英文原文

The latest weird food idea: osteoblast milk product

by Marion Nestle

I had never heard of OMP (osteoblast milk product or protein) until this morning when a reporter from the Associated Press in Beijing sent me an e-mail about it. A milk company in China, it seems, is adding OMP to its milk and the Chinese food safety agency is investigating. The companies say OMP is safe and FDA-approved.

It didn’t take long to find out what this is about. Japanese investigators isolated a protein, kininogen, from milk and demonstrated in laboratory experiments that it promotes bone growth. These and other experiments in rats and people also show that it stimulates bone formation (I haven’t read them so I can’t comment on their quality).

FDA approved? Not exactly. In response to a petition from a company called Snow Foods, the FDA agreed that the use of milk proteins as additives to dairy foods is GRAS (generally recognized as safe) for human consumption. But its “approval” letter assumes that the proteins are mainly lactoferrin and lactoperoxidase, which are pretty well known to be safe. The FDA’s letter says nothing about the use of kininogen as a bone-promoting agent.

I can see why the Chinese government is concerned. It is one thing to demonstrate the effects of a protein in experiments, and quite another to add that protein to a food likely to be consumed by children. The protein is already in milk and there is no evidence that adding more of it will make any difference to bone growth. Without further studies to make sure that adding this protein does no harm, putting it into milk seems like a bad idea.

This seems like more about marketing than health, and it sounds like it is part of the huge current effort to sell more milk to the Chinese people. I am bewildered by the pressure on the Chinese population to drink more milk and eat more milk products. Aren’t most Chinese sensitive to undigested lactose? None of this makes any sense to me. Milk is not an essential nutrient or food and the Chinese have done fine for millennia without it.

I will be watching the unfolding of this story with much interest. Stay tuned.

参考中文

最新的怪诞食品概念:OMP牛奶

马里恩·内斯特

在北京联合通讯社的一个记者给我发电子邮件之前，我从未听说过OMP(造骨细胞乳制品或造骨细胞乳蛋白)。看来中国的一家公司正向牛奶中添加OMP而中国食品安全机构正在调查此事。那家公司声明OMP是安全的且经FDA认证。

找出真相并不难。日本科学家从牛奶中分离出一种蛋白质——激肽原并在实验室模拟实验中发现其能促进骨骼生长。小鼠和人身上的活体实验也证明了它在骨构成方面有刺激作用（我对这方面没有研究所以不能对实验效果做任何评论）。

经FDA认证？不完全是。由于一家名为Snow Foods公司的申请，FDA认证了向人消耗乳制品中添加其他乳蛋白的行为为GRAS级（generally recognized as safe，通常认为安全）。但认证信显示添加的蛋白主要是乳铁传递蛋白和乳过氧化物酶，这两者的安全性早已得到认可。FDA的认证信对激肽原作为骨生长因子则只字未提。

我能理解政府为何如此关心这件事。这件事说白了就是将还在实验阶段的物质加入到很可能为孩子们消费的食物中。牛奶中已含有这种蛋白而且没有证据显示额外的添加这种物质会对骨生长带来任何作用。在更多的实验确实证明安全性之前就将其添加入牛奶显然是个坏主意。

这件事看起来更像为了市场而非健康，而且也像是为向中国人卖更多牛奶的巨大努力中的一部分。我对中国推动居民消费更多牛奶和乳制品的做法感到困惑。难道大多数中国人不是乳糖不耐受的吗？这对我没有任何意义。牛奶并不是必须的营养品或食品，而中国人也已经过了几千年没有牛奶的日子了。

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