From: Bill Bodri , Bill is now a certified Nutritionist, and an certified/registered alternative medicine therapist
Subject: Why No Milk
Many parents wonder why we don’t promote the drinking of cow's milk at our boarding school. What is surprising to some is that the children following our scientific diet rarely get sick and previous signs of hyperactivity, attention deficit or emotional problems disappear. Why is this? A major reason is because we eliminate milk and excessive sugar from the diet.
Milk and refined sugar are two of the largest contributors to food induced ill health in the world. That may seem like a harsh statement, but this is practical experience and academic conclusion of many health professionals who have studied these foods and seen the results of removing it from people's diets. Let's just talk about cow's milk.
You often hear adults saying that when they drink milk they suffer stomach problems, diarrhea, allergies or mucous. When they stop drinking milk, many of their health problems disappear. We never see these problems with our children and one of the main reasons is from avoiding milk. Cow's milk is the number one allergic food in America for children and adults. It has been well documented as a cause of diarrhea, cramps, bloating, gas, gastrointestinal bleeding, iron-deficiency anemia, skin rashes, atherosclerosis, and acne. It is the primary cause of recurrent ear infections in children. Over 50% of these children will improve and have no further ear infections if they just stop drinking milk.
One of the biggest myths people have come to believe in, due to constant milk industry advertising to get you to drink more, is that milk is a perfect food and that we absorb much calcium from milk. It is possible to obtain all your calcium from dark green vegetables and sources other than milk (which definitely causes health issues). We are careful to feed our students a diet rich in calcium, including Chinese bone soup, and have games that quickly turn children who don't love vegetables into green vegetable lovers. Of course the traditional view by most physicians and dieticians is that nobody gets enough calcium and everybody should drink more milk because it prevents osteoporosis. The research studies do not seem to bear that out.
We believe there is nothing wrong with raw milk but the problems observant nutritionists see can be traced to commercial milk. In general, there isn't anything in raw milk that a large percentage of the population is allergic to until we start changing it and altering it to become commercial milk. The health problems we see from consuming a lot of milk are due to the modern methods of homogenization and pasteurization.
Pasteurization alters the milk. When you pasteurize the milk, you are heating it up to a temperature that is sufficient to kill specific types of bacteria. This also kills all the good bacteria such as acidophilus/bifidus that you see advertised on yoghurt labels. After it gets pasteurized all the valuable enzymes in milk are destroyed (lactase for the assimilation of lactose; galactase for the assimilation of galactose; phosphatase for the assimilation of calcium). Literally dozens of other precious enzymes are destroyed in the pasteurization process. Without them, milk is very difficult to digest and young children therefore sometimes suffer upset after drinking it. The human pancreas is also not always able to produce these enzymes; over-stress of the pancreas can lead to diabetes and other diseases.
A lot of people know that they are lactose intolerant, which is the sugar that occurs in milk. Lactose intolerance is not a milk allergy. It doesn't mean milk is not good for them. It simply means that the milk sugar, which is called lactose, can't be properly assimilated by the body because the lactase enzyme is either not there or is in an insufficient amount. Mother Nature put plenty of lactase into the milk so it wouldn't cause a problem, but we destroy it by pasteurizing the milk. It's another reason people suffer health problems by drinking commercial milk. Milk is mostly sugar and all sugars tend to suppress the immune system. By eliminating the milk and many sweets the children rarely get colds or the flu. This is yet another reason why we prefer alternative sources of calcium to milk which at the very least tends to stuff some people up.
When we homogenize the milk, we also break it up into tiny particles so that the fat will not separate and collect at its surface. When we homogenize it, some people believe that this releases a chemical called Xanthine Oxidase which makes the homogenized milk more cancer causing. That's very possible but no one has definitely proved this to be detrimental yet. What we do know is that these issues don't even address all the growth hormone and antibiotic residues, virus particles, bacteria, pus and so forth you find in commercial milk, or the possibility of other ingredients being added that are harmful to people. The path of modern day milk production uses modern feeding methods that substitute high-protein, soy-based feeds for fresh green grass as cows should be fed, and our breeding methods produce cows with abnormally large pituitary glands so that they produce three times more milk than the old fashioned cow. These cows need excessive antibiotics to keep them well.
Hopefully, you will reconsider your position on overly depending on milk as a form of nourishment for children. Small amounts of milk or milk products taken infrequently will likely cause little or no problems for most people. We have no problem with modest amounts of milk, but parents always find that when children return home and start drinking milk, they easily develop runny noses, upset stomachs, or catxch colds. We have virtually eliminated these problems at our school while supplying children with more than enough calcium for strong teeth and bones from sources other than milk. |
2009-09-18 20:10