Unknown Compounds Found in Synthetic Milk

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At Mercola.com, Dr. Joseph Mercola raises the alarm over unknown compounds that have been found in synthetic yeast-based milk. He writes:

Synthetic dairy products, including milk made from genetically engineered yeast, are being touted as environmentally friendly health foods that should replace real milk from cows and other animals. But this deceptive greenwashing is putting human health at risk, according to Dr. John Fagan, a molecular biologist who worked with the U.S. National Institutes of Health for 8.5 years.

Fagan is cofounder and chief scientist at the Health Research Institute (HRI). He spoke with Errol Schweizer for an episode of his podcast, “The Checkout,” detailing concerning new findings about “animal-free” dairy. Along with missing important micronutrients that are abundant in real milk, fake milk — which Fagan and others refer to as a “synbio milk-like product” — contains compounds that have never before existed in the human diet.

“It’s really strikingly different. It just shows that this is not like milk. You can’t say that this is nutritionally like milk in any way,” Fagan says.¹

Full-Spectrum Analysis Reveals Unknown Compounds in Fake Milk

At Fagan’s HRI, they use “cutting-edge mass spectrometric and molecular genetic approaches to make the invisible visible.”² This full-spectrum analysis is capable of revealing so-called “nutritional dark matter,” even in foods as mundane as wheat. The fact is, an estimated 85% of the nutritional components in common foods remain unquantified. The health implications of most compounds also remain largely unknown. New Scientist notes:³

“This is also true of individual micronutrients. ‘Consider beta-carotene,’ says [Albert-László Barabási at Harvard Medical School, who coined the term nutritional dark matter] … ‘It tends to be positively associated with heart disease, according to epidemiological studies, but studies adding beta-carotene to the diet do not show health benefits.

One potential reason is that beta-carotene never comes alone in plants; about 400 molecules are always present with it. So epidemiology may be detecting the health implications of some other molecule.’ Another probable cause is the effect of the microbiome on dark nutrients, says [FooDB founder David] Wishart. ‘Most dark nutrients are chemically transformed by your gut bacteria.

That’s probably why studies on the benefits of different foods give relatively ambiguous results. We don’t properly control for the variation in gut microflora, or our innate metabolism, which means different people get different doses of metabolites from their food.’”

We know even less about the constituents of processed foods and synthetic foods that ignorantly claim to be “equivalents” to whole foods, such as “animal-free meats” or “animal-free milk.”

At HRI, Fagan and colleagues are using their full-spectrum analysis for a new category in the food industry — synbio milk-like product. For a bit of backstory, in 1994 Fagan returned close to $614,000 in grant money — and withdrew a request for an additional $1.25 million — to protest genetic engineering and the release of GMOs into the environment.

At the time, he said, “The benefits of genetic engineering have been oversold, and the dangers have been underrepresented.”⁴ His efforts to advocate for food purity and safety, nutrition and food security have continued via HRI.

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