Health Info
First up, see the end of the post for the Cheribundi giveaway winner!
Several of you wanted some more reading about the not so well known side of the dairy world. Here’s a selection of resources & further reading.
It’s obviously not all-inclusive or all-encompassing, but hopefully will give you a little more information!
Eat For Health – The Anti-Cancer Diet by Joel Fuhrman MD
Ask the Expert: Dairy Products from PCRM
Dairy products and cancer
Childhood dairy intake and adult cancer risk
Acne, dairy and cancer
The Definitive Guide to Dairy
Nutrition Advice From the China Study
Dairy: 6 Reasons You Should Avoid It at All Costs or Why Following the USDA Food Pyramid Guidelines is Bad for Your Health by Mark Hyman, MD
Please feel free to add to this list in the comments section!
The winner of the Cheribundi giveaway: It’s Krysten! Shoot me an email with your address so I can pass it along. 
Thoughts
As I mentioned in my previous post, there are 2 main reasons why I’ve started eliminating the dairy in my diet.
Reason one is because the use of hormones & antibiotics bothers me.
Reason two is so much bigger than that to me: Dairy can be associated with pain & disease.
Soon after I learned about the additives in milk, this issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association showed up in my mailbox.
Let me explain why this made me jump for joy like a kid who got a pony for Christmas: I LOVE when diet is used to treat disease or illness instead of drugs. And I may not have rheumatoid arthritis (RA), but I might have something similar.
[For new readers, you can read more about my story here & here, but basically the gist is I have had chronic pain in my hands & feet for almost a year and a half now. Quite debilitating actually, until one of my doctors found a medication that helps. I hate taking drugs but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. My doctors still haven’t figured out what’s causing the pain, but their best guesses put it in a category of autoimmune & connective tissue disease, which includes things like rheumatoid arthritis & lupus. (Seeing why the boring journal got me excited now?!)]
I almost always toss these journals in a “read later” bin that never gets read, but this one I immediately opened to page 727. The article compared studies looking at vegetarian, vegan, Mediterranean, and elimination diets and their effects on RA. Unfortunately the results were pretty inconclusive, but one of the main reasons was because the subjects had trouble following their diets. It still gives me hope that diet can be part of the answer.
The reason I’m looking specifically at dairy however, is because of The China Study. (Super interesting read if you’re a health nerd like me ;)) The China Study looks at a huge number of studies about the affects of animal protein on health. The part that made me catch my breath was the chapter on autoimmune disease. In all autoimmune diseases, the problem is that the body has an immune response to itself- it destroys it’s own cells along with invaders.
Essentially the function of our immune system is to attack foreign invaders, such as viruses or bacteria. These foreign invaders are protein molecules we call antigens. Some antigens trick the body into destroying it’s own cells, such as in autoimmune disease. The author of The China Study proposes that some of these antigens may come from what we eat. Cow’s milk has many proteins that our similar to our own, which can confuse the body’s immune cells. Some of the autoimmune diseases that have been associated with milk are type 1 diabetes & multiple sclerosis.
I take nothing at face value– learning this information just probes me to research more & more. Along the way I’ve found many accounts of people who stopped eating dairy and had their pain disappear.
So now you ask, am I really buying all this? I’m not sure.
I’m very skeptical by nature. (I can raise doubts and arguments for almost anything.)
But the idea that it might make the pain stop? You bet I’m willing to give it a try.
Everybody’s different- they’re made differently, respond to things differently, and go about things differently. For me it’s completely worth it to give something a try and see what I think about it. No amount of research or theories can prove something as well as actually trying it, so that’s what I’m doing.
If it doesn’t work, no harm done.
If it does work? I’m not even going to get my hopes up by imagining all the doors that would open…
Thoughts
As I’ve mentioned, I’ve recently made the decision to cut back on animal products & dairy. I’ve never been a big meat eater, but I’ve definitely devoured my share of cheese, milk, and Greek yogurt. About a month ago I decided it was time for a change.
My decision to reduce my intake of animal products, dairy in particular, is 2 fold. (Well actually more like 8 fold, but for sake of time, let’s say 2.)
- Hormones & antibiotic use in cows
- Pain & disease prevention
I grew up a big milk drinker. I loved it. A glass of milk with every meal, in my cereal, whenever I was thirsty… My mom & I went through a gallon of milk every few days. Yet when I was 22, I was diagnosed with osteopenia (the ugly little sister of osteoporosis). Obviously there are many factors that lead to osteoporosis, but I still started to lose my blind trust in milk. Did you know that China has almost no osteoporosis, but consumes very little dairy? (Can you hear my wheels start to turn?)
Let me first say that I don’t think there’s anything wrong with milk or dairy- it’s not a bad thing per se. But I do wonder what happens to the milk we’re drinking when so many things have to happen in order to produce enough milk for us all to enjoy. Hormones are pumped into cows to make them produce more milk to meet consumer demand. The cows are also loaded with antibiotics to help prevent udder infections from constantly being milked. None of this sounds good for the cow, and none of this sounds good for me. (Ever hear the phrase “you are what you eat”? How about “you are what you eat eats”?)
This point hit home when I was reading the book Food, Inc. (The same Food, Inc. as the documentary, but not exactly the same story. I’ll give a more in depth review later!) There is a section in the book called “Promoting Growth at Any Cost”, which talks about the genetically engineered growth hormone called recombinant bovine growth hormone, or rBGH (also rBST), which is used to increase milk production in about 22% of all dairy cows in the US. (The FDA’s approval of the hormone was based on a study by Monsanto- if you’ve seen the movie, warning bells should be going off in your head. If you haven’t seen it, I’ll tell you about it when I review the whole book.)
Use of rBGH increases udder infections by 25%, thereby increasing antibiotic use. Antibiotic use in animals is widespread- the problem with that is antibiotics cause bacteria to become resistant, meaning infections become harder & harder to treat.
The artificial hormone also increases the hormone ‘insulin-like growth factor-1’ (IGF-1) in cows. Elevated IGF-1 in humans is linked to colon, breast, and prostate cancer.
The US is the only industrialized country that hasn’t banned rBGH/rBST use.
This is just a small snippet of the bigger picture, but it’s enough to get me listening. Such hormones and antibiotics aren’t used in ALL cows- it’s possible to find milk that doesn’t have these artificial additives with a little research & education (many organic brands don’t use it, but you might have to do a little digging- use of hormones does not legally need to be included on the label.)
But for me, that’s not the only piece of the picture. The main reason I’m cheating on my long-standing relationship with dairy is more personal…
Check out part II of breaking up with dairy.
