Milk - The Perfect Food?

Michael Lam, MD, MPH
www.DrLam.com

(READING TIPS: For fast reading, scan through the topic headings in BOLD BLACK, important conclusions in BOLD BLUE, and " Must Know " in BOLD RED. To jump to specific sections in this article, click on the respective LINKS in the Contents.)

Before You Begin

Information presented here is for general educational purposes only. Each one of us is biochemically and metabolically different. If you have a specific health concern and wish my personalized nutritional recommendation, write to me by clicking here.

Milk provokes images synonymous of home and goodness. It conjures up the warm, fuzzy feeling of being cared for and protected. How often the universal mother of us all has reminded us to "drink all your milk" so we will grow strong and healthy. The white color of milk reminds us of purity and cleanliness. It's no wonder that most of us look on milk as the perfect food.

Contrary to popular belief, this picture is far from the truth. In reality, processed cow's milk is a chemical soup that is highly toxic and a negative fountain of youth for adults. To put it simply, cow's milk is not healthy for humans. It has been linked to a variety of diseases, including allergies, diarrhea, colic, and cramps in children. In adults, it is linked to heart disease, arthritis, autoimmune disease, allergies, and certain types of cancer such as leukemia and lymphoma. Most the world's population does not drink or use cow's milk. The reason is simple - cow's milk makes them sick.

Cow's Milk Is Designed For Cows

Milk is a maternal lactating secretion and a short-term nutrient for newborns. In the animal kingdom, a baby is weaned from milk when its body weight reaches approximately three times that at birth. All animals wean their off-spring at a fixed time peculiar to their species, except humans who continue to drink milk, if not their own mother's, then that of the mothers of other mammals.

The milk of mammals is species-specific. The milk of every species is unique and tailored to the requirements of that animal. Humans, as a species, evolved due to advanced neurological development and delicate neuromuscular control. Essential fatty acid forms an integral part of the human neurological system for memory and intelligence, while protein is the basic building block of massive skeletal growth needed in a calf for survival in the wild. Cow's milk is therefore designed for calves and not for human babies.

The primary type of protein in cow's milk is casein. There is four times more casein in cow's milk than human milk. It also has five to seven times the mineral content, but severely deficient in essential fatty acids when compared to human mother's milk. Human milk, on the other hand, has eight times more essential fatty acids, especially Linoleic acid.

Immune System

Cow's milk contains many proteins that are poorly digested and harmful to the immune system. When protein in our food is properly broken down by the digestive system into amino acids, it does no harm to the immune system. Some food proteins such as casein, however, are absorbed into the blood fully undigested, provoking an immune response. Repeated and persistent exposure to these proteins disrupts normal immune function, leading to a multitude of diseases.

One of the best screening tests and the first line of treatment for allergy and immune system dysfunction is removing dairy products from the diet. This has been shown to shrink enlarged tonsils and adenoids. Reports of marked reduction in colds, flu, sinusitis, and ear infections are commonly reported after discontinuation of milk.

Toxins

The 20th century diet of cows is rife with pesticides, fertilizers, herbicides, and traces of heavy metals, along with chemicals to enhance growth and productivity. Whatever a cow eats shows up in her udders, including grass, silage, straw, cereals, roots, tubers, legumes, oilseeds, oilcakes, and milk by-products, which contain a variety of chemical additives. This is a far cry from the grass fed free roaming cattle of the old days. Breeding methods now produce cows that generates three times more milk that the old-fashioned scrub cow.

Milk is an ideal storage medium for dissolved environmental chemicals. Most environmental contaminants are of the fat-soluble type and milk has about four percent fat. The water-soluble chemicals dissolve easily in the predominantly aqueous part of milk. Therefore, we find in milk all types of chemicals, fat-soluble and water-soluble, because milk offers both environments.

A lactating mammal excretes toxins through her milk. This includes pesticides, chemicals, hormones, and antibiotics. Chemicals fed to cows are transferred to milk and eventually into our body upon consumption of milk from such lactating cows.

Drugs such as hormones or antibiotics given to cows show up in the milk in short order. For example, antibiotics like penicillin given to cows to treat mastitis is responsible for the failure of milk to have "starter" reaction in cheese making. About one percent of milk today is unsuitable for cheese making due to high levels of penicillin.

The exposure to small levels of antibiotics in milk is also dangerous since it causes modification of "good" bacteria in the intestine leading to vitamin and mineral deficiencies and often "superinfection" - the increased tendency to contract infections.

Long-term exposures to low-levels of antibiotics are extremely harmful to health since these exposures produce drug-resistant strains of bacteria. Such is the case with a class of drugs known as sulfonamides used to prevent infections in cows. Low level exposure to sulfonamides produces resistant strains of bacteria and makes this otherwise useful drug ineffective.

Other environmental hazards in milk use comes from the radioactivity - from the sun and x-rays and, occasionally, from fallouts of catastrophe such as Hiroshima, Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl. The fallout is the settling of the fission products of a nuclear reaction, in the air, on the ground, or below the ground. Such radioactive material can be carried by wind for miles and the fallout may last for months or years, dispersing throughout the globe.

Pasteurization

Processed milk from cow is commercially pasteurized to assure safety. Pasteurization also destroys some of milk's valuable nutrition, including almost all vitamin D, half of all vitamin C, and half to three-quarters of vitamin B-complex.

The essential enzymes and growth factors destroyed during pasteurization are irreplaceable, unlike vitamins A & D. For example, phosphatase enzyme in milk is necessary for the absorption of calcium. Pasteurization destroys this enzyme, rendering pasteurized milk a poor source of calcium that can be utilized by the body. Other enzymes destroyed include lactase for assimilation of lactose and galactase for the assimilation of galactose. Milk devoid of such enzymes are much more difficult to digest and acts as a stressor on our body.

In essence, pasteurization of the milk drastically changes the structure of the milk proteins (denaturization) into something far less than healthy than "nature's most nearly perfect food" we have been lead to believe.

Despite the disadvantages, pasteurization is perhaps the only way to assure safety of milk on a bulk-production basis. Without pasteurization, daily bacterial counts, weekly anaerobic tests, monthly bacteria cultures are needed to monitor the milk. In addition, regular blood tests have to be conducted on cows themselves every 60 days, and T.B. skin tests made every six months. It is obvious that this practice is prohibitively expensive.