The Perils of Dairy
If there is only one thing you pay attention to on this entire website, it should be this video. I find myself sharing this video with anyone who is questioning whether dairy is really as good for them as they had thought.
Below is a link to the video as well as corresponding notes I have taken from the video.
Perils of Dairy Lecture by Dr. John McDougall
p.s. skip the first 15 minutes of this lecture - it’s just a lot of thank you’s to people at this conference…
Cow’s Milk NOT Human Breast Milk
When I am talking about milk, I am not talking about mother’s milk.. human breastmilk is absoultely essential for human babies. If you fail to breastfeed your child, you’re causing some problems that can be immediate, lifethreatening and can also be long term. It’s estimated that bottle feeding kills more than 1 million children a year across the world.
If you bottle feed your baby, your baby has:
2 – 4 times risk of crib death
60 times more chance of that child developing pneumonia within the first 3 months of life
10 – 12 times greater risk of going to the hospital in the first year of life
Reduced intelligence – IQ is decreased
Behavioral speech difficulties
Problems early in life such as infections, asthma, eczema, type 1 diabetes, cancers including leukemia and lymphomas are increased early in life
Then, as an adult, there is a greater risk of heart disease, obesity, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, food allergies, ulcerative colitis and chron’s disease
Human breastmilk is the only acceptable food for human babies!
If I were surgeon general of the US, one of the things I would do is make formula a prescription item. A doctor would not be allowed to prescribe in unless it was justified – this is a life and death situation.
Dairy Products
When I’m talking to you about dairy products, I’m talking about all dairy products. That means non fat milk, kefir, yogurt, butter, cheese, cottage cheese, all the dairy products.
The Dairy Industry
The dairy industry is supporting an 11 billion dollar/year milk business and a 16 billion dollar/year cheese business.
They have dedicated 165.7 million dollars this year to promoting dairy products and to show the healthfulness of dairy products.
They’re are going to pay with that 165.7 million dollars to get research to show benefits of their products.
Cow’s Milk is For Cows!
This evolution has gone on for as long as cows have been in existence to develop this ideal food for baby cows called cows milk. It does a good job, it grows baby cows really well.
But cow’s milk is not the right food for people. Milk is specifically designed for a species of animal. One of the qualities of the milk is that it has to fit the needs related to growth. Let’s look at some figures concerning the growth of an animal compared to the protein content, which is vital to growth. Let’s look at the protein content relative to the rate of growth. The rate of growth here is the amount of time it takes to double the size of an animal.
Human Breastmilk: Protein: 1.2 grams/100 ml; Doubles in Size in: 180 days
Horses: Protein: 2.4 grams; Doubles in Size: 60 days
Cows: 3.3 grams; Doubles in Size: 47 days
Goat: Protein: 4.1 grams; Doubles in Size: 19 Days
Dogs: Protein: 7.1 grams; Doubles in Size: 8 Days
Rats: Protein: 11.8 grams; Doubles in Size: 4.5 days
So, cows milk is a food that has the protein content ideal for an animal that doubles in size about 4 times as fast as we do.
Cows, Calcium and Strong Bones:
Calcium content:
Calcium content of cows milk is 4 times as high as human breastmilk.
Milk is sold to people as the ideal food to build strong bones. Originally milk was sold to you based on it’s calcium content. If you consumed the gallons of milk and handfuls of calcium pills that are recommend you would die. You would die from soft tissue calcification, your kidneys would get calcified, your muscles would get calcified, your lungs would get calcified, you would die.
We have a very intelligent gut wall that when you overload it with calcium, it will block it from getting into your bloodstream to save your life. If you give your gut the correct amount of calcium that you can very easily get from a plant based diet, your gut will allow it into your bloodstream and it will ALWAYS meet your calcium needs!!
Now, how do I know that it will always meet your calcium needs? Because I have searched, the World Health Organization has searched, the US Government has searched for a single case of calcium deficiency caused by a low calcium diet. There has never been a case of dietary calcium deficiency ever reported in the world literature. There is no such disease.
Yet, billions of people live on diets that contain no dairy products, no tums, no calcium pills and they grow normal adult skeletons.
So, the calcium pitch didn’t work. So, now the dairy industry has turned their focus to how dairy builds strong bones. Now, they are claiming that the protein causes the bones to grow stronger. They have spent millions of dollars in research and advertising to tell you this.
The Dairy Association has this 3 A Day campaign now to build strong bones. They’re telling you not just to consume low fat products, but any of their products.
