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Not Milk: The USDA, Monsanto, and the U.S.
Dairy Industry By
Ché Green, LiP Magazine.
Posted
July 9, 2002.
The dairy industry has spent billions of dollars convincing us that
milk is healthy, all the while pumping chemicals into cows and the
milk itself that makes it deadly. Milk, they say, is an important
source of calcium that helps kids grow up big and strong. Milk is
said to contain vital nutrients and to help prevent osteoporosis.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture, through its food dietary
guidelines, says that everyone should get 2-3 servings of dairy
every day. Milk is advocated by various agencies of the U.S.
government, legions of physicians, and the $180 million annual
advertising budget of the dairy industry itself. Britney Spears,
Carson Daly, Neve Campbell, Spike Lee, and other fine celebrities
have endorsed milk, decorating thousands of billboards with their
mustachioed mugs. And, indeed, America has a love affair with
milk. The average person living in the United States consumes over
600 pounds of dairy products every year, including about 420 pounds
of fluid milk and cream, 70 pounds of various milk-based fats and
oils, 30 pounds of cheese, and 17 pounds of ice cream. In
aggregate, U.S. dairy farmers produce 163 billion pounds of milk
and milk products a year. But what if Britney and Spike were
lying to us? What if milk doesn't do a body good? Instead, what if
milk is a major contributor to breast cancer, heart disease,
asthma, diabetes, and more? What if the U.S. government and the
dairy industry are colluding to hide the ill effects of dairy
consumption? According to Amy Lanou, Ph.D., the nutrition
director of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM),
"Besides prostate cancer, milk has been linked to asthma, anemia,
allergies, juvenile-onset diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and
ovarian and breast cancer." Why then, is milk still widely
regarded as wholesome? The USDA's Food Pyramid Scheme The U.S.
Department of Agriculture, according to its mission statement, is
charged with "enhancing the quality of life for the American people
by supporting the production of agriculture." Created by the
pro-business Lincoln administration in 1862, today's USDA has the
dual responsibility of assisting dairy farmers while promoting
healthy dietary choices for Americans. Not surprisingly, this
creates a conflict of interest that puts at risk the objectivity of
government farm policy and the health of all dairy-consuming
Americans. In December 1999, the PCRM filed suit against the USDA,
claiming the department unfairly promotes the special interests of
the meat and dairy industries through its official dietary
guidelines and the Food Pyramid. Six of the eleven members assigned
to the U.S. Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee were demonstrated
to have financial ties to meat, dairy, and egg interests. Prior to
the suit, which the PCRM won in December 2000, the USDA had refused
to disclose such conflicts of interest to the general public. The
USDA's advisory committees have been dominated by the agriculture
industry since the early 1950s, when the department devised the
Four Food Groups, including milk, meat, fruits and vegetables, and
breads and cereals. Over the years, these dietary guidelines have
consistently reflected the industry's push for greater consumption
of both meat and dairy, despite the testimony of numerous
physicians' groups and watchdog organizations criticizing the Food
Pyramid as biased and unhealthful. The USDA's counter-argument?
The food dietary guidelines must be reality-based, says the USDA,
arguing that what people should really be eating is moot because it
doesn't fit with the American lifestyle. Apparently, the USDA
thinks it's unrealistic to promote healthy dietary guidelines to
the increasingly obese American public, despite the fact that such
guidelines are understood by just about everyone to be goals, not
de facto rules. In other words, the USDA doesn't even think it's
reasonable to aspire to what constitutes a healthy diet.
Government Cheese With the recent passage of the Farm Bill on May
13, 2002, dairy farmers and processors will receive $2 billion more
in subsidies over the next three and a half years, largely realized
through price supports that inflate costs for consumers. Dairy
subsidies are a carryover from the Depression era, when survival of
small dairy farmers was considered essential to maintaining a
national food supply. Today, a large chunk of that additional $2
billion in subsidies is going to large dairy farms in twelve
northeastern states. Further, as consolidation continues to occur
in the dairy industry, federal subsidies are going to an
increasingly small number of highly concentrated dairy operations,
hanging small farmers out to dry and encouraging the demise of
family farms. This increase in large industrial farms bodes ill for
both cows and humans. Lactose Intolerance and Ethnic
Discrimination Another assertion of the suit brought by the PCRM
against the USDA is that the status of milk as a staple in school
lunch programs unfairly discriminates against non-whites who have a
high incidence of lactose intolerance. In total, there are an
estimated 50 million lactose intolerant adults in the U.S.,
including 15 percent of the white population, 70 percent of the
black population, and 80 to 97 percent of Asian Americans, Native
Americans, and Jews of European descent. These 50 million people
suffer from a variety of digestive symptoms that result from
consuming milk and other dairy products, including gas, bloating,
diarrhea, constipation, and indigestion. Currently, the USDA
requires that every public school in the country serve milk.
