheaply, save the environment and so on. He characterizes opponents of rBST as "cynical," but I read Dr. Miller's arguments as cynical.
I have no idea if rBST is safe. But I do know that the dairy industry and its lobbyists do not want to require labeling milk produced with rBST. In fact, they are so intent on reducing information available to consumers that they are lobbying to prevent dairies from labeling their milk as "rBST-free"!
There's good reason for cynicism. George Entenman
Chapel Hill, N.C., June 29, 2007
•
To the Editor:
Henry I. Miller's Op-Ed article provides a welcome breath of fresh air.
Anticorporate activists have campaigned against this and other ag biotech products for years in denial of the demonstrated environmental, economic and health benefits. It is most welcome to see the facts finally given some exposure.
The data speak to a clear reality: If we are to meet the challenges of feeding and clothing a growing population in the 21st century without totally despoiling the planet, we will need all the tools we can find.
Biotech is already making huge contributions toward meeting these challenges, and more to follow. There is in reality no greener approach than biotechnology.
L. Val Giddings
Silver Spring, Md., June 29, 2007
The writer, a consultant, was vice president for agriculture of the Biotechnology Industry Organization, a trade group, from 1997 to 2005.
•
To the Editor:
I read in horror Henry I. Miller's latest recommendation for biotechnology in food. Is this really the conversation we want to be having about nutrition — how to pump cows full of even more chemicals to keep up with our ravenous, fat-laden diets?
Dairy is the No. 1 source of saturated fat in the American diet. It is also full of cholesterol and hormones (natural and otherwise). Trying to make unhealthy foods cheaper by genetically modifying them is absolutely the wrong direction to be moving.
How about spending all that time, energy and money on something productive, like figuring out how to get fatty foods out of the American diet and replaced with whole real fruits, vegetables, beans and grains.
It would make my life as a dietitian a lot easier. Susan Levin
Washington, June 29, 2007
•
To the Editor:
Urging more hormone injection of cows to increase milk production is backward. It suggests there's a milk shortage. The United States has long vastly overproduced milk. In recent years, the government accumulated a $1 billion stockpile of powdered milk from excess production.
Consumers want less use of drugs and chemicals in milk production, not more, as shown by skyrocketing organic milk purchases. Such hormones may increase the risk of breast, colon and gastrointestinal cancers, according to a University of Illinois study.
In cows, the hormones have been shown to increase lameness, udder infections and bone cancer. Europe and Canada outlawed using hormones on dairy cows because of such human and animal health concerns.
Increasing rBST milk would just move food production in the wrong direction. Bill Niman
Nicolette Hahn Niman
Bolinas, Calif., June 29, 2007
The writers are cattle ranchers.
•
To the Editor:
Dr. Henry I. Miller's article about the benefits of rBST is correct and thoughtful. Sustainable agricultural in the future, of necessity, will be largely sustainable intensive agriculture — an agriculture that produces more (and often better) food, fiber and fuel on a smaller environmental footprint.
Dr. Miller has clearly stated the evidence that shows rBST to be part of sustainable agriculture: more milk that is identical to all other milk, produced by fewer cows with reduced environmental impacts.
As a society, we can make sensible choices to promote sustainable agriculture. Choosing rBST is one such sensible choice. Drew L. Kershen
Norman, Okla., June 29, 2007
The writer, a law professor, collaborated with Dr. Miller on a published article in Nature Biotechnology and on a book chapter several years before the published article in Nature Biotechnology.
•
To the Editor:
What parent or teacher has not noticed that girls are maturing far earlier than they used to? Years are being stolen from their childhoods. These added years will extend the time their bodies deal with adult hormones.
There is as yet no medical research showing the cost of several extra years of hormones flooding the system. Since this is a new phenomenon in our lives, we can't know the ultimate costs to our children.
But for Henry I. Miller to write blithely of the benefits of rBST to farmers, and to Monsanto, without considering the effects on our children is shortsighted at best. If the Food and Drug Administration chooses to value benefits to business above the health of our children, we should at least be informed of its decision.
Label the milk that is rBST produced. Place obvious labels, and then let parents choose the milk they deem best for their children.
Sally E. Carp
Staten Island, June 29, 2007
*
Article Tools Sponsored By
By HENRY I. MILLER
Published: June 29, 2007
Stanford, Calif.
Skip to next paragraph
Enlarge This Image
Jonny Hannah
MILK occupies a special place in our lives and language. It has been dubbed "nature's most perfect food," and we speak sentimentally of the "land of milk and honey" and the "milk of human kindness."
But things are turning sour for consumers of milk. The average price of a gallon of milk nationwide is up 37 cents since January, to $3.47. Strong demand and limited ability to increase production quickly are expected to increase prices more, and experts have speculated that the price per gallon could reach a record $5 by year's end. High feed costs associated with the ramping up of American corn-based ethanol production are making it difficult to produce more milk.
Worldwide, prices are also at historically high levels. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization's price index of traded dairy products has risen 46 percent since last November.
