Whole article at:
http://www.sciencenews.org/sn_arc99/6_26_99/fob2.htm
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Cows' milk, diabetes connection bolstered
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By N. Seppa

Many studies have linked cows' milk consumed by babies to subsequent
diabetes, but >some researchers still doubt that it causes the disease.
The association is based on animal experiments, they note, or indirect
evidence (SN: 10/19/96, p. 249), such as studies in which parents of
diabetic children try to recollect when their babies first started
drinking milk-based formula.

Now, Finnish researchers have avoided the vagaries of poor recall by
studying children from birth. In so doing, they have added to the case
against cows' milk.

By monitoring babies in diabetes-prone families, the scientists find that
infants getting formula that includes cows' milk are more likely later to
develop the immune reactions associated with juvenile-onset, or type I,
diabetes than are babies getting a substitute. The scientists reported
the findings this week in San Diego at the 59th Annual Scientific
Sessions of the American Diabetes Association.

The researchers tracked, until age 8 months, 173 newborns in Finland who
had a close relative with type I diabetes. To augment their mothers'
milk, half of these babies received milk-based formula and the rest got a
formula in which the cows' milk proteins had been broken into fragments
called peptides. The two formulas taste and smell the same, so parents
and researchers didn't know which one a baby was drinking.

Babies' immune systems largely ignore cows' milk proteins that have been
chopped up. However, contact with one intact protein in cows' milk,
bovine insulin, may set off a destructive process, suggest immunologist
Outi Vaarala and her colleagues at the University of Helsinki. The immune
system would attack pancreas islet cells that make human insulin, which
resembles bovine insulin, and would produce antibodies.
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