Creative Commons License photo credit: foundphotoslj

by Vic Shayne, PhD

We live in an unnatural world. There are many reasons for this, but Big Money is a huge source of the problem. For decades, John Robbins has been writing about the evils of the dairy industry and how animals are treated. He’s written about the adverse effects and warned that the effect of the mistreatment of animals would lead to more and more human disease.

Now Robbins is reporting that female infants in China are experiencing breast development from what they are being fed. But before you say, “Oh, that’s in far off China,” consider the fact that similar problems are going on right here in River City. The problem here is that there is a lot of corporate cover-up. A little investigation goes a long way in seeing the reality we face when we consume animal products tainted with drugs such as antibiotics, steroids and growth hormones, as well as synthetic chemicals in general.

Robbins writes:
…medical tests performed on the babies found levels of estrogens circulating in their bloodstreams that are as high as those found in most adult women. These babies are between four and 15 months old. And the evidence is overwhelming that the milk formula they have been fed is responsible.

Synutra, the company that makes the baby formula consumed by these babies, says it’s not their fault. They insist that “no man-made hormones or any illegal substances were added during the production of the milk powder.”

Then what is the source of the hormones? A Chinese dairy association says the hormones could have entered the food chain when farmers reared the cows. “Since a regulation forbidding the use of hormones to cultivate livestock has yet to be drawn up in China,” says Wang Dingmian, the former chairman of the dairy association in the southern province of Guangdo, “it would be lying to say nobody uses it.” Bovine growth hormones are used in China, as they are in the U.S., to promote greater milk production.

As I describe in my books The Food Revolution and Diet For a New America, and on my website, this isn’t the first time something like this has happened. In the 1980s, doctors in Puerto Rico began encountering cases of precocious puberty. There were four-year-old girls with fully developed breasts. There were three-year old girls with pubic hair and vaginal bleeding. There were one-year-old girls who had not yet begun to walk but whose breasts were growing. And it wasn’t just the females. Young boys were also affected. Many had to have surgery to deal with breasts that had become grossly swollen.

Writing a few years later in the Journal of the Puerto Rico Medical Association, Dr. Carmen A. Saenz explained the cause. “It was clearly observed in 97 percent of the cases that the appearance of abnormal breast tissue was…related to local whole milk in the infants.”

The problem was traced, and found to stem from the misuse of hormones in dairy cows. When Dr. Saenz was asked how she could be certain the babies and children were contaminated with hormones from milk rather than from some other source, she replied simply: “When we take our young patients off… fresh milk, their symptoms usually regress.”

Along with China, the U.S. is today one of the few countries in the world that still allows bovine growth hormones to be injected into dairy cows. Though banned in Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and most of Europe, the use of these hormones in U.S. dairy is not only legal, it’s routine in all 50 states.

How do you avoid such problems? Switch to eating organic and/or biodynamic foods. If you don’t, you’re just exposing yourself to every chemical and lie that Big Agra has to sell you.

The Union of Concerned Scientists said it succinctly: “An estimated 70 percent of antibiotics used in the United States are fed to animals that are not sick, a practice that breeds antibiotic-resistant bacteria and causes costly, painful, and sometimes deadly human diseases.”

We have to ask ourselves why there is such an overabundance of drugs being given to livestock. One of the answers is not a pretty one because it’s so selfish that it seems unthinkable to a caring, thoughtful person — there’s a lot of money made in dispensing drugs to animals. Human illness is worth the sacrifice for the profits.

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