May Video:

I once saw "cholesterol free" on peanut butter. All peanut butter is cholesterol free!

Love the head swivel to start. Thought I was about to get the evening news.

My dad has been a crop farmer (corn/soybeans) his whole life. He's about as leftist as 70-year-old farmers come, so I trust that his opinions aren't just whatever Fox News injects into his brain. I asked him about rBST and he doesn't know any more about it than what was discussed in the video, but he does know a bit about some of the other designations. The two that actually mean something are "non-GMO" and "organic". According to him, "non-GMO" isn't a big deal to grow, just have to get the correct seed and follow a couple of guidelines to try to limit cross-pollination with adjacent fields. He gets maybe 5-10% more money for non-GMO grain. He does still grow a mix of non-GMO and GMO across different fields. "Organic" is quite a bit more stringent; he's not well-equipped to grow USDA-certified organic grain and it's not worth it for him to pursue the additional 5-10% extra he'd get from that. Most other phrases used on food in the US ("natural" etc.) are entirely meaningless.

Just curious, do you use different cameras for different videos? The picture quality seems to vary from one video to the next.

ISTR the hoo-hah about hormones wasn't that the hormones got into the milk, but just that it was part of an industry that was basically creating full-time udders-on-legs, spewing bad quality milk filled with pus and other yucky stuff, subsequently packed with antibiotics. It was a uniquely US thing, with us in the UK and EU having "higher" standards. Similarly, I wonder if the "diet" to "zero sugar" transition happening so uniformly might've been due to the UK and EU sugar taxes. All of a sudden there was a good reason for Coca-Cola et al. to produce sugar-free drinks that matched their standard varieties, and marketed universally rather than just to the kind of half-assed reluctant health people for whom switching from normal to "Diet" soda was about as far as they could go… myself included.

I always figured that one producer just put “no hormones” on because they saw it as a way to differentiate. And then everyone else who doesn’t put that label down is assumed to be using hormones, and some people will pick the non-hormone variant because it feels safer.

very good video thanks!!

It is actually better in other places of the world! We have very strict laws around advertising here in Germany, especially for food. The vast majority misleading labeling tricks you see in the US are not legal here (like we define what juice actually means and what it can't contain in order to still be juice)

I think that small farmers choose not to use the hormone because they are the exact type of folk to believe that cow hormones cause cancer and the FDA saying they don't is proof that they do, as someone with a background in Midwestern beef cattle farming.

Canadian animal safety committee found that the "veterinary experts cited an increased risk of mastitis of up to 25%, of infertility by 18%, and of lameness by up to 50%. These increased risks and overall reduced body condition lead to a 20-25% increased risk of culling from the herd." So even if farmers aren't concerned with animals' well-being, increased culling could make rbST less attractive. I'm also not buying that wikipedia quote as its ending about benefits of milk sound like drivel.

For thorium reactors what technological hurdles need to be reached and since they can be made much smaller, in theory, and more safely do you think groups like greenpeace will protest them as much as they have with other nuclear projects? Slight follow up can there be any meaningful progress towards nuclearization if groups like greenpeace, who want to decarbonize our energy, will keep putting roadblocks in place to stop the most obvious solution for carbon free energy?

Food marketing is fascinating because there's all these reasons people buy stuff outside of hunger. I heard of rBST in the first place because I buy locally-made ice cream so I'm not supporting a Big Evil Corporation (it might be a Small Evil Corporation, but I don't know that and I can only devote so much mental energy to this), I ended up Googling rBST but didn't retain enough information to form a strong opinion about it. I think your average person can only keep so much health information balanced in their heads at once and things like "sugar free" or "doesn't contain this thing you may have heard about" can help seal the deal when people are making food choices in seconds. I think the sugar free drink trend is a marketing bandwagon effect, Sugar Free Monster Energy drink is really popular and if you have a diet soda that's not selling well, changing the packaging to be more like the popular successful thing is an easy choice. Not sure if Monster started the trend or they're just the biggest example that I know of.

Lot of good stuffs are here! I generally appreciate this everyday chemistry & biology in the grocery store line. The execution was rather good, I was a bit afraid the main arc would be "people don't understand anything so they pay attention to the wrong details" (which is so 1950), but it was pretty balanced between facts and ideas and evil companies. +1: About thorium reactors. Whenever an environmentalist starts to brag about peak oil, resource depletion or anything like that, the reaction is always something like "Thorium is abundant in the crust, it'll fuel our civilization for thousand years". I don't think people mean it in a serious scientific way, it's just a killer one-liner for CEOs. I don't think it means anything. +2: No spherical cows? I'm disappointed. +3: "I don't want to be Hulk. I do Hulk but I don't like that I do that." Dr. Robert Bruce Banner

1. No apologies. Angela's Choice has to mean something. Grants you immunity, for starters. 2. I went to Nebula, clicked your name under Subscriptions, clicked on the video, let it play a bit, then skipped to the end & finished the video. If that doesn't credit you a view, please let me know. I had watched as usual by clicking "Watch on YouTube". I didn't join Nebula to save the dough. I just want your backup plan to be viable. 3. Of course many of your viewers have horror stories about losing our work. My own favorite one is the origin story of a disclaimer form we had to sign that we nicknamed after our EE grad friend during my frosh year. The GVW Memorial Form. See, he logged on to the campus 360, spent 7 hours typing his term project into memory, but forgot to type Save at the beginning. The computer went down for planned maintenance & all that work went poof. He was so pissed, he planted a little bomb in the computer that he'd discovered by dumpster diving OS printouts. When the operators tried to bring the computer back up, it wouldn't boot. There had been no rule against that. That's why we all had to sign that form.

