Apart from being a good source of whey protein, there don’t appear to be any other benefits of dairy. To make matters worse, dairy seems to have detrimental effects to our health. Milk should be for calves (baby cows); most humans have a problem digesting it. I cannot tell you how many patients I’ve seen over the years whose chronic constipation, irritable bowel syndrome, arthritis, chronic sinusitis, and allergies cleared up when they stopped eating dairy. When people come to see me in my practice and I put them on a diet, I almost always remove dairy. Here’s why:
1. Dairy cows are fed the wrong food, which not only changes the nature of the milk, but causes health problems for the cows. They eat soy, corn, cottonseed meal, or other commercial feeds, which contain all sorts of things—including chicken manure and citrus-peel cake laced with pesticides. These foods aren’t appropriate for cows, who are ruminants and should be feeding on green grass in the spring, summer, and fall and on green feed, silage, hay, and root vegetables in the winter. Unfortunately, most dairy cows are kept in confinement, given antibiotics and hormones, and never see green grass their entire lives.
2. The milk is pasteurized. Pasteurization is the process of heating a liquid to a high enough temperature to kill certain bacteria and disable certain enzymes. It destroys enzymes, vitamins, denatures fragile milk proteins, kills beneficial bacteria, and promotes pathogens. Even calves fed pasteurized milk do poorly, and many die before maturity. Pasteurization was instituted in the 1920s to combat TB, infant diarrhea, undulant fever, and other diseases caused by poor animal nutrition and dirty production methods. But times have changed and modern stainless steel tanks, milking machines, refrigerated trucks and inspection methods make pasteurization absolutely unnecessary for public protection.
3. In some cases, milk is ultra-pasteurized to get rid of heat-resistant bacteria and give it a longer shelf life. Ultra high-temperature pasteurization is a process that takes milk from a chilled temperature to above the boiling point in less than two seconds. This process is utilized for the boxed milks that need to be kept at room temperature.
4. To make matters worse, milk is homogenized. Homogenization is a process that breaks down butterfat globules so they do not rise to the top. Homogenized milk is harder to digest, so proteins that would normally be digested in the stomach are not broken down and instead are absorbed into the bloodstream. Often the body reacts to these “foreign proteins” by triggering the immune system, causing inflammation. It can even trigger autoimmune problems. Homogenized milk has also been linked to heart disease, probably because of the fat globules that are dispersed by the process.
5. In addition to being chemically altered into something that’s hard to digest and causes problems, today’s milk usually contains steroids, antibiotics, pesticides from treated grains, bacteria from infected animals, and genetically engineered growth hormones.
So if you do drink milk, I suggest you look for pure raw milk from grass-fed cows (which is hard to get in most states unfortunately), because it may not be the milk per se, but how milk is chemically altered that causes the problems.
Originally published on Care2
