The first person I heard declare that milk is not healthy for human consumption was Dr. John R. Lee, internationally known hormone balancing expert. At the time, I thought he was being just a bit too radical. He commented that humans are the only beings on earth who drink another animal’s milk. With a strong coronary heart disease record in his family, he said he gave up drinking milk in 1951, during his first year in medical school. I thought his was just a weird belief and discarded the idea.

The next time I heard the topic presented was in Dr. Joel Fuhrman’s book, Disease-Proof Your Child. It was at this point that I, too, gave up drinking milk, for many reasons.

Dr, Fuhrman advises that heart disease begins in our youth and is not easy to reverse. “No one should eat more than five grams of saturated fat a day. Over this level, disease rates climb. Saturated fat has the most powerful causative relationship with heart disease and cancer. Besides sugar, butter and cheese contribute the most calories to children’s diets in America.”

Dr. Fuhrman explains, “…it takes ten pounds of milk to make one pound of cheese. Besides the bovine growth hormone given to cows, their milk contains estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, prolactin, and other natural cow hormones. Cheese not only is richer in saturated fat, but is a more concentrated source of these hormones. These milk hormones can exert effects on humans. The more you drink or eat the dairy, the more hormones you get, and cheese consumption magnifies the negative aspects of cow’s milk.”

Dr. Fuhrman goes on to explain, “High dairy fat and animal food consumption in childhood assures unnaturally high levels of hormone promoters that raise our children’s blood level of estrogen and testosterone, induce an earlier maturity, and initiate changes that promote adult cancers.”

All that said, we haven’t even begun to mention that when we drink the cow’s milk, we are also drinking the antibiotics and growth hormones given to the animals to get them to market sooner. Gross.  

The next book I read on the topic was The China Study. Ouch. Check out that book and learn why Dr. Campbell makes the following statements:

“Based on the evidence presented in the previous chapters, you know that if this is what our children are learning about nutrition and health then we are in for a painful journey, courtesy of Dairy Management, Inc. Obviously neither kids nor their parents are learning about how milk has been linked to Type I diabetes, prostate cancer, osteoporosis, multiple sclerosis or other autoimmune diseases, and how casein, the main protein in dairy foods, has been shown to experimentally promote cancer and increase blood cholesterol and atherosclerotic plaque.”

“If I may paraphrase the dairy industry’s efforts: their goals are to 1) market to young children and their mothers, 2) use schools as a channel to young customers; 3) conduct and publicize research favorable to their industry.”

Wow, and here we have been indoctrinated to believe that pushing milk onto our children is helping them to become healthy, happy adults. Not so.

So…if we should not drink milk, where do we get our calcium? Stay tuned, the focus of tomorrow’s article will be on discovering alternative healthy choices.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 at 7:46 am and is filed under Diet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.