Milk - Just Say NO

Essential Food Group?

 

 The average American eats close to 600 pounds of
dairy products a year, which makes it the single
largest component of their diet.  On television
we see reassuring images of healthy, beautiful
people assuring us that milk is good for us. Our
dieticians insist that "you've got to have milk,
or where will you get your calcium?"  School
lunches always have milk, and growing up weren't
you told that dairy products are an essential
food group?  Yes, the American Dairy Board has
done a very effective job of marketing this
product. Most people believe they need to consume
large, daily quantities of milk to achieve good
health.  NOTHING could be further from the truth.

If we look at this on a very basic level,  how
would you feel about drinking the milk from a dog
or a horse? A dog's milk is for pups, a cat's
milk is for kittens… Clearly this is how nature
intends it. The milk of every species of mammal
is unique and specifically designed to meet the
needs of that animal. Human's milk is designed to
take an infant from 8 pounds to 40 pounds in 18
months. Cow's milk is designed to take a calf
from 90 pounds to 1,000 pounds in 24 months.
Cow's milk is not designed for people. For one
thing, it has 20 times the casein of human milk.
Casein leads to numerous allergic reactions and
high levels of mucous in our noses and bowels.
Did you know that Elmer's glue is made from cow's
milk casein? That's why there's the picture of
Elsie the cow on each bottle.

 
WHAT IS MILK?

Milk is a maternal lactating secretion, a short
term nutrient for new-borns. Invariably, the
mother of any mammal will provide her milk for a
short period of time immediately after birth and
then wean the new-born from the milk. Humans are
the only species that continue to drink milk.
The fact is  that the body digests milk (any
milk) differently once gastric juices begin to
flow (at around 18-20 months old). Before gastric
juices flow, milk is alkaline an non-mucous
forming in the body, but once gastric juices
enter the picture, they turn the milk to acid,
forming mucous, causing sinus problems,
allergies, colds, etc.

From 1988 to 1993 there were over 2,700 articles
dealing with milk in the Medicine archives.
Fifteen hundred of these had milk as the main
focus of the article. Dr. Robert Kradjian
reviewed 500 of the 1,500 articles discarding
articles that dealt exclusively with animals or
inconclusive studies. To his horror, none of the
articles spoke of cow's milk as the "perfect
food" we have been led to believe by the milk
industry. The main focus of these reports were on
intestinal bleeding, anemia, allergic reactions
in infants and children, as well as infections
like salmonella. Contamination of milk by blood
and white cells (pus) was also discussed.

Among children some of the common problems found
were allergies, ear and tonsillar infections,
bedwetting, asthma, intestinal bleeding, colic,
and childhood diabetes. Pediatric literature
confirms that milk is the leading cause of
childhood allergies. Ear specialists frequently
insert tubes into the ear drums of infants to
treat recurrent ear infections. It has replaced
the previously popular tonsillectomy to become
the number one surgery in the country.
Unfortunately, most of these specialists don't
realize that over 50% of these children will
improve and have no further ear infections if
they just stop drinking their milk. In adults the
problems centered more around heart disease and
arthritis, allergies, sinusitis, and the more
serious questions of leukemia, lymphoma and
cancer, especially breast cancer.

It Gets Worse

 

Fifty years ago an average cow produced 2,000
pounds of milk per year. Today, the top producers
give 50,000 pounds!  How is this accomplished?
Mainly, via drugs, antibiotics, and hormones. The
latest high-tech onslought on the poor cow is
bovine growth hormone (BGH, aka rBGH). This
genetically engineered drug is used to stimulate
milk production, and according to it's
manufacturer Monsanto (creator of genetically
modified food and now animals), does not effect
the milk or meat. The FDA gave its approval for
the sale of Monsanto's BST product back in 1993,
but in Canada and Europe it remains unapproved
because of strong indications that it causes
cancer


Dr. Samuel S. Epstein at the University of
Illinois in Chicago in 1996 published a paper
arguing that IGF-1 (insulin-like growth factor)
which comes from BGH-treated cows promotes cancer
of the breast and of the colon in humans who
drink such milk. Epstein pulled no punches: "In
short," he wrote, "with the active complicity of
the FDA, the entire nation is currently being
subjected to an experiment involving large-scale
adulteration of an age-old dietary staple by a
poorly characterized and unlabeled biotechnology
product,BGH. Disturbingly, this experiment
benefits only a very small segment of the
agrichemical industry while providing no matching
benefits to consumers. Even more disturbingly, it
poses major potential public health risks for the
entire U.S. population," Dr. Epstein wrote. IGF-1
survives milk pasteurization and human intestinal
digestion, it can be directly absorbed into the
human bloodstream, particularly in infants.