It is capitalism that drives the continued use of "rbst-free" as a marketing technique. Once the consumer preference for rbst-free was created (sometime in the early 1990's, if I recall correctly), the preference became a stable choice of consumers, causing the dairy farmers to continue to avoid using rbst to keep their market share.

I am going to address a completely different aspect of this video than most of the previous commenters. I frequently work on dairy farms doing maintenance and have some strong opinions on where you should buy your milk. If you want to feel good about how the animals producing the milk you drink are treated you should try to buy your milk from some sort of local dairy cooperative. Small scale dairy farmers care deeply about the health of each individual animal on their farm. God forbid you need to do some maintenance work that inconveniences their cows in any way! Please do not think I am advocating the small farms that sell raw milk to people totally unaware of the potentially devastating consequences of unpasteurized dairy.

QANTUM QANTUM QANTUM

MSG free, gluten free, GMO free, rBST free... all of these have a specific target, it's people who exhibit food puritanism, it's for people for whom "natural" is better than anything "artificial" (this when it comes to food, but we have examples with vaccines too, it's pretty much the same type of reasoning at play). And that's actually not a small section of the public, I mean ask anybody "is it better for food to be natural/organic?" By the way "sugar free" is for the same public, it focusing on removing the sugar it doesn't focus on adding artificial sweeteners.

I'm not rueing this day. It's always a good day for Dairy Cows.

Oh, I knew the EU had banned rBST cuz "it's bad for the cows" but never bothered to dig into it. Turns out it was poor study design (though I should really verify that for myself and not take Dr Collier's word for it). There is so much to be said about how science is produced by/for governments and how industry similarly gets to influence things. Food production is so messed up in so many ways from the industry influences to the both necessary (food safety and all that) and needless bureaucracy (redundant paperwork, byzantine processes and fees that favor large producers). Glad to see Dr Collier is skeptical of both the "GMO" and "organic" side of the agricultural stuff (it's the same giant companies that produce the vast majority of it, whether it's the stuff sold cheap or at a premium, they get to write the rules as discussed). I just bought organic eggs today not cuz I like it but because thanks to the bird flu, it's cheaper to buy organic eggs. Oh yeah, I promised to offset that Blue Origin merch purchase. It will have to wait until the end of May, so in the meantime, Patreon support it is.

I somewhat disagree: Part of the motivation for producing GMO produce is to grow crops which can be treated with more pesticides and herbicides but still produce good yields. I argue that more pesticide and herbicide use in the world is a net negative, whether or not they end up in the final food product; They still end up in the soil and waterways. The same goes for organic produce: I buy organic to avoid ingesting extra pesticides and herbicides, but also to support agriculture that avoids using them in the first place. As for rBST, I've never really cared one way or the other since it doesn't lead to more chemical pollution. I often buy the cheaper cheddar.

I did not, in fact, rue the day.

Woo! The first video since I joined up, very excited.

