Yeah but they drink cows milk, which isn't meant for cats anyway...



Yes, I find that people have that odd opinion too. I'm very pro-breastfeeding, and when people would rather feed their babies cow's milk than human milk I find it very... strange. I think that there is nothing wrong with drinking human milk; heck, there are even people who PAY nursing women to express their milk and send it to them so they can eat it on their cereal!

I watched a programme the other day in which a man with cancer claimed that drinking a breastmilk smoothie every week cured his cancer. He didn't have radiotherapy, chemo or anything and his cancer went.

I honestly wouldn't have a problem with eating breast milk ice-cream. However I don't think that it is practical to produce it, I really can;t see a way in which Ben & Jerry's could mass produce it anyway!



Actually, some women can make a lot of breast milk... this one woman on a TV show that I watched could express a pint a day, and that was whilst feeding her own baby. But I agree with you about the whole mass-produce thing, that woman was from the minority!

wow, thats really interesting.....like I mentioned before...Liguid gold...





I was one of those women, i had a ton! but yeah, not enough to make a quart of ice ceam! My husband tasted it once, from the bottle people..get your minds out of the gutter...and he said it was sweet....so makes sence now when I try to give my baby cows milk...she dosen't care for it.

You people are silly.

They said that the milk should be human milk, not that it should come from humans. There is a difference. So, there are two options:

1) Genetically engineer cows to express human milk. PETA won't like it, but they'll get what they asked for.

2) Grow human mammary gland cells in the lab and use them to produce milk commercially PETA does, after all, support growing meat in the lab (which, incidentally, would allow us to have human meat on burgers), so they should support making milk the same way.

It just wouldn't be commercially viable to use human milk like this if women had to be involved, even if you had them taking prolactin and oxytocin supplements to produce more milk than normal.

... That was a significant part of my point. I know this is a debate forum, but how come so often people here respond in a disputing manner to a point that they agree with?
It's like:
"I happen to like icecream. It's tastey."
and then,
"Yeah, but I like ice cream too. It's also pretty yummy."

Could you imagine drinking breast milk from a woman you know nothing about? *shudder* With cow milk you know they're not smokers or recreational drug users.

Although, I just remembered biologoy courses for all those who say "We can't harvest human milk." ANY amino acid (read organic compound) can be produced by any organism so long as the code for it's production (DNA) is available to use as such.

This is how we get insulin: Genetically alter bacteria to produce human insulin. They don't use it, they don't want it, and they expel it from their bodys (is that the right word?). We can produce this on a massive scale using this method, because the bacteria do breed and make more insulin producing microbes. Same could be done with human breast milk.

However, there is a reason why insulin is not priced anywhere near the cost of a gallon of milk. Because this is still an expensive process. But it is still availible and we do use this technique to harvest other organic chemicles that need to be mass produced. Now, we can all at least agree that the thought of drinking human breast milk is still so hard for us to be comfortable with, the market for such a mass production wouldn't be great. And thus the cost wouldn't be worth the yield when cows are readily available, cheaper, and more popular.

What a ridiculous idea. But then, I don't do milk, period. *snuggles up to my pint of Rice Dream*

Technically, that not completely accurate. Not all amino acids are present in all organisms, and certainly not all organic compounds are amino acids or proteins (made of amino acids).


Maybe. But I know breast milk contains lactoferrin, which is a bacteriocidal compound. Not sure that genetically modified bacteria would like to express that protein.

I think that breast milk would best be made with a human cell line derived from mammary glands. Bacteria often have a hard time producing human proteins, which is usually easy to solve when you just want one protein, but milk is more than just one.

And the right word is probably cell, because a bacterium is just a single cell.

Despite how much I hate PETA, they do give me a good laugh every now and then XD

However, I think drinking human milk is a damn site less strange than drinking cow's milk, were it not for chocolate, i'd be vegan :P

Nice idea, two problems. That's going to cost, ice cream prices will no doubt be increased, at least in the preliminary stages. Human breast milk (even if made in the lab) is going to contain immunoglobulins and hormones - so, technically, we'd be subjecting all those who eat ice cream to hormonal therapy. And yes, cows' milk could also have hormones, but the chances of that affecting humans are less - we don't have the same receptor proteins.

That said, bacterial production of breast milk doesn't have to be a pipe dream - you can genetically engineer bacteria to have immunity to lactoferrin. However, insulin is one compound, its easy to get bacteria to produce a pure substance like that. Breast milk is a combination of things, how are we going to get bacteria to produce that? (I think this was mentioned above, too?)

BIOCHEMISTRY/MICROBIOLOGY WARNING!

Lactoferrin resistant bacteria exist, sure, but lactoferrin still has a bacteriostatic effect, even if not bacteriocidal.

It seems obvious that prokaryotic expression systems will not be able to express all the constituents of human breast milk. Take serum albumin for example. The favoured recombinant expression system for commercial production is plants* or yeast. This is because bacteria can't do the post-translational processing that the protein requires.

BIOCHEMISTRY/MICROBIOLOGY OVER

Still, for ice cream production it might not matter whether every component is present. As long as the main ones (like casein and lactose) are present it should be good enough. But it's not just the ice-cream industry that would want human milk. There is a large industry for formula milk.