 

It will be difficult for the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) to acknowledge that milk
from BGH-treated cows might be implicated in
common cancers. Historically, the FDA has
maintained a very close relationship with
Monsanto, the chemical company that spent a
billion dollars developing BGH. The FDA approved
BGH for cows in 1993 and issued regulations that
made it illegal to label milk BGH-produced or
BGH-free. Some of the FDA officials who approved
BGH and who established the regulations
discouraging labeling products as BGH had
previously worked for Monsanto.

 

 In 1994, Monsanto sued two grocery sores that
labeled milk BGH-free, because the chemical giant
feared that, given a choice, consumers would
reject BGH-produced mlk. The FDA's anti-labeling
regulations (signed into law by a former Monsanto
official) were clearly intended to help Monsanto
succeed in this marketing ploy.

 

Sorry, There's More

 

I hate to tell you this, but the bovine leukemia
virus is found in more than 60% of  dairy cows in
theUnited States! (In some areas up to 90%)
Unfortunately, when the milk is pooled, a very
large percentage of all milk produced is
contaminated (90 to 95 per cent). Of course the
virus is killed in pasteurisation--if the
pasteurisation was done correctly. However, there
can be accidents. One of these occurred in
theChicago area in April, 1985. At a modern,
large, milk processing plant an accidental "cross
connection" between raw and pasteurized milk
occurred. A violent salmonella outbreak followed,
killing 4 and making an estimated 150,000 ill.
And remember, 60% of these cows were carrying the
bovine leukemia virus.

 What happens to other species of mammals when
they are exposed to the bovine leukemia virus?
It's a fair question and the answer is not
reassuring. Virtually all animals exposed to the
virus develop leukemia. This includes sheep,
goats, and even primates such as rhesus monkeys
and chimpanzees.

 At Roswell Park Memorial Institute inBuffalo,
New York,  ovarian cancer--a particularly nasty
tumour--was associated with milk consumption by
workers. Drinking more than one glass of whole
milk or equivalent daily gave a woman a 3.
1 higher risk over non-milk users.

A huge study showed that human breast milk in
over 14,000 women had contamination by
pesticides! Further, it seems that the sources of
the pesticides are meat and--you guessed
it--dairy products.

 Two cardiologists from Conneticut (Oster & Ross)
identified an essential enzyme in milk that
destroyed one third of the atrial material in the
arteries of their patients. galactose, a milk
sugar. According to recent research, galactose
accelerates aging, particularly brain-aging, in
mice and rats. In some recent studies, galactose
is specifically used as an "aging accelerator" to
test the protective effects of various
supplements against it.

 One particular protein, beta-caseine, found in
cow's milk, can trick the immune system into
attacking and destroying the insulin-producing
cells of the pancreas. There are 52 kinds of
antibiotics and 59 bioactive hormones found in
milk
 But What About All The Calcium?

 Milk is often pitched as a great source of
Calcium. It is not. Yes, it has a high calcium
content, but the body cannot utilize it, in fact,
consumption of milk actually leaches calcium from
the bones! Because the milk is highly acidic, the
body needs to buffer it with more internal
calcium than you get from the milk. The 10-1
ratio of calcium to magnesium found in milk is
insanely high and devestating to the body.

 
Got Milk?
 

The majority of us have been raised with milk and
dairy products and for many it may seem foreign
to not have it. Luckily, there are many amazing
alternatives available. We have soy milk, rice
milk, oat milk, almond milk, there are new
products coming out all the time. It may seeem to
 taste a bit different at first, but  I guarantee
after a short while you will start to love it and
wonder how anyone could possibly drink milk from
a cow. Are they mad?

I went though this about 5 years ago and soy milk
tasted weird at first but after a little while it tasted
Really Good!  Now, my favourite is Almond Milk.

To your health,

Pueo



NotMilk Links:

    * http://NotMilk.com/Kradjian