The Story of our Health Message

From a Government Report

Nor should we overlook the fact that similar cautions against the free use of butter were uttered by authorities many years later. The prevalence of tubercle bacilli in butter was forcefully set forth in a publication issued by the United States Department of Agriculture in 1908. In summing up the conclusions reached, based upon many experiments made at the Bureau of Animal Industry Experiment Station, the following statements are made: SHM 199.4

“(1) The conduct of tubercle bacilli in milk is to move both upward with the cream and downward with the sediment and thus, in both directions, away from the intermediate layer of skim milk. The downward movement is due to their high specific gravity and the upward movement to the tenacity with which they adhere to the comparatively large cream globules. Hence when cream is separated from infected milk, it will contain, volume for volume, more tubercle bacilli than the milk. SHM 200.1

“(2) The frequency with which tubercle bacilli occur in sediment from milk is a fair measure of the frequency with which they occur in cream. What this means for the infection of commercial cream may be judged from the following paragraph quoted verbatim from the last [1907] Annual Report of the Secretary of Agriculture:¹ SHM 200.2

“‘The examination of sediment taken from cream separators of public creameries throughout the country has demonstrated the presence of tubercle bacilli in about one fourth of the samples.’ SHM 200.3

“(3) When butter is prepared from infected cream, tubercle bacilli are transferred to it in such numbers that they will be present in greater concentration than in the milk from which the cream was derived; hence, measure for measure, infected butter is a greater tuberculous danger than infected milk. ... SHM 200.4

“(7) Unimpeachable evidence proves conclusively that tubercle bacilli of the bovine type, from bovine sources, must be classed as highly infectious for man; hence, tubercle bacilli in butter cannot be ignored because they are usually derived from bovine sources.”—E. C. Schroeder, M.D.V., and W. E. Cotton, Tubercle Bacilli in Butter; Their Occurrence, Vitality, and Significance, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Animal Industry—Circular 127, pp. 20, 21. Washington, D.C.: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1908. SHM 200.5

Mrs. White maintained that the time would come when, due to increasing disease among animals, it would be unsafe to continue the use of animal products. Testimonies for the Church 7:124, 135. Until her death she personally did not use butter nor did it appear on her table. However, she affirmed that eggs, milk, and butter were not to “be classed with flesh meat.” Testimonies for the Church 7:135. In later years (after pasteurization and refrigeration had made the use of dairy products much safer) she recognized that “butter is less harmful when eaten on cold bread than when used in cooking,” but still maintained that “as a rule, it is better to dispense with it altogether,” especially “where the purest article cannot be obtained.”—The Ministry of Healing, 302; Counsels on Diet and Foods, 351. She taught that when properly prepared, olives, like nuts, would “supply the place of butter and flesh meats,” and asserted that “the oil, as eaten in the olive, is far preferable to animal oil or fat.”—The Ministry of Healing, 298. SHM 201.1