*cow plant, anyone?

Even if you could mass produce human milk, it still wouldn't be the same as actual human milk. Human milk changes during each individual feeding, and it also changes over time, over the course of the baby's infancy. And there's things that just couldn't be present in mass-produced human milk like antibodies - it likely would still be better than formula just in nutritional composition and digestability, but it wouldn't really be at all the same as a drink straight from mom's chest.

And if you're going the mass-produced via technology route for ice cream or whatever, why not just do it with cow's milk? PETA's issues seem to be with the exploitation of a living animal for food purposes - cut out the actual cow and just produce the milk (when antibodies and such in cow's milk are really not an issue so much as the vitamin content and overall taste/consistency/composition as it relates to cooking, etc.). But somehow I actually find that idea more distasteful than the squeezings of a large hoofed ungulate. There's just something rather unnatural and icky about it... I'd rather have it from the udder, as it were, than grown in a vat.

LOL, Zaggy!!


Ok, so I thought this was a joke until I read the article.

My sister is a mother of 4 and when she had her 2nd or 3rd, she would put her breast milk into EVERYTHING! Anything that asked for milk, she'd use her own milk..unbeknown st to her darling little sister who wanted a free home cooked meal. Even knowing the person who's milk you are consuming, it's still gross.


That's enough PETA!

Even if it's bacteriostatic (which basically stops it from reproducing, yes?), there are other mechanisms of producing such bacteria on mass even if growing colonies is out of the question. Thus, you can have enough for industrial process - problem, it'd be ridiculously expensive. And, you said lactoferrin resistance does exist, all they need to do is incorporate that gene into the bacterial genome and problem solved, no?



Well, can't we just cut out the lactoferrin gene, then?And if every component isn't present, what makes manufactured breast milk (because the natural thing is really a pipe dream unless we want to farm women) any more special than cow's milk? Why can't we just stick to cows?

Also, one of the most important reasons for infants to be breastfed (apart from obvious nutrition and immune support - which adults don't usually need) is to creat an emotional bond. Why do we need it in ice cream?

On second thought...How much do you think mothers would get paid for their liquid gold? I'd be tempted to keep pumping after my baby finished drinking it. Burning calories and making money at the same time sounds...nice. :P

You can sell it for about $2-$3 per oz... but you can also donate it to your local hospital to help sick babies for free.

Lactoferrin-resistant bacteria can't reproduce, or at least reproduce very slowly, with lactoferrin around. Maybe with an excess of iron...I don't know...


Because cows are animals and PETA doesn't want us to get milk from animals because that is, allegedly, cruel. Except humans, because I guess they can understand why they are being milked.

In other words, these people from PETA are vegans, but make an exception for human breast milk.

So, I still think we need a cow-plant.

If we stopped milking cows, what do we do with them all? There are too many cows that have been bred by humans to not use them for anything, if we don't milk them, we have to eat them. Farmers aren't going to keep cows around that they can't milk or kill for beef. But, we can't exactly turn them loose either. Nor can we simply kill all of the suddenly unnecessary cows and just throw them in a pile. So, I would ask a PETA fan what the best way would be to deal with the overpopulation of cows that would happen if we didn't need them to milk anymore.

oh lawd no.

I think PETA need to go and get some medication,because something is not quite right when you want to use Human Breast Milk in Ice Cream,and Putting Animal Life before Human Life?

Well, very biologically speaking, humans are animals too, so, they're just being hypocritical. They should either insist we stop using natural milk full stop or just say nothing, but there you go.
Lol, cow plant would be an interesting sight to behold...

Also, if we're harvesting human breastmilk, like you said containing oxytocin and prolactin, honestly, that's dangerous for pregnant women and men run the risk of developing gynacomastia, and I know oestrogen is more the culprit here, but what about the risk of breast cancer?

That's why I said they don't want us to use any animal except for humans.


Well, it should be possible, at least, to have a plant make soy milk. Not anyone would bother because soya beans, after all, are plants already.


I don't think drinking those hormones would have much of an effect. They are both going to be destroyed in the gastrointestinal tract anyway - that's why you have to take hormones in a nasal spray, injection or skin patch.

Not necessarily, protein hormones are destroyed, yes, but some steroids aren't. Hence, the contraceptive pill can be taken as a pill. And surely, oxytocin and prolactin aren't the only hormones in breast milk.

Why shouldn't humans be extended the same courtesy as cows and not be harvested for breast milk, if that's the case?

The OCP uses ethinylestradiol and synthetic progestins. But you're right, some steroids could make it into the blood stream. Neither oxytocin nor prolactin are steroids though (they are both peptides).


Oh, certainly not. It practically contains every hormone produced by the human body, although to varying degrees. But then again, cow's milk contains practically every hormone produced by bovines - many of which can actually have an effect in humans too.


Oh, they should. I'm sure PETA wouldn't support the milking of non-consenting women any more than do the milking of non-consenting dairy cows. But at least women can consent - cows can't.

Well, I'm not one of them PETA-people, but I'd wager they probably would want the same thing done that they do with the pets they pick up. They don't think people should have pets either, so rather than adopt them out into good homes, they euthanize them and throw them in dumpsters. I think you'd need a lot of dumpsters for all those cows though.