WASHINGTON -- Agribusiness giant Monsanto Co. is challenging a growing trend among dairies to label their milk "hormone free," saying those claims mislead consumers into believing that the cow growth hormone Monsanto makes is unsafe.
In an action that could send ripples through the food industry, St. Louis-based Monsanto is moving aggressively against a group of dairies to halt the use of "hormone free." It said that such labels suggest that there is something unhealthy about its synthetic hormone drug.
It looks like they don’t want people labelling hormone free milk as “hormone free”.
Here is an older post about rBGH milk.
2 comments:
The opposition comes from the fact that milk from cows treated with BST (the hormone that makes them give more milk) is chemically identical to "hormone free" milk. This is because the bovine system determines how much milk to produce by keeping the concentration of BST at a certain level, thus adding more means more milk.
Also, "hormone free" is an inaccurate and misleading label for any food product from any animal, because naturally occurring hormones will always be present.
“Hormone free” is suppose to be referring to the fact that there is no hormones added but perhaps such a label would be misleading.
According to this article, Monsanto is saying that these labels mislead people into thinking that their product is unsafe which I don’t think is true.
On that note, I would say the safety of this product is somewhat questionable:
- It’s not approved in almost all of the developed world.
- In the U.S, certain companies have stopped using milk that comes from cows which received the hormone.
- How it got approved by the FDA was questionable. People got pressured and even fired.
- There are many people who say the milk is unsafe and that it's also different then milk coming from cows that haven’t received the hormone. Here is a link showing Dr. Michael Hansen talking about the differences. Here is my older post which has a link showing Dr. Samuel Epstein talking about the differences. That post also contains a little bit about the movie called The Corporation which mentions the story of Jane Akre and Steve Wilson. (them getting fired over a report on rBGH)
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