Milk - Are You Prepared To Lose Your Bottle?
by Phillip Day

Robert Kradjian MD, Chief of the Division of General Surgery at Seton Medical Center in Daly City, California, remarks as follows:

"Milk! Just the word itself sounds comforting. "How about a nice cup of hot milk?" The last time you heard that question, it was from someone who cared for you, and you appreciated their effort.

The entire matter of food and especially that of milk is surrounded with emotional and cultural importance. Milk was our first food. If we were fortunate, it was our mother's milk. A loving link, given and taken. It was the only path to survival. If not mother's milk, it was cow's milk or soy milk 'formula' - rarely it was goat, camel or water buffalo milk.

Now we are a nation of milk drinkers. Nearly all of us. Infants, the young, adolescents, adults, even the elderly. We drink dozens or even several hundred gallons a year each and add to that many pounds of 'dairy' products, such as cheese, butter and yoghurt.

Can there be anything wrong with this?

Actually there is plenty wrong with it. Big Milk has wooed us with its impressive campaigns of creamy moustaches and "Got Milk?" and "Milk - It Does a Body Good". There is one thing conspicuously missing in the logic of all this, however, rarely if ever mentioned. Milk is actually for baby cows.

Many humans today do not consume milk because it makes them ill. Caucasians, on the other hand, lead the human pack in getting weaned off their mothers, only to spend the rest of their lives stuck under the udders of a completely different species. No animal in the creature kingdom continues milk consumption past weaning and babyhood. Milk will take a little animal from birth to weaning, and after that it's time for big-boy/big-girl food. This is a law of nature. No one drinks milk once they are up and walking. Except - humans!

Harvey Diamond, author Fit For Life, sees milk as a politicised, but failing food experiment, now people are wising up to the truth: "You can be absolutely certain of one thing: Milk is the most political food in America. According to the Los Angeles Times, the dairy industry is subsidized (meaning the taxpayer foots the bill) to the tune of almost three billion dollars a year! That's 342,000 dollars every hour to buy hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of dairy products that will in all likelihood never be eaten… The demand for dairy products has declined substantially, as it is becoming more apparent that they are not the perfect foods they were once touted to be.

But dairy production is continuous. Be assured that much of the publicity referring to the health benefits of dairy products is commercially motivated. In March 1984 the Los Angeles Times reported that the Department of Agriculture decided to launch a $140-million advertising campaign to "promote milk-drinking and help reduce the multibillion-dollar surplus." Although the real reason for the advertising campaign is to reduce the surplus, the ads attempt to convince you to buy milk for its many so-called health benefits."

We've heard of milk lakes and butter mountains for years, demonstrating clearly that production of these dairy products completely outstrips the demand for them. And why is that? Thousands of articles exist in the scientific and medical literature with milk as the focus of these studies. The main thrust of these articles, however, far from lauding milk as the perfect food we have been deceived into believing it is, deals with a horrific litany of ills with which milk has regaled humankind.

What do you find discussed in these studies? Do they tell us that milk makes strong bones, strong teeth and turns you into an Olympian athlete with the body of a Greek god? If we were to believe the piffle fed to us through the udders of the mass communications media, all the scientific journals would be telling us to go out and fill our swimming pools and baths with the stuff to ward off all those ills that milk is perfect in preventing. What complete tommyrot. What a dastardly whitewash. How could the public have been so completely creamed? The pro-milk pitch is of course not based in reality or science. It is the hype of the marketeer and the balance sheet.

All you read about in these scientific journals is how milk brings on allergic reactions, asthma, intestinal irritation, intestinal bleeding, anaemia, diabetes, salmonella, and allergic reactions in children and infants. Toxicologists such as Dr Samuel Epstein have long been warning about other dangers, such as the chronic misuse of antibiotics and hormones in cattle farming, giving rise to a whole new smorgasbord of problems. Increased estrogen intake, brought on by farmers fattening their stock with estradiol, a hormonal anabolic with estrus activity, shows links in adults to breast and ovarian cancers, atherosclerosis and heart disease (Vitamin C depletion). Notice all these conditions can be termed 'survival responses' to a specific, or series of threats. Leukemias and lymphomas, along with arthritis, accelerated sexual development in children and the potential for infection with bovine leukemia virus as well as childhood diabetes, are also discussed in the medical literature in connection with milk and meat consumption. Contamination through the milk supply with pesticides and insecticides has also given rise to concerns with child health, including allergy, ear and tonsillar infections, bedwetting, asthma, intestinal bleeding and colic.

