A few days ago, I noticed an interesting word in my old dictionary: "staggerwort." It was defined as "a ragwort (Senecio aureus)." I turned to "ragwort" and found it defined as "any of several herbs of the genus Senecio; esp tansy ragwort -- see golden ragwort, purple ragwort."
I looked into ragwort and found that it has several alkaloids, some of which make cattle and horses stagger when they consume ragwort in noticeable quantities. Ragwort alkaloids can make their way into cow milk, and a 2017 study found that heating milk via pasteurization and UHT sterilization left the alkaloids completely intact. (See https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28829252/, "Fate of pyrrolizidine alkaloids during processing of milk of cows treated with ragwort" by de Nijs et al.) Even fermentation such as to make yogurt and cheese only partially decreased the amount of the ragwort alkaloids.
My elderly mother, who doesn't eat much these days but still likes her milk and ice cream, has been complaining of a lot of vertigo. Falls in her age group and ethnicity are a very high risk, as high as 1 out of 3 for a serious fall in a given year. The risk of a fall is much higher for Caucasians than for Hispanics/Asians and African-Americans. (See the WHO Global Report on Falls Prevention in Older Age, accessible online at https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789241563536.) I thought at first this heightened fall risk could be solely due to age-related brain damage, but that doesn't explain why African Americans have a smaller fall risk, for they have a much higher risk of stroke. What does seem to fit the ethnicity differences is milk consumption. Only Caucasians drink a lot of milk into their later years due to their not being lactose intolerant.
Ragwort alkaloids could easily be in our milk without anybody realizing it because all of our milk (even raw milk, unless one milks the cow herself and carries the milk straight to her kitchen) gets pooled at dairies for processing. They could then contribute to increased balance issues. Dairy milk processing should be reviewed with an eye to limiting the amount of ragwort alkaloids present, especially since many dairy farmers now intentionally try to give their cows a more "natural" diet, which is one that would necessarily increase the cows' ability to access ragwort, an invasive weed in pastures throughout the central and western United States and in many other parts of the world. Further, the addition of new preservatives such as natamycin to our shredded cheese should be checked to make sure the new additives are not also killing off the human gut bacteria that could break down ragwort alkaloids.
We give so much publicity to other additives like RGBT in our milk, but nature has its own "additives" such as RGWT (i.e., ragwort) that we should also be aware of.