There's even a push by Senator Charles Schumer (D-New York) to
offer financial incentives to schools that install milk vending
machines (after California, New York is the second largest
dairy-producing state). Further, students cannot get free or
subsidized alternatives to milk, such as juice or soy milk, without
a note from their physician, so for 70 percent of black kids in
public schools, a negative response to lactose intake is
practically mandated by the U.S. Government. Same goes for 90
percent of Asian American students and 74 percent of Native
American students. The PCRM asserts that huge dairy subsidies and
broad-based promotion of milk by the government's school lunch
program is a form of economic racism that isolates minorities and
encourages them to consume something they're disproportionately
intolerant of or allergic to. rBGH and the Damage Done Girls in
the U.S. are beginning to menstruate at younger and younger ages.
According to the Cancer Prevention Coalition, some girls are now
experiencing the effects of puberty as young as three years of age.
Fifty years ago the incidence of breast cancer risk among U.S. women
was one in twenty, a percentage that has grown to one in eight women
as of 2001. Here's a big part of the reason why: Bovine Growth
Hormone (BGH) is a naturally occurring hormone produced by milk
cows. Closely resembling the natural growth hormones in human
children, the presence of BGH in milk has been shown to
significantly elevate hormone levels in people, creating a host of
growth problems. That's not even accounting for the use of
artificial hormones. Recombinant BGH (rBGH) is an unnaturally
occurring, genetically engineered hormone produced by Monsanto
Company, a giant in the agrichemical industry, which has also made
such other fine ecological and humanitarian contributions as Agent
Orange and PCBs. Through a series of research cover-ups and a
network of conflicting interests with government policymakers [see
sidebar], Monsanto in 1994 managed to get approval for Posilac, the
company's commercial form of rBGH, which increases cows' milk
production by an estimated 15-25 percent.
Asked
if countries with a high consumption of dairy products have higher
ovarian cancer rates, Fairfield says "they do, and the reverse is
true as well: Low consumption of dairy products correlates to low
rates of ovarian cancer."
Milk and Prostate Cancer. .
. no way! |
Two
or More Daily Glasses of Milk May
Raise Ovarian Cancer Risks
Hormones increase milk production
According to Monsanto, over a quarter of U.S. milk cows are now in
herds supplemented with Posilac. The vast majority of the
country's 1,500 dairy companies mix rBGH milk with non-rBGH milk
during processing to such an extent that an estimated 80-90
percent of the U.S. dairy supply is contaminated.What Monsanto
doesn't tell consumers is that supplementing the American diet
with additional growth hormones is causing secondary sex
characteristics to appear earlier in young children, particularly
girls. Monsanto also won't tell the public that rBGH-injected
cows produce milk with exceedingly high levels of Insulin Growth
Factor-1 (IGF-1), a cancer promoter that occurs naturally in the
human bloodstream at levels that generally do not result in
tumors. Monsanto and the FDA refuse to acknowledge recent
research directly linking elevated levels of IGF-1 to increased
risk of breast and prostate cancer. Going even further, Monsanto
and the FDA colluded in 1993 and '94 to block labeling
requirements for rBGH milk. Consequently, the average dairy
consumer has no idea if they're increasing their own risk of
getting cancer. Since
1994, every industrialized country in the world except the U.S.
-- including Canada, Japan, and all fifteen nations of the
European Union -- has banned rBGH milk. The United Nations Food
Standards Body refuses to certify that rBGH is safe. Even the WTO,
or more specifically its food standards body, the Codex
Alimentarius, has refused to endorse Monsanto's claim that rBGH
is safe for use in the dairy supply. In the face of facts and the
majority opinion of the global political and scientific
community, Monsanto and the United States continue to endorse
rBGH milk for general consumption, at the same time scratching
their heads about increases in breast cancer deaths and the
continually declining age of puberty for girls.
What about the Cash Cows?
Okay, so milk is bad for people.
