What is melamine? Is it in my milk?

Every few months the media seems to dig up a new quality control issue with Chinese products. Many of these are largely just typical media fear factoring, but the recent “melamine in milk” debacle is very real and very wide-spanning.

If you’re like me, you probably gasped in horror when it was reported that all the major milk distributors in China had milk tainted with melamine. You heard about the babies dying and started looking ominously at your fridge.

Then, again assuming you’re like me, you stopped and said, “wait, WTF is melamine?”

Not boring anyone with the chemical details, essentially it is an organic compound that in one form or another is likely all over your house. When combined with formaldehyde, a resin is created that is commonly used is everything from kitchenware to whiteboards and commercial filters. It’s also used to make fire/heat resistant materials and some fertilizers.

So why on earth would any but the most malicious people stick melamine in milk? The reason is that melamine has the ability to fudge the numbers and make products appear to have more protein in them than they actually do. Melamine doesn’t actually contain protein, but by increasing the nitrogen levels, it fools the tests used to gauge protein into thinking there’s more of the good stuff than there actually is.

You may remember last year hundreds of pets died after eating tainted pet food? Same stuff. Melamine was mixed with vegetable proteins (rice, wheat and corn gluten) from China and ended up doing a number on our furry friends.

Melamine, in and of itself, isn’t overly toxic (they force fed it to rats and dogs in the 40s and it didn’t do much damage). However it is believed that when combined with cyanuric acid (another nitrogen booster) the two create a substance that is more toxic than either separately. It is this new compound that scientists believe causes acute renal failure (aka, your kidneys going nuclear).

Bottom line, melamine and cyanuric acid are both adulterants unethically added to products to make the products appear to have more protein than they actually have – likely because they’ve been heavily cut with water in an effort to lower production costs.

At the time of writing, four infants have died and more than 6,200 are ill because of this tainted milk.

Earlier this month it appeared to be just Sanlu (part owned by New Zealand’s Fonterra Cooperative Group Ltd.) milk powder had been tainted. However tests on products from Yili Industrial Group Co. and Mengniu Dairy Co. (both of Inner Mongolia) as well as Shanghai’s Bright Dariy all revealed traces of melamine (link).

So, brass tacks – I drink milk, am I going to die?

Yep. But not likely because you drank milk in China.

Xinhua reports, “Chinese State Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ), along with 150 state level food testing centers, checked more than 400 liquid milk producers, and found most diary products were safe to drink.”

The 408 liquid milk producers, including Sanyuan and Nestle, were not found containing the chemical.

However, the test results showed nearly 10 percent of the sample batches tested from Mengniu and Yili, 2 top brands on Chinese diary market, contained 0.8 – 7 and 0.7 – 8.4 milligrams of melamine per kilogram respectively while 6 batches out of 93 from Bright, contained 0.6 to 8.6 milligrams of melamine per kilogram.

According to medical experts, these levels of contamination will not cause any illness, such as kidney stones, for an adult who drinks less than 2 liters of the tainted milk daily. So, unless you have an unnatural thirst for the white stuff, you should be alright. However, if you have young children who have consumed tainted products, it might be advisable to get them checked out.