9: THE CHEMICAL SOUP

"All is not butter that comes from the cow."

--THOMAS FULLER, Gnomologia. No. 527

Cow's milk, or for that matter any other milk, as it comes to our dining table is a chemical soup. In this chapter we examine the effects of environmental chemicals which find their way into milk, accidentally, or perhaps intentionally, and how this unwelcome exposure affects our lives.

Milk is an ideal liquid to dissolve environmental chemicals. Most environmental contaminants are of the fat-soluble type and milk has about four percent fat. The water-soluble chemicals dissolve easily in the predominantly aqueous part of milk. Therefore, we find in milk all types of chemicals, fat-soluble and water-soluble, because milk offers both environments. Milk, therefore, is a true reflection of the pollution in our environment--not a very pretty picture.

In addition to environmental pollution imparting its chemical treasure to milk, processing of milk also adds many chemicals at different stages making milk a heterogeneous mixture of chemicals that we find on our dining table.

Drugs such as hormones or antibiotics given to cows show up in the milk quickly. For example, penicillin given to cows to treat mastitis is responsible for the failure of milk to have "starter" reaction in cheese making. Today, despite strict controls, about one percent of milk samples still show sufficient levels of penicillin in milk to make it unsuitable for cheese making.

The dairy industry while claiming that penicillin contamination is no longer a problem, continues to develop methods to remove penicillin from milk. A 1981 patent describes the use of activated charcoal in removing penicillin from milk. It is apparently still a problem.

The exposure to small levels of antibiotics, as found in milk, is dangerous since it causes modification of "good" bacteria in the intestine leading to vitamin and mineral deficiencies and often "superinfection"- the increased tendency to contract infections. The long-term exposures to low-levels of antibiotics are extremely harmful to health, especially in children, since these exposures produce drug-resistant strains of bacteria.

Other drugs commonly found in cow's milk are sulfonamides, used to prevent infections in cows. Again low level exposure to sulfonamides produces resistant strains of bacteria and makes this otherwise useful drug ineffective. Sulfonamides also have several side effects, one of which is an allergic reaction which can cause severe respiratory reaction and even death in sensitive individuals.

Some cow's milk samples also show noticeable concentration of a growth hormone given cows to promote their growth and increase milk production. Being fat-soluble, hormones concentrate in the cream. Hormones in milk are a serious threat to health because even at very low concentrations, they can cause severe imbalance of our physiologic system. They have also been implicated in many types of cancers and decreased resistance to infections and diseases. Though prohibited, unscrupulous ranchers continue to use hormones, oblivious to the health of their brethren and children.Whatever a cow eats shows up in her udders. The grass, silage, straw, cereals, roots, tubers, legumes, oilseeds, oilcakes, and milk by-products, which contain a variety of chemical additives, make the diet of modern cow. The 20th century diet of cows is rife with pesticides, fertilizers, herbicides and traces of heavy metals along with chemicals from spoilage.

Another environmental hazard in milk use comes from the radioactivity--from the sun and x-rays and, occasionally, from fallouts of catastrophes like Hiroshima, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. The fallout is the settling of the fission products of a nuclear reaction, on the ground, under ground or in the air. The westerly winds will carry fission fragments eastward thousands of milk and fallout may last for months or years, dispersing throughout the globe.

The fall out isotopes of greatest concern are strontium 90, cesium 137 and iodine-131 among scores of others. Strontium 90 is the biggest problem since it take about 200 years to clear the environment. Chemical similarities between strontium and calcium account for the penetration of strontium into plants. Cattle grazing on vegetables contaminated with strontium will store and impart strontium to milk easily. As a result, all of us carry some strontium in our bones--about four Sunshine Units of strontium-90 (A Sunshine Unit is one micromicro curie per 90 grams of calcium in our body). Numerous studies show that it is safe to raise cows in the neighborhood of nuclear power plants but some radioactivity finds its way into cow's body either through feeds or irradiated water.

The worst nuclear accident in history occurred on April 26, 1986 near Kiev in the Soviet Union's Ukraine region. The major radioactive substances released by the accident were iodine-131 and cesium-137, both of which can cause cancer. Radioactive iodine is specially dangerous to infants and unborn children. The biggest danger from radioactive fallout was the contamination of air and food such as leafy vegetables and milk and meat from cows that graze on contaminated grass. Contamination from Chernobyl spread throughout Europe, affecting reindeer in Swedish Lapland, cattle and sheep in Great Britain, vegetables and rabbits in Italy. Cows in countries bordering Russia had significantly high level of radioactivity in their milk and were destroyed because no one knew how long it would take for the cows to purge themselves.

To no one's surprise, nursing mothers in Oregon and Washington showed elevated iodine-131 and cesium-137 levels within two weeks of the accident. Such is the ferocity of nuclear contamination. Cow's milk makes an excellent medium to contract and concentrate radioactive components found in the environment.Pesticides are so essential to a good crop that it is almost impossible to visualize any feed without some contamination.The world produces about one billion pounds of these very active and dangerous chemicals; they must end up some place--such as in your milk container. The use of these compounds is like having a double-edged sword. Designed to penetrate quickly through the skin, it is hard for these chemicals to differentiate between the skin of its inventor from that of a moth. The cows absorb these chemical very quickly and efficiently through their skin, in addition to getting them in their feed. Unfortunately, pesticides exist for a long time in the body. Being fat-soluble, these chemicals find their way into body fats and stay there for months, often years, before the body removes them completely. As a result, pesticides in milk appear all year around, not just during the seasons of high usage.