Most of us milk moustachers don't realise that milk contains blood and white (pus) cells from the animal. USDA inspectors in America know this, and simply ask milk processing companies to keep the content of these white cells to a maximum of 1 to 1.5 million white cells per millilitre (1/30th of an ounce). The other pertinent point to consider before we suckle another of our favourite dairy dishes, is that fifty years ago, the average cow produced 20,000 pounds of milk every year. Today, the top gold-star bovines are churning out 50,000-plus pounds by comparison. Do you want to know how the cows are able to do this? Charles Atlas' Dynamic Tension Technique maybe? An LA sports club membership perhaps?

Antibiotics, drugs and recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH) are the culprits. rBGH is a genetically engineered drug, produced by the Monsanto Corporation (they of soy and GM), which swears blind that the hormone does not affect the milk or meat of the animal.

Beef hormones are big business because they fatten cows, which means that farmers want to buy the hormones, since, in the case of estradiol, they can add significant weight to an animal during its 100-day fattening period prior to slaughter, resulting in at least an extra $80 in the farmer's wallet as a bonus. Dr Samuel Epstein, the cancer establishment's long-time antagonist and critic, describes a frightening legacy of non-regulation and governmental irresponsibility: "As of 1990, more than 95% of American beef cattle were implanted with carcinogenic growth-promoting hormones. The European Economic Community banned hormone-treated meat in 1989, and does not allow US or other producers to export their meat into the EEC. This ban was recently (February 1998) upheld by a World Trade Organisation appellate body. In the absence of effective federal regulation, the US meat industry uses hundreds of animal feed additives, including antibiotics, tranquilizers, pesticides, animal drugs, artificial flavours, industrial wastes, and growth-promoting hormones, with little or no concern about the carcinogenic and other toxic effects of dietary residues of these additives."

And so the predictable cast of drug manufacturers, ever greedy for a fresh slice of the drug pie, prowl around this lucrative cattle-porking profit-centre like fat cats around a milk churn. Of course, what the companies fail to tell you, in their headlong rush to bank their profits, is that what gets fed to the cows invariably comes out in the whitewash, as it were. The milk produced by cows fed steroid-bolstered, antibiotic-laced, hormone-accelerated diets, which in certain cases can contain human excrement (France) and all these drug and bacterial elements, finds its way into the human food chain, bringing into our stomachs its Borgian poison-payload. "But that's what pasteurisation is for!" shrill the outraged. Wipe your faces, my friends, and please keep reading…. It all gets so horribly compelling in a minute.

rBGH causes a significant increase in mastitis (udder infection) in cows, which requires antibiotic treatment and salves. The residues of these drugs appear in the milk and survive pasteurisation, which is designed to kill off harmful bacteria. Even the US Government's General Accounting Office has stated that FDA and State legislation across America is failing to regulate the true extent of drug and hormone contamination in milk. This contamination, taken in through meat and dairy products consumed by the human mother, shows up in her breast milk where these pesticides and drugs are then transmitted to the infant.

Dr Frank Oski, of the Upstate Medical Center Department of Pediatrics, has spoken out against the American Academy of Pediatrics' recommendation that whole bovine milk should be consumed by infants. Breaking ranks with his peers in the scientific journal Pediatrics, Oski states: "It is my thesis that milk should not be fed to the infant in the first year of life because of its association with iron deficiency anaemia (cow's milk is so deficient in iron that an infant would have to consume an impossible 31 quarts a day to get the iron RDA of 15mg), occult gastrointestinal bleeding, and various manifestations of food allergy. I further suggest that unmodified whole bovine milk should not be consumed after infancy because of the problems of lactose intolerance, its contribution to the genesis of atherosclerosis, and its possible link to other diseases."

