Moo in Current Events

I spent a lot of my Saturday researching the dagamges of dairy so that I can try and talk some sense into my mother to at least open her mind up to the idea of going dairy-free. One of the purposes of a mammals mother’s milk is to stimulate the immune system to grow and it does that with a protein that produces mucus. That is how dairy exacerbates respiratory issues in kids and adults, which is something my mother has a lot of. My grandmother as well. Their condition would greatly improve if they quit dairy. We don’t need that extra fluid in our lungs.

I also tried to explain to my sister on how an infants body will produce certain antibodies when introduced to cows milk before they have a complete set of digestive enzymes and for some individuals, especially those who are genetically susceptible, after certain infections later in life their bodies will develop an auto-immune disease phenomenon called type one diabetes. Type one diabetes directly affects our ethnic group, first nations, and she has her son on a formula that has cow’s milk. I thought she might like to know all of the risks but she couldn’t care less. Our bodies break food down into individual molecules for absorption but an infant does not have that ability, their bodies break it down into fragments. This is what allows them to also absorb their mother’s antibodies intact. The protein required to do all of that turns off when an infant is weaned. However, lactose is a sugar made up of two molecules and our bodies can only absorb sugars that are broken down into individual molecules. Most of us do not have the ability to break those molecules up, we cannot metabolize dairy. There is, however, one ethnic group of people who do have this ability, barely. Our species is a hundred thousand years old and dairy consumption is only about three thousand years old and that was mostly just in one part of the world. Northern Europe. They developed a mutation that keeps that gene turned on and that allows their bodies continue to make those very large proteins throughout their lifetime which, by the way, requires a lot of intracellular machinery to produce. It’s a condition called lactase persistence. Lactose intolerance is actually the normal setting. No other species continue to consume dairy post-infancy. Our bodies have better things to do like fight off disease and cancer, not metabolize cow’s milk.

Our bodies leak more calcium in our urine from a glass of milk than we can absorb from it. The dairy industry, just a few years ago, attempted to create a protein reduced version of milk to decrease the calcium loss but failed to let it get on the market. This shows that the dairy industry recognizes this issue but is promoting calcium to make dairy consumption attractive anyway. A Harvard study showed how women who consume the most dairy were at the highest risk of bone and hip fractures. Osteoporosis is a huge problem in our family also and we do not need to be leaking out all of our calcium. Also, there are a lot of studies that show a link between dairy and the most lethal forms of cancer for men & women, ovarian and prostate cancer. Both my grandmother and my mother have had brushes with ovarian cancer already. Studies have tried to prove that dairy protects individuals from that but those studies fail to do so every single time. So on one hand we have no benefit from consuming dairy and on the other hand, we have very very very high risks of lethal cancers.

In my country, Canada, we removed dairy as a food group because we respect and support science and we respect our multicultural population. The US Department of Agriculture just reviewed their dietary guidelines and they were called out on the institutional racism that is dairy. Only one ethnic group can metabolize this material, I refuse to even call it food, and yet it is recommended to be in every American’s diet making most American’s sick. The committee that puts out these guidelines has zero non-minorities in it whatsoever. I want to have faith that dairy will be removed as a food group down there as well but the dairy industry is using the same tactics as the tobacco industry to keep everybody confused so that they will continue to consume their product.

People are not living longer, they are dying longer. The cognitive dissonance that people experience when they are presented with this information is a force to be reckoned with. I know that because I used to be on the other side of it and I refused to believe it because I did not want to change. My mind and body had healed so much since I made that change four years ago and I really want this for my mother as well.

Last updated September 23, 2019