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On the heels of Yoplait, Dannon to Remove Growth Hormone from Dairy Products

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More good news for consumers. Dannon, manufacturer of 100 dairy products such as Activia, Light & Fit, DanActive and Danimals, will stop using milk from cows injected with bovine growth hormones (rBST / rGBH). The plan is to be 100% hormone free by the end of 2009.

From DairyReporter.com:

[Dannon] said the move is a result of consumer feedback. “This is a response to our market evaluation and consumer preference,” Dannon’s senior director of public relations Michael Neuwirth told DairyReporter.com.

“When General Mills make their announcement, we naturally got many questions. This is something we’ve been working on for some time but because there is no real safety issue here we’ve been quite low-key about it,” said Neuwirth.

Read the entire article…

What you need to know:

BST (bovine somatotropin) is a hormone cows naturally produce and found in their bodies. The more of this hormone a cow has, the more milk it produces. In the early 1990’s, an artificial growth hormone, rBST (a.ka. rBGH), was developed by agriculture giant Monsanto. While this seems like good news, when you mess with nature, there are always consequences.

The rBST hormone itself has no effect on humans, but the “consequences” do:
1. Cows injected with the hormone tend to be sicker due to inflammations of their much larger udders, and therefore receive more antibiotics. The antibiotics then find their way into your milk and your body.
2. rBST additionally increases the level of an insulin type growth factor in the milk (IGF-1). This, again, finds its way into the human body. Though in most cases our stomach acids digest it, sometimes IGF-1 gets into the bloodstream, and for some people this raises the risk of cancer.

Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and the EU banned rBGH.

Dannon is an international dairy powerhouse, and owns about one third of the US yogurt market, tied with General Mill’s Yoplait. Having these two giants make the move will probably line up all of the smaller manufacturers as well.

What to do at the supermarket:

Until the end of 2009, buying organic is the sure way to avoid milk products from rBGH-free cows, albeit at a higher price.

On conventional products, you will not find a label mentioning the presence or absence of growth hormones or antibiotics.

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  • Jude

    Your “consequences” are entirely incorrect.

    1) All milk (regardless of whether the cows are organic, conventional, rbST-free etc) is tested for antibiotics a total of 7 times between leaving the farm and being processed. Any milk found to have antibiotic traces is removing from the system and there are very heavy financial penalties to the producer if their milk is found to be contaminated. Antibiotics used in dairy production therefore do not ‘find their way’ into the milk that we drink, or our bodies.

    2) IGF-1 does not cause cancer. People *with* cancer often have higher IGF-1 levels in their bodies as it’s produced by the growing tumor, but consuming IGF-1 from any food product does not initiate cancer – it is not a cause-effect relationship. No scientific studies have shown any link between rbST use and cancer incidence. The FDA has cited rbST use as being safe for both animals and human consumers of animal products.

    rBGH has not been banned in ANY country worldwide. It is not currently used in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan or EU as, although it was approved on a human safety basis in those countries, the registration process has never been completed, therefore it cannot be sold.

    • http://fooducate.com staff

      Jude,
      thanks for the clarifications. 2 questions:
      1. Why has the registration process for rBGH never been completed in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan or the EU?
      2. If rBGH is so safe, why have consumers embraced this issue to such an extent that manufacturers are actually starting to source rBGH-free milk?

  • Lyle

    Jude’s completely right. As for staff’s ?’s the answers vary. In those other countries you’d have to ask Monsanto why they didn’t seek approval of rBST. All of those countries allow imports of U.S. dairy products (where rBST is used) so safety of the product has never been in question. It probably revolves around market potential and ease of approval. If it wasn’t very profitable I’m sure Monsanto wasn’t interested. For staff’s second question I think the answer is easier. If you survey the public, I bet 95% of people have no idea what rBST is. But if you have two bottles of milk next to each other and one says “hormone free” and the other doesn’t, a marketing advantage is created – even if it’s a completely baseless claim like rBST-free. For example lets look at what happened in the Atlanta marketplace in 2007. Publix, a large grocery store chain, started advertising and selling BST-free milk in May of 2007. Over the next couple months their sales of milk went up and one of their largest competitors, Krogers, went down. In early fall of 2007 Kroger announced they were going BST-free nationwide. And the dominoes started to fall – within months many large grocery store chains in the U.S. were BST-free. All because these retailers were scared of losing market share which was caused by consumer fear of “hormones” in their milk. Fear is a very powerful advertiser when it comes to food safety and it doesn’t matter whether it is factual or not. This is a principle that organic food has made its living off of.

  • Lyle

    By the way, from years of experience, rBST is harmless to cows. Don’t be fooled by people that have an agenda but don’t have a clue.

  • http://geneticallyengineeredfoodnews.com Ella Baker

     

    The
    U.S. is the only developed nation that allows humans to consume milk from cows
    that were given bovine growth hormone or BGH. Marketed as Posilac from the
    Monsanto Corporation, it is banned in Japan, New Zealand, Canada and Australia,
    and most of the European nations.