I’ve just been asked a wonderful question – whether increased oestrogen levels in the water supply is attributable to the feeding of oestrogen to hens and dairy cattle, in order to increase yield.
Interesting, both for me and for the questioner – as Mothers of Sons, we have no wish to find ourselves unexpectedly Mothers of Daughters instead.
My first, and I think correct, instinct is that as far as egg production goes, it would be cheaper and easier to start with a fresh hen than to feed oestrogen to a menopausal one. There is, after all, an optimum outcome of one egg per day per chook, max.
Cows I felt less certain about. In a website chatroom, I recently came across a group of people scandalised to discover that cows’ milk is a by-product of birth: one cannot be instigated without the other. However oestrogen, whilst great for bovine hot flushes, has never to my knowledge been used in milk production.
According to a paper in The Internet Journal of Urology 2004 (I’m sure you have your own copy about the place somewhere) oestrogen does enter the milk supply, purely because (interesting fact) cows, unlike people, continue to lactate whilst pregnant. So the milk from pregnant cows enters the food chain, as it has always done. The only difference in recent years is that this milk is used to make baby formula. The jury is however still out (as far as I know) on whether oestrogen could survive the production process.
No. I’m afraid we have to come back to the obvious cause of rising oestrogen levels in drinking water; pollution from the contraceptive pill. All over the world, salmon are poppimg Viagra in a vain attempt to get it up for long enough to spawn. Our sons, meanwhile, already unmanned by tight jeans and girl-power, are fending off man-boobs with bottles of Highland Spring.
The Sisterhood has a lot to answer for.
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