Calcium is a mineral that comes from the ground. It does not come from milk, it does not come from the plants, it originates from the ground as do all of the essential minerals that we need. No animal eats ground, so we want to get the mineral from the next closer source: plants.
Plants are so sufficient in minerals, that mineral deficiency is almost non existent in the world except for some very rare cases in third world countries (iodine, selenium, zinc) – very isolated situations, nothing we would ever have to worry about in our society.
Recommendations given for calcium intake:
Nursing or Pregnant: 150 – 200 mg/day
Average intake in underdeveloped countries: 300 – 500 mg/day
Average American: 500 – 600mg/day
World Health Organization: 400 – 500 mg/day
Dairy Industry Influenced US Organizations Recommendations:
US Food and Nutrition Board: 1000 mg/day
National Institutes of Health: 1000 – 1500 mg/day
How in the world could we have recommendations so varied? Because calcium intake has little or nothing to do with the health of the bones.
The dairy industry has paid for almost all of the research studying the effects of calcium on bone health.
Whenever you read a study, look at who paid for it.
Out of only 57 they conducted, they decided that just 21 of them were worth considering. You’d think that with the amount of money they are spending on this research and advertising these studies, they would have 1,000′s of studies. Of these 21 studies, in which it was clear to all parties that the study was paid for by the Dairy Association:
57% showed no benefit from cow’s milk on bone health
29% were favorable
14% actually showed that cow’s milk hurt the bones
There are only 7 studies published in the literature on the effect of cows milk that are randomized, controlled studies! Of those 7 studies, only ONE tested the effect of fluid cow’s milk on post-menopausal women, which are the subjects that are most likely to develop osteoporosis, and that one study, published in 1985, shows that cows milk hurts the bones and it was paid for the by the national dairy industry.
Read the study here: American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in February of 1985, but remember that the results were written by the Dairy Association, so read through the twisted interpretation.
Those who got the milk lost twice as much bone as those who didn’t get the milk! They will never ever do this study again!
The protein having a detrimental effect on the ca
Recker and Heaney, who performed this study, say that “the protein content of the milk supplement may have a negative affect on the calcium balance possibly through an increase in kidney losses of calcium or through a direct effect on bone resorption”. Focus on those words: PROTEIN HAVING A DETRIMENTAL EFFECT ON THE CALCIUM. Don’t forget those words, because the dairy industry has forgotten them. They go onto say, “This may be have been due to an average 30% increase in protein intake during the milk supplementation”. It says it right there in their paper!
What causes osteoporosis? The bones are designed to last a lifetime, your bones aren’t designed to dissolve when you are 40, 50, 60 years old so this has to be a disease. We are eating a diet not intended for human beings. This is a diet that we did not evolve upon.
Acidity and Alkalinity
One of the more serious problems of this kind of diet is that it is filled with acid. Below 7 is acid, above 7 is alkaline.
Certain foods are very acidic. Things like cheese. Parmesan cheese is the most acidic of all foods commonly consumed. Poultry, fish, seafood, all of your animal products are loaded with acids.
Alkaline foods are your fruits and vegetables.
So, we eat all of this acid in the SAD diet and our bodies maintain a slightly alkaline PH and then when we eat acid the body has to neutralize that acid. Why? Because the PH has to be maintained precisely and if it isn’t, other chemical reactions of the body don’t work and you get very sick.
So the body maintanis the PH by neutralizing the acid. How? The primary buffering system of the body is the bones, the bones dissolve, they release bicarbonates and other kinds of alkaline materials which neutralize the acids and that’s how you lose your bones. You essentially pour acid on them and they dissolve.
When we look around the world what we find is a direct correlation between animal protein intake and hip fractures. You see countries that consume a very alkaline diet have very low risks of hip fracture, when you see higher protein intakes, you see higher hip fracture rates. The more calcium you consume in a country, the higher the rate of hip fractures. You can not deny this data, you can not argue against this data.
In order to get the calcium balances, you measure the calcium in the urine and the feces and then subtract that from the amount of calcium that you eat and you get the calcium balance. Well, when you’re on a low protein diet you’re in positive calcium balance on a diet of 500 milligrams of calcium. You’re still in a positive calcium balance on 1400 milligrams of calcium. If you eat a high protein diet which is typical of Americans, even when you’re consuming 1400 milligrams of calcium per day, you’re still in a negative calcium balance. The moral of the story is no matter how much calcium you consume, you will not correct the problem until you deal with the cause, which is the high protein, high acid American diet.
