September 10, 1968

Dr. James F. Crow
Department of Genetics
University of Wisconsin
Madison, Wisconsin

Dear Jim:
This note is a delayed follow-up to a column that I wrote over a year ago.

I have in mind to ask you whether there has been an agressive response
on the part of your colleague dairy scientists to the very negative
climate about the health values of milk as a food post-infancy. (Note
for example, Dr. Stare's remarks attached).

The question of the actfeptertous effect of saturated fats with respect
to later heart disease may, of course, still turn out differently from
the current tradition, but it seems to me foolhardly to ignore it or to
just take it without reacting. Quite apart from the protection of the
economic interests of dairy farmers in Wisconsin, milk 48 too valuable
a food to have it go down the drain for failure to keep up with con-
temporary science,

I guess what I have in mind could be embodied in efforts to -

1. Replace the standards for milk quality moving them
away from butterfat content and towards the
butritional values we recognize today, e.g., the
balance of essential amino acids,

2. Breeding milk cattle to meet these specifications, and

3. Perhaps even attempting to modify the metabolism of
the cow, either environmentally or genetically, so
as to decrease the saturation level of the milk fatty
acids,

T have no idea what plausbile physiological limits there may be on
such a process, for example, are there any animal species whose pilk
is significambply unsaturated?

I suppose another thing to look into might be fermentation processes
that could give cheese-like products in which saturated fats are
replaced by unsaturated ones.

Nova

 

 
Dr. James F. Crow -2~ 9/10/68

Sincerely yours,

Joshua Lederberg
Professor of Genetics

JL:lh

Let us carry this argument one step further. The Pediatricians and the
Dairy Scientists ought to get together to define an ideal nutritional
fluid. If the dairy industry doesn't react in some way the market for
fresh milk and a large part of the market for its derivatives is going
to dry up. Once an ideal fluid is specified, there then remains the
task of engineering its production, deciding what part of it can most
economically be manufactured by artificial supplementation and what
part can be obtained by redirecting the breeding of dairy cattle toward
such an ideal product. The question comes up, for example, whether an
ideal milk Bhould have appreciable quantities of lactose when a probably
even more desirable caloric equivalent can be introduced as industrial
glucose. (I have in mind the moderately wide distribution of lmetose
intolerance). As a rule of thumb, I would assume that any irrelevant
component still costs the cow something she might better put into
tryptophane and lysine.