What's Really In Your Milk? Hint: Not GMOs

For most people in the U.S., dairy products provide about 600 calories per day, and 1/3 to ½ of our daily protein intake. By Roy Williams
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As a former dairy farmer, I appreciate the challenges in producing the milk that provides for so much of our diet. As a current graduate student in genetics and molecular biology, I also appreciate the incredible advances in science, and the amazing improvements in technology in dairy farming over the last 70 years. Those changes have radically reduced the environmental footprint of dairy farming over the last 70 years.
Today, the average American consumes almost as many dairy products as they did 70 years ago – although today, a lot of that milk is consumed as cheese, yogurt and ice cream. Today, U.S. dairy farms need only 8.5 million cows to produce more than twice as much milk as dairy farms did in 1940 with 26 million cows. My rough calculations suggest that the number of acres of land required for grazing, hay and feed for dairy farming today is probably no more than 40% of what was needed in 1940. Crops developed through genetic engineering have played a role in that progress. Contrary to the claims of those whose ideology opposes scientific progress, the consumption of plants developed by genetic engineering have no negative effect on milk quality or safety
Nowhere in the cow, or in you, can parts of plants be found (except, of course, in the digestive tract). When humans, or cows, eat plants, the plants are broken down into tiny molecular-sized fragments in the digestive system, so that the chemical factories in our body (or the cow) can make new fats, sugars, and proteins that we need.
Here is an analogy: suppose you want to make a decorative brick wall in your yard. You find where an old building is being demolished, and you get the brick from the demolition crew. When you get home, you find you must carefully clean all the old mortar off, and separate all the bricks, because you cannot lay the bricks neatly into the new wall if they are not separate and clean. When you are done, you have a decorative wall in your yard, regardless of what structure the bricks previously formed. They may have made a prison in their prior form – but now they make a garden wall, not another prison.
The “bricks” that make up living things are the same in all species of plants and animals – they are just put together in different ways, just as the same bricks can make a garden wall or a prison. This should be obvious: you eat many different foods, but you do not look like a cow, a corn plant, or some weird mix of what you have eaten all your life.
One of the components of every living thing is a chemical known as “DNA”. DNA is a unique material – it is an incredibly thin, long “thread”. (If you took all of the DNA in your body and stretched all the pieces together end-to-end, it would long enough to reach from the Earth to the Sun 450 times.) DNA is much like a very thin strip of paper, so thin that it is only one letter wide. The “genes” are groups of letters on the paper; each group (gene) is thousands of letters long. If you chop up the paper, the individual pieces are not legible – you just have jumble of letters that mean nothing. That is what digestion does to the food you eat, and to what the cow eats. The genes – the genetic information – is lost when the DNA is shredded by the digestive system.
Some research reports have claimed that a very tiny amount of small DNA fragments (smaller than is needed for a complete gene) from digested plants can sometimes be found in milk. These tiny fragments in no way represent complete genes, any more than a few bricks stuck together are a prison. What is a “tiny” amount? No genetically modified genes or gene fragments were found in milk, while fragments of a “normal” plant gene were found.
Thus, the claim that “GMOs are in your milk” is false – there are no plant genes of any kind in any milk, just some fragments of DNA
 
Source: Forbes
Link: http://www.forbes.com/sites/gmoanswers/2016/06/28/gmos-milk/#6b428f2761a3
 

Mirá También

Así lo expresó Domingo Possetto, secretario de la seccional Rafaela, quien además, afirmó que a los productores «habitualmente los ignoran los gobiernos». Además, reconoció la labor de los empresarios de las firmas locales y aseguró que están «esperanzados» con la negociación entre SanCor y Adecoagro.

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