This is not a problem of modern society. They have studied Eskimos from 500 years ago and have found the same issues.
Insulin Like Growth Factor – 1
Insulin like growth factor one (IGF-1) is a very powerful growth hormone. It will promote bone growth.
When you feed protein to people, you increase ILGF1 in their bodies and you increase bone growth and you can actually see that only if you neutralize the acid first.
You can also increase ILGF1 even more by increasing the amount of recumbent bovine growth factor (rBgh) that they put into milk to increase milk production. So when you put this into the cows in the production process, the milk that they produce also has more ILGF1 and by the way it’s not destroyed in pasteurization.
The end result is published in two studies. One on adolescent girls and one on post-menopausal women. And what they show is that if you feed milk to women, either adolescents or post-menopausal, you increase their ILGF1 levels by 10%. So, now the Dairy Industry has the mechanism for bone growth by feeding dairy products. Now, they’re not going to tell you all the details like you’ve got to neutralize the acid first, now they’ve got it. Unfortunately there are going to be people like myself that are going to tell you the rest of the story… the rest of the story is:
I
LGF1 is the strongest cancer promoter that people have identified. Not only do you grow body tissue, but you also grow cancer with ILGF1. It grows, breast, colon, prostate and lung cancer tremendously. It prevents cell death which you don’t want to happen when you are growing cancer cells and and increases cell proliferation. It is a very powerful cancer stimulator.
Whole vs. Low-fat vs. Skim Milk:
Whole milk is 49% fat and low-fat milk is still 31% fat! How could that be when it says on the side of the milk carton 3.5% fat – well, that’s 3.5% fat by weight, but no one eats their food by weight, you don’t eat a 5 pound diet, you eat a 2000 calorie diet. The denominator for all discussions in science on nutrition is calories, not weight, so of the calories that are in milk, 31% of those calories are from fat. So, what happens to the other relative concentrations of calories that make up skim milk? Remember you have to ultimately end up with 100% in terms of total calories.
Whole Milk: 49% fat, 21% protein, 30% carbohydrates (carbs = lactose = milk sugar)
Low Fat Milk is 31% fat, 28% protein, 41% carbohydrates
Skim Milk: 2% fat, 41% protein, 57% carbohydates
When you switch from whole milk to skim milk, you double the amount of protein! So what you’ve done is you have damaged the bones and you’ve created a situation in which you get kidney stones. Those bones that you lose pass out of the body through the kidneys, they solidify and that’s how you get kidney stones.
Raising Children Without Dairy? Can you imagine?
The dairy industry has targeted children, and this is one of the areas that we’re going to go after them. Their efforts to target children concerning the importance of cows milk. They tell you it’s necessary for growth, it’s necessary for bones, it’s actually essential.
The brainwashing is so dominant, they’ve changed our minds to even when we know the facts, we still know that we have to consume this cows milk for our children’s health and we’re afraid to take them off the cow’s milk. It’s a deadly kind of thinking. I will try to show you why and hopefully give you enough information so that when those emotions come up you will be able to fight them a little bit and you will be able to do the right thing for your children and your grandchildren.
F
rom The Dairy Industry: “The goal is to guide school age children to become lifelong consumers of dairy products. 2003 activities will target students, parents, educators and school food service professionals.”
Similar words have been said by the tobacco industry. You’ve heard the exact statement, “we’re gonna hook em when they’re young and we’re going to keep them on for life”, and that’s what they’re doing.
Annual milk consumption among kids aged 6 – 12 increased to 28 gallons per capita, the highest levels in 10 years. Children under 18 consume 46% of the milk in this Country.
Let’s Talk About The Problems With Dairy
Not all the white color in milk comes from the calcium. Some of it comes from the white blood cells. White blood cells are also commonly known as puss cells. The cells that occur when you get a pustule on your hand, they’re called white blood cells.
The dairy industry has standards: You can not have more than 750,000 puss cells per cc of milk or you can’t sell it. In New York the milk was analyzed and on average it had 363,000 puss cells per cc. A cc, by the way, is 1/3rd of an ounce! And they 24,000 of bacteria per cc.
Dairy products were the foods most often recalled by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) from the period October 1, 1993 through September 30th, 1998, for problems such as:
Salmonella, staphylococci, listeria, deadly e.coli 01573, mycobacterium, paratuberculosis, which some people believe causes chron’s disease.
Photo courtesy of The Boot Camp Blog.