One way to ease the shortage and lower the prices is to take greater advantage of a proven 13-year-old biological technology that stimulates milk production in dairy cows — a protein called recombinant bovine somatotropin (rBST), or bovine growth hormone. The protein, produced naturally by a cow's pituitary, is one of the substances that control its milk production. It can be made in large quantities with gene-splicing (recombinant DNA) techniques. The gene-spliced and natural versions are identical.
Bad-faith efforts by biotechnology opponents to portray rBST as untested or harmful, and to discourage its use, keep society from taking full advantage of a safe and useful product. The opponents' limited success is keeping the price of milk unnecessarily high.
When rBST is injected into cows, their digestive systems become more efficient at converting feed to milk. It induces the average cow, which produces about eight gallons of milk each day, to make nearly a gallon more. More feed, water, barn space and grazing land are devoted to milk production, rather than other aspects of bovine metabolism, so that you get seven cows' worth of milk from six.
This may not seem like a big deal, but when applied widely the effects are profound. For every million cows treated with rBST each year, 6.6 billion gallons of water (enough to supply 26,000 homes) are conserved, according to Monsanto, which makes rBST. With much of the nation enduring a drought and many cities in the West experiencing water shortages, this is a significant benefit.
The amount of animal feed consumed each year by those million rBST-supplemented cows is reduced by more than three billion pounds. This helps to keep the lid on corn prices, even as much of the nation's corn harvest is diverted to producing ethanol for cars. And the amount of land required to raise the cattle and grow their food is reduced by more than 417 square miles.
At the same time, more than 5.5 million gallons of gasoline and diesel fuel (enough to power 8,800 homes) are saved, greenhouse gas emissions are lowered by 30,000 metric tons (because fewer cows means less methane produced by bovine intestinal tracts), and manure production is decreased by about 3.6 million tons, reducing the chances of runoff getting into waterways and groundwater.
Comprehensive studies by academics and government regulatory agencies around the world have found no differences in the composition of milk or meat from rBST-supplemented cows.
And consumers are apparently happy to drink milk from supplemented cows, in spite of efforts by biotechnology opponents to bamboozle milk processors and retailers into believing that consumers don't want it. In various surveys to ascertain the factors that influence consumers' milk purchasing decisions, the predominant considerations have been: price (80 percent to 99 percent), freshness (60 percent to 97 percent), brand loyalty (30 percent to 60 percent) and a claim of "organic" (1 percent to 4 percent). Only the "organic" claim is even remotely related to rBST supplementation. Unless prompted, the consumers surveyed didn't mention rBST as a concern.
Some milk suppliers and food stores have increased the price of milk labeled "rBST-free," even though it is indistinguishable from supplemented milk, and offer only this more expensive option, pre-empting consumers' ability to choose on the basis of price.
Activists' purely speculative concerns about rBST — ranging from the destruction of small family farms to the risk of cancer — have proven baseless. Before approval by the Food and Drug Administration, rBST underwent the longest and most comprehensive regulatory review of any veterinary product in history. Three years before the F.D.A. approved the marketing of milk from supplemented cows, its scientists, in an article published in the journal Science, summarized more than 120 studies showing that rBST poses no risk to human health.
Their conclusion was affirmed over the next several years by additional scientific reviews conducted by the National Institutes of Health, the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the drug-regulatory agencies of Britain, Canada and the European Union, and by an issues audit done by the Department of Health and Human Services inspector general. These reviews noted that traces of BST are found in milk from all cows, supplemented or not. They also pointed out that, like other proteins, rBST is digested in the human gut. Moreover, even if it is injected into the human bloodstream, it has no biological activity.
Largely as a result of bullying by several members of Congress, the F.D.A.'s review of rBST took nine years, while the evaluation of an almost identical product for injection into growth hormone-deficient children had taken a mere 18 months.
Cynical activists have unfairly stigmatized a scientifically proven product that has consistently delivered economic and environmental benefits to dairy farmers and consumers. In a more rational world, they would embrace — and enlightened consumers would demand — milk with a label that boasted, "A Proud Product of rBST-Supplemented Cows."
Henry I. Miller, a doctor and fellow at the Hoover Institution, headed the Food and Drug Administration's Office of Biotechnology from 1989 to 1993. He is the co-author, most recently, of "The Frankenfood Myth."
Bioengineered Milk? No Thanks (7 Letters)
*
Article Tools Sponsored By
Published: July 5, 2007
To the Editor:
Skip to next paragraph
Related
Op-Ed Contributor: Don't Cry Over rBST Milk (June 29, 2007)
Re "Don't Cry Over rBST Milk," by Henry I. Miller (Op-Ed, June 29):
Monsanto's genetically engineered hormone has not held up to scrutiny. When recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH; also known as rBST) is used, it elevates levels of insulin-like growth factor 1 in milk, which has been linked to increased risk of breast, prostate and other cancers. No wonder rBGH has been banned in Europe, Canada, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.
