Welcome to Gaia! ::

posted by: Kayla Coleman 1 day ago

"The first thing schoolchildren are served as they enter the cafeteria is a carton of milk--followed by menu choices of pizza, burgers, grilled cheese, macaroni and cheese, and countless other items high in saturated fat and cholesterol. All of these foods contain milk. According to the National School Lunch Program, which serves 31 million children every day, "milk consumption in school has increased nearly 10-fold over the past 23 years".

Despite its reputation as a wholesome and healthy source of nutrients, getting your calcium and protein from cows' milk comes at a price: milk and milk products are linked with scores of health issues, like diabetes and cancer. In addition, many people are lactose intolerant or allergic to cows' milk.

Despite these concerns, cows' milk is being pushed in school cafeterias, and millions of kids are drinking cows' milk and eating dairy. The 2010 reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act will give America a chance to rethink kids' school lunches--an important part of kids' overall nutrition and for many, the main source of nutrients for the day. You can take action to make sure that America's kids are getting the healthiest lunch possible.

Health Concerns

The health risks linked with milk read like a veritable laundry list of today's top health concerns. Milk products, like the beloved cheese on top of kids' school lunch pizzas, are ridden with saturated fat, the artery-clogging fat that leads to heart disease, the top cause of death in America. According to Dr. Joel Fuhrman, author of Disease-Proof Your Child, drinking cows' milk has been linked to allergies, a**l fissures, childhood-onset (type 1) diabetes, chronic constipation, Crohn's disease, ear infections, heart attacks, multiple sclerosis and prostate cancer.

Milk ads often brag about the calcium in milk--that drinking milk is a great way to prevent osteoporosis. But more and more research is surfacing that shows this might not be true. The American Journal of Public Health published a 12-year study of 78,000 people that found women who drank more than a glass of milk a day (the USDA recommends three cups per day) had a 45 percent greater chance of a hip fracture. Women who got the same amount of calcium from non-dairy sources had no increase.

This means that drinking more milk did nothing to strengthen bones--in fact, it actually weakened them. People who eat plant-based proteins can maintain a positive calcium balance at only 450 mg per day, lower than the recommended daily amount. How is this possible? Because eating and drinking too much protein, which is easy to do when ingesting meat and dairy, leaches calcium from bones. Excess protein in your diet causes your blood to be more acidic, meaning you need more calcium in your diet...so you drink milk, which gives you calcium, along with animal protein, which causes your blood to be more acidic…and the calcium-leaching cycle continues.

Allergies and Intolerance

Milk is the #1 allergic food in the country, and close to 50 million Americans are lactose intolerant.

Lactose intolerance occurs when the body doesn't make enough lactase, the protein we need to digest milk. But this is actually normal! Mammals naturally produce lactase when they are infants in order to digest their mother's milk, but are eventually supposed to stop producing it once they are weaned. Humans who keep producing lactase into adulthood do so because of a genetic mutation. After all, humans are the only species to drink the milk of another species. Imagine if you saw, say, a zebra drinking the milk of a giraffe. Wouldn't something just be a bit...unnatural?

A milk allergy is different than lactose intolerance because it's a reaction to the proteins in cows' milk, casein and whey. People with milk allergies must avoid all milk and milk products, at the risk of immediate wheezing, vomiting, hives, swelling, or worst of all: anaphylaxis, sudden changes to breathing, heart rate, or other functions.

More Than Just Calcium in Milk

The milk routinely served in school cafeterias is an average carton of milk--cows' milk. Not organic. Not grass-fed. And although cows' milk does have important nutrients (need that calcium!), it also has a lot of…not-so-desirable components.

Along with the calcium and protein in an average carton of cows' milk, researchers have found a range of hormones, including pituitary, hypothalamic, and thyroid. There are gastrointestinal peptides and rBGH, recombinant bovine growth hormone, which is linked to breast, colon and prostate cancer but also increases the cows' milk production.

There might also be pus in milk. Cows on an average dairy farm are repeatedly impregnated and milked several times a day--this over-milking causes mastitis, or infected udders, which secrete pus. When the cows are being milked, pus from their udders inevitably seeps in with the milk, and national averages show around 322 million cell counts of pus in a glass of milk. Blood is another disturbing ingredient in a glass of milk--the USDA allows 1.5 million white blood cells per milliliter of commonly sold milk.

