Milk Most Maligned

To decide if milk is actually the best food known to man or a poison in itself, we need to have the facts cleared first.

Chemically, mother’s milk is almost an elixir of life … no one today debates that. It is the source of an entire factory of antibodies as well as the nutrition the newborn needs, not to mention the emotional security breast feeding provides. The question actually arises thereafter… do humans actually need to consume another animal’s milk into their adulthood? After all, human babies drink human milk, so cow’s milk should be good only for calves… isn’t it?

The milk that we get in the market comes from farms, and is of two types, skimmed milk (from which the fat or cream has been skimmed and removed), and whole milk. Whole milk has about 3.9% fats. Some milk has added calcium or protein content. The milk we finally get in the market is pasteurized and homogenized. Pasteurization kills the bacteria which may be present while homogenization serves to break up the cream or fat globules into tiny particles that will stay in the milk in a permanent suspension.

The nutrients present in one cup (about 250 ml) of milk (with 2% fat content) one consumes, are:

Vitamin A 147 RE Vitamin D 2.6 mcg
Thiamin 0.1 mg Riboflavin 0.43 mg
Niacin 2.2 NE Vitamin B6 0.1 mg
Folacin 13 mcg Vitamin B12 0.94 mcg
Calcium 314 mg Phosphorus 245 mg
Magnesium 35 mg Zinc 1.0 mg
Potassium 398 mg Sodium 129 mg
Protein 8.6 g Fat 5 g
Carbohydrates 12.4 g

This seems like a great amount of good health. With almost 25% of the daily requirement of calcium, Riboflavin and vitamin B 12 taken care of in a cup, it may be called a very healthy drink. Even in developed counties, most people do not need up taking their daily requirement of calcium in their diet, which is what has encouraged the onslaught of diseases like osteoporosis. Experts say, about 3 portions of milk and milk products in a day will take care of that…this roughly translates into a cup of milk, about a three quarter cup of yoghurt (about 150 grams) and 50 grams of hard cheese.

But the question still remains, is cows milk good for humans? The obvious answer is..then why isn’t deer or elephant or even dog milk good for us? We do not drink them, because of specie- specific preferences. So that way we should only drink human milk, and no other. Nature gives a free flow of human milk in a mother’s breast only for a limited time after the birth of a human baby. Does this indicate that we need to consume milk only during that time period?

Those who believe that milk is not required by adult humans even go to the extent of arguing that it does not provide calcium to the bones, but actually takes away calcium…hence can be a CAUSE for osteoporosis. This is because when one consumes milk, the acidity brought about while digesting milk proteins need body calcium to neutralize it… and this calcium is drawn from our bones. That is why a lifetime of high protein diet actually eats away at our bones while a low protein high on fiber diet like a vegetarian intake actually keeps our bone density intact for advancing ages too. Can we then safely say that degeneration of the body is encouraged by consumption of milk proteins (and other high protein diets)?

In fact, there are more cases reported of dairy products being responsible for diseases like osteoporosis, heart disease, obesity, cancer, allergies and diabetes.

Doctors now say that even non- fat milk can be held responsible for bringing on heart diseases, because of being deficient in Vitamin B 2. In fact even for kids under the age of one, it has been found that milk consumption encourages the onset of Type I diabetes. Milk allergies can cause a lot of other problems in children- sinus, ear infections in a very large number of cases and childhood asthma being a few of these. In an interesting comment a leading authority on child growth, Dr. Benjamin Spock, has called for a stop on feeding `cow’s glue’ to our children. This is because cow’s milk contains casein that is actually also used as a raw material for glue. Casein sticks to, and then coats the surface of the intestine, thereby blocking nutrient absorption. Over a period of time this could spell dire consequences.

In addition to the problems that natural milk can cause, if one takes into account the hormones and chemicals injected into bovine cattle to stimulate milk production, the milk they produce is nothing short of poison. On of the most powerful growth factors for this purpose is IGF-I, which has been identified as an accelerating factor (seven fold) for breast cancer occurrence among women and four fold increases in prostrate cancer among men. In addition, it increases the risk of udder infection in cattle, so more antibiotics are given to them to counter it…and these too pile on into the milk we have.

An interesting fact is that researches have shown that almost 90 percent of African Americans and the majority of Latinos, Asians and southern Europeans lack the genes necessary to digest lactose (the primary sugar in milk). But the rest of the world may or may not have these problems. Can this, then be a universal opinion?