Is Baby’s Milk “Contaminated” With Rocket Fuel?
Scare-mongering is an ugly practice, especially when the scare-mongers are willing to risk babies’ health to falsely indict modern science and technology.
The latest scare is that women are picking up a chemical called perchlorate-used as primary ingredient in rocket fuel-and transmitting it to their infants through their breast milk. Even cows’ milk samples from across the country were mostly “contaminated” with perchlorate.
You don’t want your little baby to explode from drinking rocket fuel, do you? So you should stop breast feeding infants, or even cows’ milk is suspect. So what to do? Give them synthetic formula instead?
In reality, perchlorate is a natural compound, found all over the world in certain types of rock deposits. This was the first scientific search for traces of perchlorate in milk, and the broad “contamination” of both breast milk and cows’ milk across the country probably means that most milk has carried traces of perchlorate since before the Stone Age.
Fortunately, perchlorate is not a poison. At normal exposures, perchlorate poses no health risk. At high doses, perchlorate can limit our uptake of iodide. This could be harmful because iodide is necessary for child development and for proper thyroid functioning in adults. However, high-dose iodide shortage can be remedied if breast-feeding mothers take nutritional supplements, use iodized salt, and eat more seafood.
Iodine supplements would be a good idea anyway; researchers say pregnant women generally are getting only about half as much dietary iodine today as they did in the 1970s.
The problem with switching babies from breast feeding to formula is that all the studies say breast-fed babies are healthier than formula-fed babies. Dr. Jack Newman, a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians (Canada) says all milk is full of dozens of natural toxins. Yet breastfed babies do better on cognitive and neurological tests than formula-fed babies in virtually every test. And, says Dr. Newman breastfed babies have more mature immune systems than formula-fed babies. Breastfed babies also have a lower incidence of certain cancers later in life than formula-fed babies.
One of the activists calling for tougher limit on perchlorate is Renee Sharp, a biologist with the Environmental Working Group. As it happens, the EWG gets donations from the Trial Lawyers Association. EWG scares helped Erin Brockovich get millions of dollars by claiming that her town’s water was poisoned by a corporation-even though the townspeople had no identifiable symptoms of poisoning.
The EWG is also big on claiming that our fruits and vegetables contain unsafe levels of pesticide residues. That’s to frighten mothers into the expensive organic food stores that also support EWG. The organization counts on the powerful gas chromatographs and mass spectrometers that can now detect “toxins” at tiny trace levels in most of our foods, organic or not. So they illogically claim that non-organic food is dangerous.
Traces, however, are rarely dangerous to people. The dose makes the poison, and a part per million is equal to one second in 11 days. Those parts per billion of perchlorate are each equal to one second in 32 years. Unless consumers understand the importance of dose, the scaremongers win.
It would be tragic if mothers were frightened away from breast feeding by a scare campaign over a natural compound that’s apparently found in virtually all milk, all over the world.
As a matter of fact, perchlorate traces are even found in bottled water! That means there’s no way to get perchlorate-free water with which to mix formula!
That’s how ridiculous the perchlorate scare campaign is. Use iodized salt-always a good idea-and forget about it.