If cows get infections, they need medicine. The antibiotics the cows are treated with also enter into their milk. Although the Midwest Dairy Association has called milk "one of the most tested, wholesome, and nutritious foods available", only about 4 of the 85 drugs used to treat dairy cows are tested. The FDA also acknowledges that over half of all milk contains traces of pharmaceuticals.

Estrogen and Phytoestrogens

If, after reading these concerns, you find yourself looking for an alternative to milk, your first thought might be soymilk. But wait! Doesn't soymilk have estrogen in it? Too much estrogen can give women breast cancer, and can make men less masculine…

While it's true that soy, like all foods, should be eaten in moderation, soy contains phytoestrogen, which is plant estrogen, and which will not have the same effects on your body as animal estrogen.

In fact, phytoestrogens have actually been found to be beneficial to the human body because they keep our estrogen levels under control. They can act like weak estrogen when our body's levels are low, and can inhibit estrogen effects when levels are too high. The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism says that phytoestrogens can have health benefits related to cancer, osteoporosis, cardiovascular disease, and menopausal symptoms. There is also evidence that eating and drinking soy in childhood can reduce your risk for cancer later.

Excess animal estrogens can be harmful to the body, and the main source of these estrogens in our diet comes from milk; dairy accounts for 60-80 percent of estrogens we take in. Pregnant females, including pregnant cows, have lots of estrogen in their systems, especially in late pregnancy. A cow must be pregnant or nursing to produce milk, and dairy cows are often milked before they give birth, causing a surge of increased estrogen to enter their milk. One study comparing diet and cancer rates in 42 countries found that milk and cheese were strongly linked with testicular cancer in men ages 20-39. Another finding is that, in the past 50 years, rising dairy consumption in Japan is linked with rising death rates of prostate cancer.

Non-Dairy Calcium Sources

Non-dairy sources of calcium are plentiful, and these sources can be low-fat and low (or no) cholesterol. These healthy, calcium-rich foods include fortified cereals, fortified soymilk, nutmilk, ricemilk or other non-dairy milks, dark leafy greens like kale, broccoli or collards, blackstrap molasses, fortified oatmeal, almonds or almond butter, peas, onion, pickles, pumpkin…A plate of baked beans has over 100 milligrams of calcium, and fortified juice can have over 300 milligrams per cup. Calcium can be found in just about every fruit and vegetable, even apples, raisin, dates, and strawberries. If you are eating a whole-foods diet rich in fruits, vegetables, nuts, and whole grains, getting enough calcium should not be an issue.

As the Child Nutrition Act reauthorization approaches, reconsider the best ways for our kids to get their nutrients. Whether for health, religious, or ethical reasons, kids should have an alternative choice to cows' milk and milk products in their school lunch. Eating habits that people learn in childhood are carried into adulthood, and kids need to be able to make healthy choices about their diets. More schools are offering alternatives to dairy in their school lunch menus--but this needs to be required. Kids need the option of having a lunch low in fat and cholesterol, but high in nutrients. Speak up for the health of America's children, and tell Congress that kids need alternative choices to dairy in their school lunch.

Take Action

If you want to take action to get dairy alternatives in school lunches, sign this petition."

http://www.care2.com/causes/health-policy/blog/milk-does-it-really-do-a-body-good/

Yes, processed foods are a lot worse. But even straight from the cow, milk is fatty, full of hormones, and full of more protein than is healthy for us to consume regularly.

Here are some more articles:

"Children who drink more than three servings of milk each day are prone to becoming overweight, according to a large new study that undermines a heavily advertised dairy industry claim that milk helps people lose weight...."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/06/AR2005060601348.html

"In conclusion," they write, "prospective cohort studies, but not case-control studies, support the hypothesis that high intakes of dairy foods and lactose may increase the risk of ovarian cancer."
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/08/050805064340.htm

"The scientific evidence, too, is massing up that regular consumption of large quantities of milk can be bad for your health, and campaigners are making a noise about the environmental and international costs...

Frank Oski, former paediatrics director at Johns Hopkins school of medicine, estimated in his book Don't Drink Your Milk! that half of all iron deficiency in US infants results from cows' milk-induced intestinal bleeding - a staggering amount, since more than 15% of American under-twos suffer from iron-deficiency anaemia...

According to various studies, there's a whole catalogue of other illnesses that can be attributed to cows' milk, among them diabetes. A 1992 report in the New England Journal of Medicine corroborated a long-standing theory that proteins in cows' milk can damage the production of insulin in those with a genetic predisposition to diabetes....

