>Date:    Fri, 1 Feb 2002 08:08:45 -0600
>From:    Karen Zeretzke <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Re: flame retardants in breast milk

>Anyone know if cow's milk (that we purchase in the grocery) and/or
>manufactured baby milk have been tested for PBDEs?

>(The web page Sandra Steingraber so kindly sent us wouldn't open for me.
>All I got was that annoying "page not found" message.)

>Karen Z, who wonders why the focus is only on human milk


Well, cows don't sleep on PBDE-treated sofa cushions or spend hours
of every day bent over PBDE-treated laptops posting emails to
listservs.  (Maybe they would if only keyboards were made a teensy
bit bigger to accomodate hooves....)

Cows also don't eat as high on the food chain as we humans do, so
they accumulate less persistent toxins of all kinds in their grain
and grass-based diets.  They're also continuously lactating gallons
per day, and haven't had 20-40 years to accumulate persistent
pollutants in their body's fat reserves from which milk fat is drawn.

When a new toxic chemical makes headlines, the focus is on breast
milk rather than cow's milk usually for good biological reasons.

Breast milk typically carries concentrations of organochlorine
pollutants that are ten to twenty times higher than those in cow's
milk.  Since PBDEs behave very similarly to PCBs (which are one
family of organochlorines), it's a pretty good bet that their
concentration in breast milk will be many fold higher than cow's milk
as well.

Infant formula, for all it inferior qualities and evil marketing, is
basically free of organic pollutants because the fat in formula comes
from plant oils, not cow's milk.  (It's the protein fraction of cow's
milk that's added to make formula, not the contaminant-laden fat
fraction.)  This isn't to say that formula can't be sometimes more
contaminated than breast milk with other kinds of pollutants (e.g.
heavy metals such as lead), but only that when it comes to
fat-soluble persistent organic pollutants like PBDE, breast milk is
the most vulnerable of all human foods.

As far as I'm concerned--and I've said this on lactnet before, so
forgive me--it's precisely because mother's milk is absolutely
unsubstitutable that we have to take seriously its contamination with
toxic chemicals and not downplay the problem.
--
--

Sandra Steingraber, Ph.D.
Visiting Assistant Professor
Program on Breast Cancer and Environmental Risk Factors
110 Rice Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY  14853
[log in to unmask]
www.steingraber.com

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