Milk is Milk Blog by Alex Avery

An open letter to the New York Times: To the Editor: I came across your recent article, “Living Green, but Allowing for Shades of Gray” which published some thoughts on organic foods by the environmentalist Wendy Gordon. As a frequent reader of your newspaper, who pays careful attention to the flattering articles you print about organic milk, I expected this article to, as usual, exalt organic milk and disparage conventional milk. I read instead, “Conventional milk is as wholesome as organic milk…,” but my joy was short-lived when I read the rest of the sentence: “…as long as it is free of hormones.”

No such milk exists! To the newspaper that supposedly publishes “all the news that’s fit to print,” here’s some news: All milk contains hormones. It always has. Any dairy that says its milk is “free of hormones” (and Ms. Gordon) is simply not telling the truth. Yes, even organic milk contains various hormones, and not just the kinds produced by the cows. In fact, Vitamin D, which has been added to American milk since the 1930’s, is a hormone which was accidentally named a vitamin.

So why do claims like Ms. Gordon’s (claims which your newspaper frequently publishes) go unchallenged? Shouldn’t the dairy industry speak up and correct the record here? It should. But like too much of our modern society, it is preoccupied with its public image. It most likely fears that people will stop drinking (read: “buying”) milk when they realize that all milk contains hormones, (which aren’t as popular as they are safe), when the industry itself could have prevented “hormone” from becoming a dirty word in the first place.

I am glad that, at least in this article, the NY Times has printed that “conventional milk is as wholesome as organic milk.” A recently published 12-year-long academic study confirms that organic and conventional milk are exactly the same. I encourage your paper to take this one step farther, and report on the misleading labeling associated with hormone-related dairy claims. After all, as Ms. Gordon wisely said in your article, “Don’t rely only on labels. They are often confusing and often meaningless.”

- Alex Avery
Director of Research and Education
Center for Global Food Issues

* A note to my readers:

Sadly, this letter is unlikely to get published in the NY Times. There are simply too many interests working against me here: the organic industry mega-corporations, the activists they fund, the NY Times’ track record and, as I mentioned in my letter, even the dairy industry itself (incidentally, if you care to contact the International Dairy Foods Association, please send an email to Brian Fields, who is the IDFA’s contact for regulatory and safety issues).

Organic activists may object and claim that hormones like glucocorticoids, cortisol, corticosterone, progesterone, estrone and estradiol which are present in ALL milk are “naturally-occurring,” so they are somehow better for you than bovine somatotropin (bST), which is an “added hormone.” For the record, bST is not added to milk (like “Vitamin D” is) and milk from cows that receive bST supplements “contain no more BST than other milks.” Oh yeah, and bST - a protein hormone - has been proven completely safe for human health.

Other hormones that the organic industry doesn’t want to talk about include the use of the steroid hormones oxytocin and prostaglandin for reproductive health which are not prohibited by organic standards and are used by organic dairy farmers. Along with the hormone Vitamin D3, this reproductive hormone use juxtaposed to “hormone-free” claims by the multi-billion dollar organic dairy industry is bad for consumers and damaging to honest conventional dairy producers.

High-priced organic milk sales have skyrocketed (nearly 600 percent growth since 1992) based on false and misleading marketing which scares consumers away from the exact same, safe and affordable conventional milk. Not surprisingly during this same growth period for organic milk, overall fluid milk consumption has dropped by 14 percent.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see the connection. For every consumer scared away from safe conventional milk by deceptive organic labels and corresponding black marketing who is willing to pay double the cost or more for their gallon of organic milk, there is an equal number of consumers who cannot afford to pay for this more expensive milk who then turn away from the product completely to other less nutritious products for the children and families such as soda or juice.

While that may be good for the robber-barons at Horizon and Organic Valley reaping in the profits, it’s bad for all the honest, hard-working family dairy farms going out of business and worse for the poor and middle-class children whose parents are scared into serving them less nutritious foods. Stealing customers through deceit is unethical. Contributing to poor health and nutrition for children through fear mongering and fraud should be criminal.

When will the New York Times abandon their complicity with the organic fear profiteers and wise up to the fact that milk is milk?

Milk is Milk Blog by Alex Avery

This past year, we’ve seen a huge increase in people wanting to drink “raw” (unpasteurized) milk because of unspecified and undocumented health and nutrition benefits. As such, we’ve received a number of emails and letters asking us why it is that we’re so dead set against raw milk.

The answer to that question reared its ugly head just before Christmas when several children in Washington State were hospitalized in critical condition due to bacterial infections acquired from raw milk.

The article below provides the grisly details. What is left out of this and other articles is that these illness outbreaks are all too common with raw milk. This significantly higher risk for contracting illnesses from raw milk is exactly why so many health authorities mandated the pasteurization of milk starting in the early 20th century. It was around this time that the American Medical Association helped establish milk pasteurization centers in the U.S. Prior to this time the death rate of children under five years old who consumed raw milk was up to 135 per 1,000. The city of Chicago was the first to mandate milk pasteurization in 1908 to stop the spread of tuberculosis.

The problem today is that we’ve become so successful at combating and minimizing the incidence of these sometimes life-threatening illnesses that we’ve come to believe pasteurization is unnecessary. We forget that milk used to be a primary way of contracting tuberculosis, ruminant fever, salmonella, and many other nasty and potentially life-threatening diseases. We are lulled by the fact that most of us are vaccinated against many diseases that used to be transmitted in milk. In fact, some of these diseases have become so rare that we incorrectly think we can choose NOT to vaccinate our children without risk. And to some extent that’s correct. If 95% of the population is vaccinated, the unvaccinated 5% are protected by the mass of vaccinated people around them. But like so much else, when we start yanking bricks from the foundation, eventually huge holes will appear.

And so it is with raw milk. Despite the fact that raw milk represents a mere fraction of a fraction of our total milk supply, it is causing the majority of illness outbreaks from milk. In the past few years, hundreds have been sickened from raw milk. What would happen if all milk were unpasteurized, as is advocated by fanatical raw milk promotion groups like the Weston A. Price Foundation (founded by a physician who in the 1930s became convinced that modern foods were the cause of bad health after seeing lots of “healthy” people in primitive parts of the world)? There would be a massive increase in deaths and disease spread in milk, plain and simple.

While there are surely passionate and likely well-meaning people behind the raw-milk promotion campaigns, they are playing Russian roulette with your health. This is especially true for children, the elderly and pregnant women. Fortunately, it’s still a fringe product. Scarily, it is being promoted most heavily for the health of children. And when children are involved, promoting raw milk is criminal.

Why it is that anyone is allowed to sell raw milk in any state to anyone when the risks have been repeatedly shown to exist and real victims continue to pile up eludes us. Currently 23 states allow some legal sale of raw cow milk.