Major studies suggesting a link between milk and prostate cancer have been appearing since the 1970s, culminating in findings by the Harvard School of Public Health in 2000 that men who consumed two and a half servings of dairy products a day had a third greater risk of getting prostate cancer than those who ate less than half a serving a day. In the same year, T Colin Campbell, the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Nutritional Biochemistry at Cornell University, said that "cows' milk protein may be the single most significant chemical carcinogen to which humans are exposed"...

The most important culprit is almost certainly the overconsumption of protein. High-protein foods such as meat, eggs and dairy make excessive demands on the kidneys, which in turn leach calcium from the body. One solution, then, isn't to increase our calcium intake, but to reduce our consumption of protein, so our bones don't have to surrender so much calcium. Astonishingly, according to this newer, more critical view, dairy products almost certainly help to cause, rather than prevent, osteoporosis....

American women are among the biggest consumers of calcium in the world, yet still have one of the highest levels of osteoporosis in the world. Lots of researchers have tried to work out the relationship between these two facts. A study funded by the US National Dairy Council, for example, gave a group of postmenopausal women three 8oz glasses of skimmed milk a day for two years, then compared their bones with those of a control group of women not given the milk. The dairy group consumed 1,400mg of calcium a day, yet lost bone at twice the rate of the control group. Similarly, the Harvard Nurses' Health Study found that women who consumed the most calcium from dairy foods broke more bones than those who rarely drank milk. Another piece of research found that women who get most of their protein from animal sources have three times the rate of bone loss and hip fractures of women who get most of their protein from vegetable sources, according to a 2001 National Institutes of Health study...."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2003/dec/13/foodanddrink.weekend

"Drinking milk builds dairy producers' profits, but it is not likely to build your bones and may even harm them. Dairy foods are linked to all sorts of other problems, too, including obesity, heart disease, and cancer, and are likely to be contaminated with antibiotics, hormones, and other chemicals, including dioxin, one of the most toxic substances in the world. (On April 12, 2001, The Washington Post reported that "the latest EPA study concludes that people who consume even small amounts of dioxin in fatty foods and dairy products face a cancer risk of one in 100." These consumers may develop other problems, too, including learning disabilities and susceptibility to infections.)

Of course, calcium is an essential mineral. According to Dr. Neal Barnard, president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, "Milk, in particular, is poor insurance against bone breaks ... the healthiest calcium sources are green leafy vegetables and legumes. ... You don't need to eat huge servings of vegetables or beans to get enough calcium, but do include both in your regular menu planning."
http://www.dumpdairy.com/osteo.asp

"The problem with humans drinking cow's milk, says Holly, is that it is biologically designed for a very different function: to boost the growth of small cows at a time in their lives when they need to grow quickly to become big cows. And this is significant, because while there are lots of questions to be answered over possible links between milk and cancer, the finger of suspicion points most persistently at growth factors and at proteins within milk that stimulate the development of growth factors in human bodies. What some scientists believe is that the growth factors that were intended to make baby cows grow could have a role in providing the right environment for human cancer cells to grow, too.

But it's all speculation, so far. Not that they're taking any chances at the Bristol Cancer Help Centre, which now tells those seeking advice on combating cancer to cut dairy products right out of their diet. Their stance, which has been much influenced by the experience of Jane Plant, a scientist who believes she has overcome breast cancer thanks to a dairy-free diet, is that, while they don't want to make people worried or fearful, the weight of evidence against milk - certainly for those who already have cancer - is mounting. "There are lots of theories and we need more work to be done on them," says Liz Butler, nutritionist at Bristol. "As well as the growth hormone theory, there's another theory that the lactose in milk could be upsetting the natural balance of hormones or could be toxic to the cells in some areas of the body, such as the ovaries. Or the high levels of calcium in milk could be the problem, maybe by blocking the body's use of vitamin D, which is known to have a protective effect against cancer."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2004/nov/30/lifeandhealth.medicineandhealth

"Many Americans, including some vegetarians, still consume substantial amounts of dairy products—and government policies still promote them—despite scientific evidence that questions their health benefits and indicates their potential health risks...."
http://www.pcrm.org/health/veginfo/dairy.html

And there are lots more, those are just the first ones that came up when I did a search for "milk."

I can relate to this topic. Only last year, I started getting stomach sickness from milk, I stopped and the pains stopped, I drink orange juice instead now. I love milk a lot and I never experienced issues with it till last year. Oh well...