My neighbors have been pushing me to try organic milk because it doesn’t have hormones, antibiotics etc.
But I thought they only fed hormones and antibiotics to beef cattle. And though antibiotics may pass through to the milk, surely hormones don’t? Or have we all been feeding our kids beef hormones and antibiotics all this time?
Ever get sick? Ever take antibiotics? Dairy cows get sick too, sometimes, and are given antibiotics to combat infection.
When the milk truck comes around (on a dairy farm a milk truck picks up milk; it doesn’t deliver 
) the driver takes a small sample of the milk from each bulk tank, which is tested upon delivery. If some ijit has dumped antibiotic milk into his farm’s bulk tank he gets charged for ALL the milk that has to be dumped due to antibiotic taint. Even up here, in northern redneck country. FDA regs are FDA regs, and that’s all there is to it.
Hormones I don’t know about. My family owns a small family farm and hormones are out of our realm.
When I’m more sober/sentinent I’ll post some more links, but this magazine is one that may interest you: http://www.hoards.com/
WAGs, one and all…
I am a mammal.
When I had mastitis, I took antibiotics which cleared it up. My WAG is that if an antibiotic clears up an infection in the milk ducts…the antibiotic will get into the milk too.
When I had to go on the pill (high estrogen dosage - my hormones never got going again after I had ToddlerNym) I had to stop breastfeeding at the same time. My doctor told me that the level of hormones was potentially unsafe for ToddlerNym.
Alcohol appears in breastmilk, if the mother drinks it.
Breastmilk changes color and taste, slightly, depending on what the mother eats.
Cows are mammals. (As much as I hate comparing myself to a cow, I’m WAGing that mammals are quite similar in this respect.)
My guess is that anything that gets into the blood stream would get into the milk supply also. It’s just a matter of what is bad for you. I assume most bad things are destroyed by pastuerization, but that’s a WAG too.
I’m worried enough about it that when my daughter drinks milk, she drinks organic, but mostly she drinks juice fortified with calcium.
wag, wag, wag.
Hormones do show up in cows milk, but in what amounts I don’t know. Bovine growth homone is the one they talk about all the time, but it can’t hurt you if you ingest it. It is a protein hormone and all proteins are sliced into amino acids before they are absorbed. Steroid hormones can be absorbed if ingested, but you will get a certain amount of this no matter what cow you get your milk from.
Chique pretty much covers it. While we can use antibiotics each one has ‘holdout’ periods in which the milk can’t be used for food as well as the meat can be slaughtered. This time differs depending on Federal regulations for each medication. As chique mentions each tankload is tested and we pay for the whole truckload if our tank has contaminated the load.
As for hormones they do show up in milk but since BST (bovine somotatropin), aka bovine growth hormone, is a synthetic form of a naturally occuring hormone you can’t test for it. In other words while you can test for the hormone, you can’t tell if it’s the stuff that is always in milk (naturally occuring) or BST (the hormone used for increasing production). That is why the industry says it is safe, you can’t tell the difference (and it seems you can’t see any difference in hormone levels) in milk coming from BST treated and non-BST injected cows.
That having been said we have taken the middle ground by sending to a botttler that does not allow us to use BST but is not strictly an organic bottler. I don’t see us going organic simply because I can’t iomagine not being able to do everything possible to keep our cows healthy. Organic farming limits medication to herbal remedies and also limits feed to that that is produced organicly, which in practice tends to have less nutrient quality than that grown with fertilizers. Mind you I’m not saying you can’t grow good organic forage, it’s just that it tends to be an expensive (labor intensive) product and not currently economical feasible for use in feeding animals exclusively.
Sounds a little funny (all milk after all is organic).
But some of the hormones that are injected into cows are synthetic and are not the exact same molecule as teh natural one. This is what I beleive organic milk is trying to avoid. Some people really think it’s better - to me the extra cost isn’t worth it.
RE: the hormones thing.
I can’t count how many milk products claim that “no hormones are added”…TO THE MILK. People are up in arms over this perceived threat, and the advertisers are ready to take advantage of this. Why the hell would a dairy add hormones TO THE MILK? Hormones, if used at all, would be given to the cows themselves to increase milk production. While you can argue all you want about the safety and ethics of this practice, its ridiculous how uninformed consumers are leading to confusion on the hormone issue.
This is the question that always comes up with organics-- and it is the wrong one. The real question is not if “organic” is better for you, the question is: how dangerous are the conventional practices?
Bovine Growth Hormone is not as obviously harmless as others here seem to believe. In fact, its use is banned in several countries. Furthermore, don’t be under the illusion that all the hormones and drugs given to cows are for the health of the cow. That’s naive in the extreme.
Because “organic” has a specific definition for chemical treatment of cows, many people prefer to buy it because they can have a pretty good idea how the cattle were raised. Many organic farmers offer the cattle a better life free from much of what goes on in the modern mass-production dairy biz.
That’s not to say that all conventional farmers mistreat their cows or give them possibly dangerous drugs to keep them producing high volumes of milk. It’s just with the “organic” label, you can have some knowledge about the source of your milk.
From what I’ve seen, the only criticisms of rBGH come from Dr. Samuel Epstein. You can read a good criticism of his work at http://www.fumento.com/milk.html . In it, Michael Fumento says: