More Information on Composition of Animal Products

Changes in the composition of a feed/forage crop, whether through conventional breeding, genetic engineering or environmental effects, may change the composition of the animal food products that humans consume (Dickinson and King, 1978; Keeler et al., 1978). The studies described in the previous section demonstrate the feed derived from transgenic crops is nutritionally comparable to feed derived from non-transgenic crops. No researcher was able to find any difference between animals fed transgenic and non-transgenic feed, irrespective of the species they studied or the variable they measured. Consequently, one would expect to see no difference in the quality of the milk, meat and eggs of animals that had eaten either transgenic or non-transgenic feed. The limited research on milk and fish fillets conducted to date supports this view.

Milk from lactating cows fed green chop Bt corn for 14 days was no different in either amount or quality of milk from cows fed green chop from the conventional counterpart (Faust and Miller, 1997). Similarly, milk from lactating cows fed complete diets containing soybean meal from glyphosate-tolerant soybeans did not differ in either amount or quality from the milk of cows fed the non-transgenic soybean variety (Hammond et al., 1996). The quality parameters they measured included the amounts of fat, protein and lactose and the number of somatic cells.

No differences were detected in catfish fed soybean meal from either the glyphosate-tolerant soybeans or the non-transgenic progenitor soybean variety (Hammond et al., 1996). They measured moisture, protein, fat and ash content in catfish fillets.