The real "Got Milk?" question
Butterscotch nibbles on clover and lush grass as her tail bats the season's remaining flies. Her udder hangs low and full, with her teats reaching for the prairie like fingers trying to grasp a wave.
Wearing mud boots and a fall jacket, Sherie Noffke leads me closer to Butter-scotch and the three other dairy cows that make up her and her husband's small herd. I follow carefully. Tip-toeing between mud puddles and cow pies that dot the ground, we hop over electric fence after electric fence and faced the portion of pasture where the cows graze. Butter-scotch looks up at me with innocent eyes covered in thick, cartoon-like eyelashes, seemingly unruffled, and again turns her head to the grass.
Butterscotch and her lady friends eat grass and clover and roam a fresh pasture every week. They receive no hormone injections or antibiotics, and the grains that supplement their diet are organic. They live a stress-free life and fatten as nature intended. In comparison to their counterparts at large dairies that are confined to cement-floored paddocks and feedlots, the Noffke's foursome are lucky cows. The way Noffke tells it, these lucky cows make better milk.
Milk is one of the FDA's most controversial foods. From organic to conventional, raw to pasteurized and fattening to
healthy, the debate over milk is multifaceted. Scientists and nutritionists cannot agree on the safety of growth hormones used by many dairy farmers or the use of pesticides on cattle feed. The increase in attention to organic and pure foods has reintroduced raw milk into the mix as a potentially safe alternative to pasteurized milk. The safe and healthy concept received significant backing when a study by the University of Tennessee was released, casting doubt on the "too-much-dairy-makes-you-fat idea." It claimed instead that dairy products aid in weight reduction. Milk has proved to be one heck of a dairy dilemma.
The good for us stuff
Practically from conception, we have been bombarded with the five food groups—whole grains, vegetables, fruits, dairy products and meat—and told that if we ate a certain number of servings of each group per day, we would provide our bodies with the essential nutrients to stay strong and fit. We need to drink milk by the glass, add feta to our salads and consume yogurt for snacks. We were to be a nation of healthy teeth and strong bones with beautiful actresses and dominant athletes leading the way with their glued-on milk mustaches.
This "Got Milk?" marketing ploy simply
advertised to the public what many of us already knew: milk provides our body with essential nutrients. With components such as Vitamin D, calcium and Vitamin K, it's no secret that milk aids in the development of strong bones. One serving of reduced-fat cow's milk contains almost 30 percent of the daily value of calcium and a little more than 30 percent of the daily value of phosphate. These two minerals combine to form calcium phosphate, which provides for both the strength and structure of bones. A serving of milk also provides almost 50 percent of the daily value of Vitamin D, which keeps calcium in the blood and available for bones to use. With all of these vitamins and minerals, milk looks like a super-food, so why is there any debate at all? Nutrients in milk were never the problem.
One of the problems with milk's image is the fear of hormones injected into dairy cows. Many conventional dairy farms use
Shooting up cows
a cow growth hormone called rBGH (recombinant bovine growth hormone), known commercially as Posilac. Farmers inject this hormone into the cows as often as twice a month to extend the heavy milk output period from eight to 10 weeks to 16 to 20. This extended milking period allows each cow to produce more milk, but Dr. Samuel Epstein, a professor of environmental medicine at the University of Illinois Medical Center at Chicago, states in his book "Got (Genetically Engineered) Milk?" that the hormone also increases the occurrence of mastitis in cows. Mastitis is the scientific name for inflammation of breast tissue, which in cows can lead to swollen, hard udders that when milked, will excrete pus from the infected tissue into the milk. Extensive mastitis cases require large doses of antibiotics.
Epstein also says that rBGH increases a cell-stimulating growth factor that is genetically identical to humans and may cause premature growth of breasts in children and possibly breast cancer in adults.
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Jayplay 02.03.05
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