Iodine in Milk and Cheese Ends up in Your Thyroid

Iodine in Milk and Cheese Ends up in Your Thyroid

From Robert Cohen, NotMilk.com

One of the ways farmers deal with the liquid feces is to sanitize the udders as best as they can before and after milking. This enormous dairy industry secret would spoil pre-sleep milk and cookies for dairy lovers. Breakfast? Snap, crackle, and poop.

How do farmers sanitize udders? Many (if not most) use an iodine tincture as a teat dip. Iodine kills germs.

Milk is a dirty filthy fluid coming from diseased animals with high bacterial count. Sick creatures with constant diarrhea have unmentionable filth dripping down their undersides into their milk. Skip that. I'll mention it.

Lysteria. E. coli. Salmonella. Mycobacterium Paratuberculosis.

One of the ways farmers deal with the liquid feces is to sanitize the udders as best as they can before and after milking. This enormous dairy industry secret would spoil pre-sleep milk and cookies for dairy lovers. Breakfast? Snap, crackle, and poop.

How do farmers sanitize udders? Many (if not most) use an iodine tincture as a teat dip. Iodine kills germs.

Fifteen years ago, I hired a food-testing laboratory in Ridgefield, New Jersey to test milk samples for iodine.

In 1996, the cost for each test was $340, and Marvin Winston of Winston Labs was given this assignment:

Randomly buy one quart of Farmland milk at retail and one quart of Tuscan Farms milk. Test for Iodine. Farmland and Tuscan represents the two largest milk distributors in the New York Metropolitan area. Each buys milk and pools it from an average of 600 different dairies.

Farmland requires that their dairy farmers sign a pledge not to treat their cows with the genetically engineered bovine growth hormone. Tuscan has no such policy.

Bottom line: The Tuscan milk sample contained 300 times the safe level of iodine, while the Farmland contained 200 times the safe level.

One year earlier (November 81994), the New York Times reported that upon autopsy, virtually every adult over age 50 has undiagnosed thyroid tumors.

Why? Perhaps it is because we are overdosing on Iodine. Forty percent of what the average American eats comes from those iodine-dripping udders.

Fast forward to September, 2011.

A group of dairy scientists have reported their
pre-publication research at a dairy conference
through a poster demonstration.

The subject is iodine in cow's milk.

I found no hint of this story on the news. Although Hoard's neither identified the authors nor the institution at which the research was performed, hours of research at the website containing thousands of abstracts presented at the American  Dairy Science Association's annual meeting revealed to me the missing ingredients.

Poster Presentation T106 - Effects of pre-dipping practices on milk iodine concentrations.

S. I. Borucki-Castro1, R. Berthiaume1, A. Robichaud, and P. Lacasse*, AAFC-Dairy and Swine Research and Development Centre, Sherbrooke, QC, Canada, Food Directorate, Health Canada, Longueuil, QC, Canada.

As the researchers performed their study on a herd of only 36 cows, they exercised extreme and care to carefully dry off each teat on each udder with paper towels so that no iodine residues remained. Such time would not effectively be spent on a commercial dairy farm operation in which 1,000 or more cows are milked three times each day.

The authors conclude after their sanitized lab experiment under perfect conditions:

These results indicate that pre-dipping is an acceptable practice but must be performed with the appropriate product and completely wiped out before milking.

Sadly, that is not the way things are done in the real world.

This is extremely troubling news for milk drinkers and cheese eaters and confirms my experimental findings of 1996.

* * * * * * *

HOARD'S HEADLINE:

"Teat Dip Type Does Affect Iodine Levels in Dairy Product"

Dairy products are one of the only sources of iodine in the human diet due to the widespread industry use of iodine-based teat dips.

Over-consumption of iodine is also a dietary concern. Canadian researchers recently investigated how teat dip types affected the concentration of iodine in milk and presented their findings on a poster at the 2011 American Dairy Science Association annual meeting.

Cows were treated four different ways. One group received no iodine teat dip before milking, another a 1/2 percent iodine solution, the next a 1 percent iodine teat dip, and the final group a half percent solution with only wiping off three teats.

Milk iodine levels grew with each treatment.

The more concentrated solutions led to a higher level of iodine in the milk. These levels also increased when not all dip was removed from the teats.

I find it hard to believe that a pro-dairy magazine would report this story, as more often than not, Hoard's usually looks the other way on issues which could destroy their OWN livelihood and the future of their dairy-producing readers. This one is major.