Bovine Growth Hormone and Milk

Sure it Helps Cows Produce More Milk...but Does it Help YOU?

It makes perfect sense that if there are more men, women and children drinking milk than there are COWS to produce all the milk we drink, we either have to get more cows or figure out how to coax the cows that we DO have into producing more milk.

A lot of dairy farmers decided on option number 2: coax more milk out of the cow. And that's when -- about 20 years ago -- experimental recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH) made its debut in the dairy products made by the Monsanto Company (www.monsanto.com).

At the time, rBGH was being heralded as the "next big thing" and hey -- it was an impressive claim: if I can get 'ol Bessie to produce twice as much milk on the same amount of grass then I'm automatically working a profit. But two decades later recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone is suddenly making a whole lot of people take notice -- and it's NOT because Farmer Jone's cow is producing more milk.

According to the medical site www.mercola.com, a recent breakthrough came with the May 2006 discovery that expectant U.S. mothers who consumed rBGH milk experienced problems as a result of elevated levels of Insulin-Like Growth Factor One, which has been linked to cancer. As a result, a large number of dairies - most notably California Dairy Inc. (CDI) announced that it would be going "rBGH-free" as of August 1, 2007 as a result of "consumer demand." CDI processes 45 percent of California's milk. OrganicConsumers.org points out that a number of large grocery store and restaurant chains - including Dean Foods, Darigold, H.P. Hood, Oakhurst Dairy of New England, United Dairymen of Arizona, and Shamrock Farms of Arizona, have also rejected rBGH.

In fact, just this past February 20, 2007 a petition was submitted to the FDA on behalf of the Cancer Prevention Coalition, Family Farm Defenders, and the Organic Consumers Association, requesting a suspension of rBGH approval pending a reevaluation of its human health hazards.