Really bad, in fact. But what of the effect on cows producing
that milk? The life expectancy of the average cow in natural
conditions is about 25-30 years; on the typical factory farm,
where well over half of U.S. milk cows reside, they live only
four to five years. The
increased milk production spurred by dosing cows with Monsanto's
Posilac causes them to suffer from mastitis, a bacterial
infection of the udder, and widespread occurrences of cystic
ovaries and disorders of the uterus. In addition to harming the
cows, these conditions may produce discharges that are passed to
consumers along with the milk.
It turns out that keeping dairy cows
constantly pregnant -- the only way they will produce milk --
creates (surprise!) baby calves. The veal industry was created
because the dairy industry didn't know what to do with male
calves that otherwise had no economic value to dairy farmers
(female calves are the future milk producers). The process is
cruel from start to finish: the cows are artificially impregnated
by being bound to what the industry terms a "rape rack," then
injected with a series of bull semen, hormones, and antibiotics;
veal calves are then immobilized in small wooden crates so that
they can't move around, therefore ensuring the tenderness of
their flesh when slaughtered. Over a million veal calves were
slaughtered in the U.S. in 2001.
In the end, it boils down to a
familiar story: Big business and the U.S. government joining
forces to dupe the American consumer. The USDA tells us to drink
more milk while subsidizing large dairy farms and federally
mandating dairy consumption for schoolchildren. The government
spends billions to buy unused milk and dairy products, one of the
biggest forms of subsidies, while the industry spends almost $200
million every year promoting dairy consumption. Meanwhile, The
FDA and Monsanto conspire to pollute the already unhealthful
dairy supply with a genetically engineered hormone banned
virtually everywhere else in the world.
So while the American public might
fairly answer the dairy industry's ubiquitous question of whether
it "Got Milk?" with a resounding, mustachioed "Yes," the better
question might be whether people have gotten screwed in the
process. Ché Green is the
founder and director of The ARMEDIA Institute, a nonprofit
research and advocacy organization focusing on farm animal issues
in the United States.
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Monsanto -- the manufacturer of Agent Orange that also spent
about four decades covering up the effects of PCBs -- was about
to seek approval for Posilac, the company's commercialized form
of rBGH. The study linking rBGH to cancer was submitted to the
FDA, but somehow Posilac was still approved in 1994. With
fingers pointing in both directions, those with opinions argue
about who had a bigger part in the cover-up -- Monsanto or the
FDA. The results of the study, in fact, were not made
available to the public until 1998, when a group of Canadian
scientists obtained the full documentation and completed an
independent analysis of the results. Among other instances of
neglect, the documents showed that the FDA had never even
reviewed Monsanto's original studies (on which the approval for
Posilac had been based), so in the end the point was moot
whether or not the report had contained all of the original
data. The FDA's complicity continued; Michael Taylor, a
Monsanto lawyer for many years, left in 1976 to become a staff
lawyer for the FDA. In 1991 he was promoted to the office of
FDA's Deputy Commissioner, serving in that capacity until 1994.
The administration approved rBGH in 1993. While at the FDA,
Taylor also wrote the policy exempting rBGH and other biotech
foods from special labeling, considered by most to be a major
victory for Monsanto. Ten days after Taylor's policy was
finalized, his old law firm, still representing Monsanto, filed
suit against two dairy farms that had labeled their milk rBGH-free.
As soon as the GAO released a report covering all of this,
Taylor was removed to work for the USDA, as the Administrator
of the Food Safety and Inspection Service, a position he held
from 1994 to 1996. After holding positions at both the Food and
Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture,
Taylor then went back to working for Monsanto, this time
directly, as the corporation's Vice President of Public Policy.
Michael Taylor wasn't the only government employee with an
obvious conflict of interest. At the same time that Taylor left
Monsanto for the FDA, Dr. Margaret Miller, once Monsanto's top
scientist, was also hired by the FDA to review her own
scientific research conducted during her tenure at Monsanto. In
her role as FDA scientist, Miller made the official decision to
increase the amount of permissible antibiotic residues in milk
by a hundred-fold, in part to counter the increase of mastitis
in cows due to overuse of artificial growth hormones. These
incestuous relationships between industry and the U.S.
government are the norm rather than the exception. Decisions at
the FDA are made primarily by advisory boards comprised of
scientists and executives from the dairy and meat industries,
with a few university academics thrown in for good measure. |
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