Healthy Eating for Women

Dairy products are a big part of culinary traditions in America, Western Europe, and many other countries. Whatever the dish, someone is smothering it with cheese. Fast-food eateries could probably sell a cardboard sandwich if they covered it in three kinds of cheese. But when your goal is to change the role that foods play in your life and to start using them to your best advantage, it’s time to take a good, hard look at dairy.

Let’s begin with milk. Modern dairy farming presents much of the same contamination issues as chicken farming. Cows graze on pesticide-soaked lands and, since the legalization of bovine growth hormone (BGH) in 1993, farmers have been using it to produce enormous quantities of milk. As a result, cows often develop mastitis, a painful udder infection that must be treated with antibiotics.

Again, these chemicals can end up in your carton of milk, adding to the problem of antibiotic resistance and other health risks. Twenty different antibiotics and thirty-three other drugs are legal for use in dairy cows.

Organic milk products are available in some grocery stores; however, pollutants are not the only reason why dairy products do not belong in an optimal diet. Every slice of cheese you add and every glass of milk you drink, other than skim varieties, burdens your body with fat and cholesterol. Given the very high fat content of whole cow’s milk (49% of its calories are from nothing but fat), it’s clear that nature never intended adult humans to consume it at all. What’s nourishing to a calf has caused a multitude of problems for human beings.

Risks associated with the consumption of dairy products include insulin-dependent diabetes, prostate cancer, osteoporosis (see chapter 10), allergies that can cause respiratory distress, canker sores, skin conditions, cataracts, asthma, and, surprisingly enough, fertility problems in women. Babies often suffer from a digestive irritation called colic. It has long been known that eliminating cow’s milk formula often solves the problem. A study in the journal Pediatrics found that women using dairy products pass milk antibodies along to their babies when they breastfeed, increasing the chance of causing colic.

As we have seen, iron deficiency in Western countries is uncommon. But add milk products and this can change. Low in iron to begin with, milk often displaces iron-rich foods in the diet. In infants it can cause irritation and loss of blood from the intestinal tract, which over time reduces the body’s iron stores. Even combining a healthy food such as broccoli with cheese or milk reduces its usable iron by about half. While adults often have problems with iron overload, as we saw in the previous chapter, iron deficiency in children is risky, and dairy products often are contributors. Milk causes unnecessary discomfort for people who are lactoseintolerant.

Even though 95 percent of Asian Americans, 74 percent of Native Americans, and 70 percent of African Americans cannot digest dairy’s lactose sugar, milk products have been pushed in the U.S. Dietary Guidelines for all Americans. All babies have lactase enzymes, which allow them to digest milk. But for many, these enzymes disappear after childhood, so milk drinking causes cramping, diarrhea, and nausea. About 85 percent of Caucasians tolerate milk sugar, but only because of a genetic mutation passed down from distant ancestors. About 75 percent of people worldwide do not. Apparently nature has ensured that mother’s milk—in all mammals—contains ideal nutrients for infants. After this stage of life, milk is no longer needed—especially milk from another species— and a new set of nutrients is required.

Perhaps the most troubling side of milk relates to a compound called insulin-like growth factor, or IGF-I. There are small traces of IGF-I in your bloodstream normally, and it has many biological functions, from encouraging cells to grow, to storing nutrients. But IGF-I also is a powerful stimulus for cancer cell growth. Researchers believe that in even slight excess, it may be linked to higher risk of prostate cancer in men and breast cancer in women. Here is where milk comes in. Researchers have found that drinking milk regularly can boost the amount of IGF-I in your blood by about 10 percent, precisely the opposite of what you want to happen. Perhaps this explains why several studies have found higher cancer rates in countries where milk drinking is especially popular.

Share This