Seventy-four percent of Americans are concerned about negative long-term health effects from rBGH, while Starbucks, Publix and Safeway supermarkets and others have refused to use rBGH in many locations.
I dispute Dr. Miller's assertion that rBGH-injected cows can help reduce milk prices. The only national study on the subject contradicts his claims. Farms using rBGH are likely to use more grain, water, fuel, emit more greenhouse gases and spend more on feed and other inputs, offsetting any economic gains.
Dr. Miller's argument distracts from the real concerns over rBGH. Consumers are right to be wary; rBGH threatens to undermine the safety of nature's most perfect food.
Andrew Kimbrell
Executive Director
Center for Food Safety
Washington, June 29, 2007
•
To the Editor:
Henry I. Miller argues that we should "embrace" the use of bovine growth hormone (rBST) in order to feed people more cheaply, save the environment and so on. He characterizes opponents of rBST as "cynical," but I read Dr. Miller's arguments as cynical.
I have no idea if rBST is safe. But I do know that the dairy industry and its lobbyists do not want to require labeling milk produced with rBST. In fact, they are so intent on reducing information available to consumers that they are lobbying to prevent dairies from labeling their milk as "rBST-free"!
There's good reason for cynicism. George Entenman
Chapel Hill, N.C., June 29, 2007
•
To the Editor:
Henry I. Miller's Op-Ed article provides a welcome breath of fresh air.
Anticorporate activists have campaigned against this and other ag biotech products for years in denial of the demonstrated environmental, economic and health benefits. It is most welcome to see the facts finally given some exposure.
The data speak to a clear reality: If we are to meet the challenges of feeding and clothing a growing population in the 21st century without totally despoiling the planet, we will need all the tools we can find.
Biotech is already making huge contributions toward meeting these challenges, and more to follow. There is in reality no greener approach than biotechnology.
L. Val Giddings
Silver Spring, Md., June 29, 2007
The writer, a consultant, was vice president for agriculture of the Biotechnology Industry Organization, a trade group, from 1997 to 2005.
•
To the Editor:
I read in horror Henry I. Miller's latest recommendation for biotechnology in food. Is this really the conversation we want to be having about nutrition — how to pump cows full of even more chemicals to keep up with our ravenous, fat-laden diets?
Dairy is the No. 1 source of saturated fat in the American diet. It is also full of cholesterol and hormones (natural and otherwise). Trying to make unhealthy foods cheaper by genetically modifying them is absolutely the wrong direction to be moving.
How about spending all that time, energy and money on something productive, like figuring out how to get fatty foods out of the American diet and replaced with whole real fruits, vegetables, beans and grains.
It would make my life as a dietitian a lot easier. Susan Levin
Washington, June 29, 2007
•
To the Editor:
Urging more hormone injection of cows to increase milk production is backward. It suggests there's a milk shortage. The United States has long vastly overproduced milk. In recent years, the government accumulated a $1 billion stockpile of powdered milk from excess production.
Consumers want less use of drugs and chemicals in milk production, not more, as shown by skyrocketing organic milk purchases. Such hormones may increase the risk of breast, colon and gastrointestinal cancers, according to a University of Illinois study.
In cows, the hormones have been shown to increase lameness, udder infections and bone cancer. Europe and Canada outlawed using hormones on dairy cows because of such human and animal health concerns.
Increasing rBST milk would just move food production in the wrong direction. Bill Niman
Nicolette Hahn Niman
Bolinas, Calif., June 29, 2007
The writers are cattle ranchers.
•
To the Editor:
Dr. Henry I. Miller's article about the benefits of rBST is correct and thoughtful. Sustainable agricultural in the future, of necessity, will be largely sustainable intensive agriculture — an agriculture that produces more (and often better) food, fiber and fuel on a smaller environmental footprint.
Dr. Miller has clearly stated the evidence that shows rBST to be part of sustainable agriculture: more milk that is identical to all other milk, produced by fewer cows with reduced environmental impacts.
As a society, we can make sensible choices to promote sustainable agriculture. Choosing rBST is one such sensible choice. Drew L. Kershen
Norman, Okla., June 29, 2007
The writer, a law professor, collaborated with Dr. Miller on a published article in Nature Biotechnology and on a book chapter several years before the published article in Nature Biotechnology.
•
To the Editor:
What parent or teacher has not noticed that girls are maturing far earlier than they used to? Years are being stolen from their childhoods. These added years will extend the time their bodies deal with adult hormones.
There is as yet no medical research showing the cost of several extra years of hormones flooding the system. Since this is a new phenomenon in our lives, we can't know the ultimate costs to our children.
But for Henry I. Miller to write blithely of the benefits of rBST to farmers, and to Monsanto, without considering the effects on our children is shortsighted at best. If the Food and Drug Administration chooses to value benefits to business above the health of our children, we should at least be informed of its decision.
Label the milk that is rBST produced. Place obvious labels, and then let parents choose the milk they deem best for their children.
Sally E. Carp
Staten Island, June 29, 2007