> I can say I've never had a playpen ever in my house - imagine caging baby
- yuck.

Playpens are great -- for storing toys and for allowing a sleeping baby to
sleep undisturbed by older children and cats in a house without a crib.

> Cows aren't so much "bred" to produce an oversupply of milk, but they are
given the Bovine Growth Hormones that force their bodies to produce more
milk than they should.

For many generations before bovine growth hormone was developed, cows WERE
bred to produce way more milk than their calves needed.  This is the
foundation of the dairy industry, both in the US and abroad.  And certain
breeds of cows were bred specifically to produce LOTS of high-fat milk
(can't remember if it is Jersey's or Guernsey's, but one of the breeds from
the Channel Islands).  So cows were producing up to 14 times as much milk as
their own calf needed, long before the advent of bovine growth hormone.

Can ingesting bovine growth hormone affect a human mother's milk production?

Since cows and humans are so very different, and growth hormones are
exceedingly species specific, it would be extrememly unlikely that bovine
growth hormone -- especially when ingested orally and processed through the
intestinal tract -- would have any impact on human growth or milk
production.  Synthetic human growth hormone given to human children who lack
their own must be injected -- it cannot be taken orally.  Before the advent
of synthetic human growth hormone in the early 1980s, kids had to take real
human growth hormone harvested from cadavers, which was very expensive.
Growth hormone derived from other animals, even chimpanzees, our closest
relatives, does not work in humans.  It must be real human growth hormone,
or now the synthetic version.  All of which is to say that fears about
bovine growth hormone affecting humans are not supported by the research.

Kathy Dettwyler, Ph.D.
specialist in human growth and development

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