Synthetic dairy products, including milk made from genetically engineered yeast, are being touted as environmentally friendly health foods that should replace real milk from cows and other animals.

But this deceptive greenwashing is putting human health at risk, according to Dr. John Fagan, a molecular biologist who worked with the U.S. National Institutes of Health for 8.5 years.

Fagan is cofounder and chief scientist at the Health Research Institute (HRI). He spoke with Errol Schweizer for an episode of his podcast, "The Checkout," detailing concerning new findings about "animal-free" dairy. Along with missing important micronutrients that are abundant in real milk, fake milk — which Fagan and others refer to as a "synbio milk-like product" — contains compounds that have never before existed in the human diet.

"It’s really strikingly different. It just shows that this is not like milk. You can’t say that this is nutritionally like milk in any way," Fagan says.

Full-Spectrum Analysis Reveals Unknown Compounds in Fake Milk​

At Fagan’s HRI, they use "cutting-edge mass spectrometric and molecular genetic approaches to make the invisible visible." This full-spectrum analysis is capable of revealing so-called "nutritional dark matter," even in foods as mundane as wheat.

FDA Hasn’t Tested the 92 Unknown Compounds in Fake Milk for Safety​

As Fagan explains to Schweizer, one form of synthetic biology involves bacteria, yeast or fungus cells genetically engineered to produce another compound, in this case cow milk proteins. The idea is once you have milk proteins, you can make something from that that supposedly is milk, he says. But Fagan and colleagues used a mass spectrometer to chart the differences in composition between synbio milk-like products, biodynamic milk and organic milk.

While important micronutrients exist in organic and biodynamic milk, they’re missing, or very low in, synbio milk. Further, mysterious, unknown compounds were detected in the fake milk that don’t exist in real milk. Fagan says:

"These are small compounds, and they include things like … fungicide and other really weird compounds ... These are huge amounts of these compounds that are present in synbio milk and not present in real milk. Literally, I counted and there are 92 different compounds.

Most of them are so uncommon that we don’t even have names for them. And so we can say with good confidence that these compounds have never been part of the human food supply before, and yet they are the predominant small molecules in synbio milk."