Really good video with a lot of thoughts so sorry in advance for the lengthy essay. Appreciate all you do. One bit at 28:30 regarding the Climate Change part. There's a really good youtube video from PBS Terra titled "Who killed the Colorado River?" and is related to the video topic. In short, the video covers how Alfalfa as a crop requires a ton of irrigation, yet it is grown in abundance in the arid climates of locations like California and Arizona. Alfalfa is one of the most calorie dense crops to feed to livestock, but is unsustainable given it's water use at least in the locations they're primarily grown in the United States. Given that none of alfalfa is used to feed people unless indirectly to consumers of beef and dairy, consumer reduction of both products would maybe lead to more drought tolerant crops that can feed people with less water usage instead in their place. Collectively if the typical consumers of beef and dairy instead shifted their diet to consuming more vegetables intended for human consumption, not even giving up meat or dairy entirely but just cutting back significantly on both, it would have a more significant climate change impact that would be a positive. This is all assuming outdated agricultural laws like the Colorado River Compact remove the penalties of water conservation along the Colorado River as also covered in the PBS Terra video. I also tend to think given we're experiencing late stage capitalism, that if hormone use upped production by 15%, the outcome wouldn't be 15% less dairy cows in production. As you've said in other videos, line must go up or maybe that was Dan Olson or you both. Instead, assuming there were enough consumers ready to consume 15% more milk, cheese, and other milk byproducts, it seems much more likely dairy cow farms and companies that depend on dairy cow farm production would want to increase the population of cows as long as it continued to remain more profitable than other alternatives. As a side note to figure out why the label is on there, here is my best guess. I once took a road trip driving down I-5 freeway in California where a lot of the agricultural footage of PBS Terra looks like it was shot in part and noticed cows in really stinky smelling areas where there were no crops to feed them in pens growing adjacent to crops intended for agriculture. The living conditions of those animals looked horrendous and a cesspool for pathogens given that it smelled of cow poo. Cow poo where dense populations of cows were stuck in without the ability to graze or rest away from their own filth. I think deliberately providing those types of living conditions for animals is a form of min/maxing on the value of the cows as products though. By providing the cows as little as you can in terms of adequate living conditions other than calorie dense food and water that's just enough to keep them productive, while ignoring say the quality of life of the animal raised in such a system and likely min/maxing by use of hormones to increase dairy cow milk production, the company operating this business is doing everything they can to squeeze every cent of production out of the product which is the cows for slaughter or milk production. By providing a label that says their cows aren't given hormones just to increase production, I feel like it's a subtle way of saying, the company advertising the label treats their dairy cows better than a typical dairy cow farm that does use hormones. They don't min/max profits because while they do need to make a profit, they will make a profit by probably up charging the consumer a little bit extra by letting the consumer know they treat their cows more humanely. They're not generating the most profits they could be making by using hormones and treating their dairy cows inhumanely instead. I think if that was the goal though, I'd probably market similar to what Laughing Cow cheese makers do in addition to a mysterious asterisk. Make cute happy cow marketing imagery instead. I mean who would typically go through the effort of a deep dive to figure out why there's an asterisk to a milk jug label? Who? Probably not the most effective marketing tactic then. So maybe the people that operate those farms hold onto the belief that the hormones are harmful, and there's enough of an audience of consumers that likewise believe as such too that it's profitable to advertise and go through all the regulatory hoops to prove as much. I mean drinking raw milk and eating raw meat as disgusting as both are, is a trend. Maybe it doesn't need to make sense.

So Monsanto forced them to add the asterisk, not the misleading claim. Looks like a good if inconsequential thing. My guess given the evidence from the video would be that the hormone doesn't actually increase the profits much, so it costs little to forgo it, and you get some marketing benefits because of the 'debate'. The farming industry not really needing the supplementation would also explain it remaining banned in the EU despite weak justification.

I have a lot of thoughts about this video and it'll be hard to be concise, but to start I'll point out your fundamental misunderstanding about bovine hormones not affecting humans. Estrogen in cows is the same as that in humans, and it does get into the milk and then it does in fact get into and affect humans that drink that milk. There are many studies on the topic, but I'll point you to a concise video from Dr. Michael Greger's incredible website NutritionFacts.Org where he shares actual scientific studies and their results in easy to watch and understand video form, with links to every source so you can trust his info is as scientifically accurate as possible, which I know you and we as your audience should appreciate. https://nutritionfacts.org/video/the-effects-of-hormones-in-dairy-milk-on-cancer/ https://nutritionfacts.org/video/dairy-and-cancer/ In fact, most of your speculations can be answered through existing studies regarding the effects of milk (and meat, and eggs) on human health. For example https://nutritionfacts.org/video/estrogen-in-meat-dairy-and-eggs/ talks about estrogen in animal products and how it affects not just humans but also wild animals due to the amount of estrogen in animal urine from farms. Also, it is pronounced Mast-eye-tis and it would make you sound a lot more informed if you could pronounce it correctly rather than blowing it off as you did. Without writing an entire novel, I urge you and your viewers to seek more information regarding this topic because you should hold yourself to a higher standard of information than what you shared here, and I'm very disappointed in this video.

Wow. I was wondering the same thing. I just thought that it was a marketing thing like Organic but that didn't make sense because it's on the Kroger milk which. is the cheapest. But Kroger's farmers don't want to pay Bayer makes sense. Nice surprise ending. That made the video fun. Thanks for solving this mystery

As someone who was around in the 80s, the hormone debate was absolutely *not* big news in the 80s. The big news in the 80s (well, actually the 90s) about milk was the unexpected smash success of the "got milk?" ads. And we also inexplicably had "Milk Runs" in high school in the 80s, sponsored by the Milk Board, where we would run around the school a few times and then at the end we were "rewarded" with warm cartons of stale milk, which was as horrifying as it sounds.

Hey Angela, thanks for the video! One minor thing, at 30:09 you mentioned that Bayer is the Big Evil Company now, but I'd argue they were much worse than Monsanto already. Bayer was part of a German pharmaceutical conglomerate called IG Farben in 1925 and you can probably imagine where this is going...

You had me at Monsanto...

Someone involved in the making of Omen II knew in 1978. https://ldw.portents.ca/files/monsanto/Monsanto_Board_Meeting.mp4

I’ve always associated the “hormone free” farms with the ones that export (powdered) milk.

Watch Bitter Harvest starring Ron Howard 1981. It's all about dairy cows.

This is one of the best Patreon videos. I'm taking notes. I learned a lot of information to support what I thought. So now I can argue more accurately.

This is exactly the kind of unexpectedness I subscribed for

I'm sure it's going to be a fun video.