Can we do anything to reduce risk of exposure to these chemicals? Well, a lot has been said and some even has been done during the past 50 years, yet the problem persists. One solution proposed earlier, was to ban the types of pesticides which persist in the body for a longer time. However, the new pesticides containing chlorine or phosphorus are still too long-lasting to be good substitutes for the old ones. The problem is that a safe pesticide cannot be an effective pesticide because the characteristics which make them effective also make them hazardous for the environment.

This is a battle that does not seem likely to be won. This was apparent in the poison-pill approach taken by the U.S. government when it began to spray marijuana with paraquat, a deadly pesticide. The spraying caused more harm than good and the government was forced to stop using this deliberate contamination as a deterrent against use of marijuana.

The seriousness of the problem of pesticide contamination is not fully understood because of the lack of reliable analytical methods. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) started a monitoring program in 1964. Inspectors from the FDA collect market baskets in different cities and analyze these foods for about 38 pesticides and other chemicals. Not surprising, despite many years of bans, pesticide residues of DDT, still show up in our diets along with many other chemicals. This is certainly a good a lesson in persistence and survival.The intensive fertilization of pastures with nitrogen has, perhaps, forever, changed the composition of milk. Cow's milk produced today is laced heavily with non-protein nitrogen and urea. How this affects milk users is not fully understood but it well may be that the nitrogen combines with other proteins in the milk to produce cancer causing chemicals. Additional hazardous chemicals, many still unidentified, come from contamination of silage during handling and storage.While chemicals in the fat portion of milk are of special concern, the chemicals, phenols, vanillins and indole found in the water portion or milk make even skimmed milk a chemical hazard. Therefore, skimmed milk is not necessarily the answer, even though it does reduce risk of exposure to those chemicals that stay in the body the longest.Milk is also contaminated with heavy metals such as zinc, cadmium, selenium, sulfur, iodine and possibily even more dangerous arsenic and cyanide. Cows on farms near industrial areas and nuclear power plants have exceptionally higher levels of heavy metals in their milk.Still another source of feed contamination is the recycled farmyard waste. Cases have been reported of silage contamination by dieldrin, a chemical used as a mothproofing agent and from chemicals used in poultry farming. Cows grazing on farms where poultry is raised often show high levels of arsenic in their milk because of the contamination of grass with poultry feces high in arsenic. Arsenic appears in drugs used to promote growth and control disease in poultry. Detergents and disinfectants used to clean the milking machines and leaching from various rubber and other nonmetallic parts, also contain chemicals which eventually may find their way into your milk carton.Natural "plant chemicals" evolved in the plants to protect them against predators as part of their survival system are highly active "drug-like" agents. Many of these chemicals are used as drugs in the modern medicine. When cows eat plants, these drugs, or chemicals show up in their milk also. These "inadvertent" milk chemicals are a recent discoveriy. These chemicals cause cancer, growth retardation, stimulation and arrest of heart, gastrointestinal discomforts such as flatulence, mineral deficiency, birth defects, skin irritation, goiter and a variety of unexplained "milk sicknesses."

"Milk sickness," is characterized by weakness, nausea and exhaustion and has occasionally reached epidemic proportions in parts of the U.S. Abraham Lincoln's mother died of this disease, which derives its name from the trembles which show up in affected cows.

Some of these chemicals make drugs more toxic. For example, goats fed tansy ragwort yield milk which damages liver. Damaged liver is less capable of removing drugs from the body, making them more toxic.

Modern pasteurization, or heating, destroys some of the plant chemicals and others are "filtered-out" in the liver of cow before entering the blood. Still others simply do not cross the blood/milk barrier. Yet, some of these chemicals do reach our milk container, albeit in small quantities. But then what is small to measure may be too much for the heart or the nerves.There are still many unanswered questions regarding the safety of milk for human consumption. For example, how does the combination of chemicals affect the activity of each? Does it make them more dangerous? The risk seems hardly worth taking.

Supporters of milk argue that the concentration of chemical contaminants is so low that it does not pose a serious threat to health. Scientific evidence repudiates this logic. Many diseases such as cancer are caused by single molecules of chemicals. How a single molecules can be so omnipotent is seen in the science of homeopathic treatment where almost infinite dilutions of drugs achieve dramatic results.

Though not widely recognized, alteration of our body's immune system is another damaging effect of milk chemicals. Chemicals, foreign to our body, invoke an immune response. Frequent challenges to our immune system make our body highly reactive to defending itself, a state of paranoia which creates many diseases such as asthma, multiple sclerosis, migraine, diabetes, etc. At times, these indirect effects of chemical exposure may be more damaging than the direct toxicity of these chemicals.Morarji Desai, the former prime minister of India, demonstrated on American television how he starts his day by drinking a glass of fresh urine--shocking to American sensibilities, perhaps, but true! Thousands of his countrymen, who hold cows as sacred as a deity, drink cow urine daily. It may almost sound facetious, but by all accounts, the urine is considerably safer, though not as pleasant tasting, as milk. The chemicals which appear in urine are only of the water-soluble type having had already gone through the body's metabolism or system to inactivate them. The extra nitrogen in the urine as urea poses some problem, but urea itself increases urine production so ultimately a person ends up urinating more often while keeping the streets of India free of cow-urine odor.