zogger's Journal: Your right to choose your own food

The FDA is now claiming, in a convoluted case involving raw milk, that you have no inherent right to choose your own food, that this "right" exists solely with the Federal government.

So the FDA is trolling.

[tomhudson]

"There is no 'deeply rooted' historical tradition of unfettered access to foods of all kinds."

Sure there is. Hundreds of thousands of years, at least. That's pretty deeply rooted.

"Plaintiffs' assertion of a 'fundamental right to their own bodily and physical health, which includes what foods they do and do not choose to consume for themselves and their families' is similarly unavailing because plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to obtain any food they wish."

Nice straw man. The plaintiffs aren't asking about "any" food - but rather, a food that has a tradition of access going back from before the US ever existed.

Funny how they don't go after "ultra-homogenized" milk - milk that has been passed through ultra-fine filters, breaking up the fat particles so that even more can enter directly into the blood stream. Homogenized milk has been implicated in the rise of type 1 (juvenile) diabetes, because the proteins on the milk fat, entering the bloodstream through the less-than-perfect infant gullet, sensitize the body to those proteins. Later on, because the Isles of Langerhans resemble those proteins, they come under attack in an auto-immune reaction.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18503496 [nih.gov]

Pediatr Diabetes. 2008 Oct;9(5):434-41. Epub 2008 May 21.
Enhanced levels of cow's milk antibodies in infancy in children who develop type 1 diabetes later in childhood.

Luopajärvi K, Savilahti E, Virtanen SM, Ilonen J, Knip M, Akerblom HK, Vaarala O.

Hospital for Children and Adolescents, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland. [e-mail]

Comment in:

* Pediatr Diabetes. 2008 Oct;9(5):431-3.

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Early exposure to cow's milk (CM) proteins have been implicated in the pathogenesis of type 1 diabetes (T1D). OBJECTIVE: We analyzed the development of the humoral immune response to dietary CM proteins in early childhood and its relation to later T1D. SUBJECTS AND METHODS: We studied a subgroup of 94 children randomized to be weaned to a CM-based infant formula in the trial to reduce insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus in the genetically at risk (TRIGR) pilot study. All subjects carried human leukocyte antigen-conferred T1D susceptibility and had an affected first-degree relative. After 7 years of follow-up, 8 subjects had progressed to T1D, 15 had at least one disease-associated autoantibody, and 71 remained autoantibody negative (controls). Immunoglobulin (Ig) G and IgA class antibodies to whole CM formula, beta-lactoglobulin (BLG), bovine serum albumin, and alpha-casein and IgG antibodies to bovine insulin (BI) were measured with enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays from sequential samples. RESULTS: The children with later T1D showed increased IgG levels to BLG from 3 to 18 months of age (p = 0.028) and enhanced IgA levels to CM formula at the age of 9 months (p = 0.022) compared with controls. In the children with an affected father or sibling, IgG antibodies to BI were higher in autoantibody-positive subjects than in autoantibody-negative subjects at 18 months of age (p = 0.022). CONCLUSION: An enhanced humoral immune response to various CM proteins in infancy is seen in a subgroup of those children who later progress to T1D. Accordingly, a dysregulated immune response to oral antigens is an early event in the pathogenesis of T1D.

This isn't the only study - it's bee known for 30 years that homogenized cows milk is a risk factor for several auto-immune diseases.