This entry was posted on Thursday, July 24th, 2008 at 7:43am and is filed under Media and information, Food Safety, Organic foods, Labels, Agriculture, Food Production. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
WARNING: Take the headline with a grain of salt.
I came across a blog post claiming organic milk is worse than regular milk, and is in fact dangerous. The blog editor has posted liberally elsewhere about dioxins in organic milk: As background to the quote below, the author states that 80% of organic milk worldwide is Ultra-High Temperature processed.
You get far more dioxins with UHT milk than you do with regular pasteurized milk because more dioxins gets digested instead of being flushed out of the body. This occurs because the micronized fat globules in UHT milk are much smaller. As a result, significantly more dioxins from organic UHT milk get into the bloodstream.
This “news” even made it into the mainstream ag news service to which I subscribe.
BUT-being the skeptic I am, I followed up… The bottom line is that I don’t trust the author. His posts claim milk is responsible for acne, death, global warming and is the biggest cause of illness in the world. He is selling a book called “Organic Milk Myth”, among several other books, all of which seem to be aimed at eliminating milk consumption altogether (to be substituted by the “milks” he’ll gladly sell you the recipes to make). Anyone with that clear an agenda is not going to weigh the often conflicting scientific data. In my book, if you don’t consider the validity of the other side’s viewpoint, your arguments don’t hold much water.
There are some valid points in his posts, however. The main thing of value I see in his writing is a point that I have made here many times. Often people buy organic thinking they are getting something they are not. Most organic milk is produced in very similar ways to regular milk. Many organic milk products are UHT pasteurized where their regular counterparts may not be.
There was a good study published recently in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association (JADA) on nutrient and hormone composition of conventional, rbST-free and organic milk. More on that soon.
July 24th, 2008 at 1:54pm
Sara, thanks as always for a thoughtful post.