So why do we drink cow's milk? Why don't we drink lion's milk to make us braver, or rat's milk to make us slyer or cat's milk so we can scratch up the furniture? The question is not as silly as it sounds. We drink cow's milk because that is culturally what we have always done. Also we can catch cows easily and they are docile when milked. You're not likely to have the same success if your penchant is for polar bear milk - and you probably won't live to get the Queen's telegram either.

No, we drink cow's milk because it is readily available and we have been conned into believing we cannot get by without it. And then along comes the breakfast cereal industry and hooks us on sucrose, gluten and milk, all mixed up together with some raisins sprinkled on the top for good measure, and persuades us to eat it during our morning elimination cycle. This then is our breakfast 'health food'. What is the difference between my getting out of the car and suckling a cow in the field to your evident horror, and Sainsbury's and Walmart obtaining it for me, packaging it and sticking it on their supermarket shelves for me to grab on the way to the till? The answer? Marketing. We'll drink it if it is provided for us. If it isn't, we won't go suckle the cow. Figure out the logic of that one when you've got a minute.

But is cow's milk similar to human milk? Not in the least. Milk components vary widely according to species. Cow's milk, for instance, has three to four times more protein than human milk. Rat milk contains up to eleven times more protein than human milk. Cow's milk is designed to assist baby cows in their development in very specific ways. It has five to seven times the mineral content but is markedly deficient in essential fatty acids when compared to human mothers' milk, which contains up to eleven times the essential fatty acid components, most specifically linoleic acid, essential for neurological development, which is completely absent in cow's milk when skimmed. Cows, of course, are not famous for their mental gymnastics.

Harvey Diamond points out other problems with the consumption of the white stuff: "The enzymes required to break down and digest milk are renin and lactase. They are all but gone by the age of three in most humans. There is a protein in all milk known as casein. There is three hundred times more casein in cow's milk than in human's milk. That's for the development of huge [cow] bones. Casein coagulates in the stomach and forms large, tough, dense, difficult-to-digest curds that are adapted to the four-stomach digestive apparatus of a cow.

Once inside the human system, this thick mass of goo puts a tremendous burden on the body to get rid of it somehow. In other words, a huge amount of energy must be expended in dealing with it. Unfortunately some of this gooey substance hardens and adheres to the lining of the intestines and prevents the absorption of nutrients into the body. Also the by-products of milk digestion leave a great deal of toxic mucus in the body. It's very acidic, and it is stored in the body until it can be dealt with at a later time. The next time you are going to dust your home, smear some paste all over everything and see how easy it is to dust. Dairy products do the same inside your body. That translates into more weight instead of weight loss.

Casein, by the way, is the base of one of the strongest glues used in woodworking."

When I was a kid in school, we used to be given bottles of milk to drink in the playground. Of course, in those days, current political correctness and the Nanny State were but an embryo in the minds of the communist social architects of the 1960s, so milk got thrown everywhere, and so did the glass bottles that held it.

My early enduring memories of those days were the smell of decomposing milk, the thick mucus and taste of the stuff in my mouth, and most of all, the chronic runny noses and ear infections we all had, which weren't just because of the limb-snapping cold that often afflicts English kids in January. I know they were trying to kill us off before the age of seven, for who else but the terminally psychotic would ever send trusting kids out in Siberia temperatures IN SHORT TROUSERS to guzzle whole milk by the frozen (glass) bottle-load while we had sword fights with the icicles?

One kid's nose in particular used to gush like Niagara. Every time you saw the poor wretch, he had those glassy pearls coming out of his nostrils. I was fascinated with this phenomenon and fully believed my mates when they told me Farr's brains were coming out through his nose. Come to think about it, we all had runny Niagara noses and this thick, flobby gunk in our mouth after we had slogged the milk down our throats through those paper straws we later used as peashooters.

