On Feb 26, 2015, at 10:34 PM, Jon Clements wrote:
> ...
> 6.) What ever happened to BST/BGH push-back and labeling? Ginda, I will let
> you look that one up.
> ...
> Jon
I don't need to look that one up, because I've followed it. The differences
between the milk and meat of BST/BGH-treated cows is too small to be
conclusively measured (higher levels of this and that, but within the normal
range) HOWEVER, the incidence of mastitis and other maladies is significantly
higher in cows treated with BST than in untreated cows. So, just as the
"roundup ready" gene doesn't affect how your body interacts with food, but the
greater residue of roundup might be a concern, the hormonal changes in the milk
are probably unimportant, but you are probably exposed to more antibiotic
residue (and anti-biotic-resistant bacterial contamination) from the milk (and
meat) of treated cows.
It's been outlawed in Canada, the EU, and several other first-world countries,
mostly on animal welfare grounds. It remains legal in the US, but most of the
milk in my supermarket says "our farmers pledged not to use BST". Checking
with wikipedia, this isn't just a yuppie phenomenon, a large number of major
brands of milk, including Costco's "Kirkland" brand, Walmart's "Great Value"
brand, and many more.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_somatotropin
The wikipedia article doesn't have any recent data on how commonly it is used,
but says:
"From 2000-2005 the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) survey
of dairy producers found that about 17% of producers used rBST.[23] The 2010
USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service survey of Wisconsin farms found
that about 18% of dairy farms used rBST.[24]"
So it's still out there, but most of our milk supply is from untreated cows.
...
John, your first link in both intriguing and scary.
1.) I would be a lot more worried about this
http://www.the-open-mind.com/mit-estimates-half-of-all-children-autistic-in-10-years-due-to-monsanto-1/#fsWKjef2oeh3k4OW.01
...
Do you know anything about how reliable the author is? She uses a lot of graphs
of correlations, that I find very unconvincing. There are all manner of things
that correlate, and most of them aren't causal. Some are both causally related
to a third factor, and some are completely random. If you want to see some fun,
random correlations, check out this link.
http://www.tylervigen.com/
Ginda Fisher
_______________________________________________
apple-crop mailing list
apple-crop@virtualorchard.net
http://virtualorchard.net/mailman/listinfo/apple-crop