Dr William A Ellis, a retired osteopathic physician and surgeon, has researched and reported on milk and its health-related problems for over forty years. Dr Ellis' research shows conclusive links between high dairy products consumption and heart disease, arthritis, allergies and migraine headaches. He also, as a conclusion to his research, states that there is "…overwhelming evidence that milk and milk products are a major factor in obesity." He further states: "Over my forty-two years of practice, I've performed more than 25,000 blood tests for my patients. These tests show, conclusively in my opinion, that adults who use milk products do not absorb nutrients as well as adults who don't. Of course, poor absorption in turn means chronic fatigue."

Other studies have linked Type 1 diabetes to chronic milk consumption. On 30th July 1992 the New England Journal of Medicine wrote up a landmark report. In Finland there is "… the world's highest rate of dairy product consumption and the world's highest rate of insulin-dependent diabetes. The disease strikes about 40 children out of every 1,000 there, contrasted with six to eight per 1,000 in the United States….

Antibodies produced against the milk protein during the first year of life, the researchers speculate, also attack and destroy the pancreas in a so-called auto-immune reaction, producing diabetes in people whose genetic make-up leaves them vulnerable."

These same researchers also studied 142 Finnish children with newly diagnosed diabetes and found that every one of them had at least eight times the level of antibodies against milk proteins than normal children. "Clear evidence," as one of the researchers later stated, "that these children had a raging auto-immune disorder."

Another favourite marketing adage of Big Milk is that milk is pure, because of the pasteurisation, and besides, milk gives you calcium to assist in the development of healthy bones. This too is complete nonsense, bordering on the criminal. The pasteurisation technique of heating up the milk to kill the bugs is widely known also to kill off enzymes, destroy the germicidal properties of bovine milk and reduce the usable vitamin content by at least 50%. Calves fed pasteurised milk die within 60 days, as shown by numerous experiments, so why do humans drink it? Actually the benefits of pasteurisation revert to the farmer and the milk industry: pasteurised milk lasts longer on the supermarket shelves and farmers can get away with a lower standard of cleanliness around the farm.

And now the question of milk calcium. Calcium exists in the body to neutralise acid build-up and there is little question that milk contains calcium. However, the consumption of milk and dairy products greatly increases the acidity of the body requiring water and calcium to adjust the pH balance. The problem with milk calcium is that it is coarser than the calcium contained in human milk because it is bound up with the sticky protein casein we looked at earlier, making it more unavailable. The other problem is that most milk and dairy products have been pasteurised, skimmed, homogenised and otherwise processed and adulterated, further degrading the calcium, rendering it even more difficult for the body to absorb. Ingri Cassel remarks as follows:

"Our nutritional education in school (funded in part by the diary industry) taught us that dairy products are one of the four basic food groups we all need for proper nutrition. Largely as a result of this conditioning, the average American consumes 375 pounds of dairy products a year. One out of every seven dollars spent on groceries in the US goes to buy dairy products.

We have been told all of our lives to drink plenty of milk in order to build strong teeth and bones. Curiously, the US as a whole records one of the highest consumption of dairy products in the world and also boasts the highest incidence of bones fractures and osteoporosis.

In the January 1988 Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, scientists reported that calcium excretion and bone loss increase in proportion to the amount of animal protein ingested. Animal proteins, due to their high sulphur [acidic] content, alter the kidneys' reabsorption of calcium, so that more calcium is excreted on a diet based upon meats, eggs and dairy products. People on high protein diets excrete between 90-100mg of calcium a day."

So here we have a picture of Westernised humans rendering their bodies acidic through the consumption of dairy and animal products which, by their very acid nature, compel the body to strip sodium, calcium and magnesium from its stores to alkalise the onslaught. Pause for a moment that hectic daily schedule of yours and consider where our society is, in terms of health, chomping and slurping all this endless 'healthy' dairy chow, with sicknesses endemic in our culture as a result of this wrong turn. With the evidence pointing to unweaned humans becoming sicker and more gummed up by the day, can we any longer maintain, with even a shred of credibility, that 'milk does a body good'?

Further Resources

Health Wars by Phillip Day
Food for Thought by Phillip Day

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