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Cow's milk; helpful or harmful?


MDJH

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Although I'm used to hearing from doctors and nutritionists about milk being good for you, I've come across some almost convincing arguments for the idea that it isn't.

 

Here's an article, though it's a bit long: http://www.notmilk.com/kradjian.html

 

And for those who don't want to bother with the article, here's a video:

 

It's a bit disturbing to think that even nutritionists would be misinformed on this subject; but the arguments for why they would be sound somewhat plausible. As a type 1 diabetic, I hope they find out what's causing this disease, and if it really is milk, I hope the diary industry gets punished for it.

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Interesting article. However, there is one thing that makes me uneasy: he cites several studies and then concludes the opposite that the researchers do. If you think a study is wrong that doesn't entitle you to draw your own conclusions, you'd have to find a study that supports those conclusions. That he does this leads me to wonder about the other stuff he says. Still, it does seem believable.

 

I'm mildly lactose intolerant and have been worried about not getting enough milk. Maybe it is time I stopped worrying about it.

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I'm more worried that I find myself agreeing with klaplunk than I am about drinking milk.

 

The reality is that lots of people drink lots of milk with no apparent ill effects so it's certainly not that harmful.

 

On the other hand the saturated fat levels in it might be a bit high.

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Cow's milk may well be correlated with type 1 diabetes, but of course the patient has to have the right genetic predisposition to have this reaction to cow's milk for it to have any effect, which is why so many people can drink milk without harm. But interestingly, monozygotic twins are only 50% concordant for type 1 diabetes, suggesting that some subtle environmental influence, which affects one twin and not the other, triggers the disease during childhood. But since twins are usually brought up in the very same household, go to the same school, eat the same things, and inhale the same chemicals in the environment, what could account for the fact that even with identical genes they both develop type 1 diabetes in only half of all cases? I can't imagine that one twin drinks cow's milk and the other doesn't!

 

It is also likely that it is not that cow's milk causes type 1 diabetes, but that drinking cow's milk instead of human milk, with all the vital immunological instructions its chemical composition contains, is what causes the autoimmune processes of type 1 diabetes.

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The reality is that lots of people drink lots of milk with no apparent ill effects so it's certainly not that harmful.

What do you mean, "no apparent ill effects?" What is your basis for this?

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What do you mean, "no apparent ill effects?" What is your basis for this?

 

With the quantity of milk sold and drank everyday if people were becoming violently ill or milk was posing massive health hazards I would assume that people would stop drinking it and there would be a massive uproar and recall. I mean with the mass media today a thing as prevalent as milk would be a huge news story if it was causing sickness. Since there has been none of this I think its fairly safe to assume that for the most part milk is not making people sick.

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What do you mean, "no apparent ill effects?" What is your basis for this?

 

I don't think it's my job to prove a negative. If you think there are apparent ill effects please say why you think so.

Otherwise, as DJBruce says, I think we can assume that no such effects exist.

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With the quantity of milk sold and drank everyday if people were becoming violently ill or milk was posing massive health hazards I would assume that people would stop drinking it and there would be a massive uproar and recall.

It obviously isn't making people violently ill immediately. But that's not what's being alleged. What's being alleged is that it has long-term links to diseases like cancer and heart disease. Obviously the effects of this aren't going to be immediate, and I don't think it would necessarily be apparent, to the individuals affected, that the milk contributed to it. Milk having massive health hazards wouldn't necessarily imply people would stop drinking it; smoking has massive health hazards and people still smoke.

 

Of course, that may seem like a false equivalence. We are told that milk is good for you and cigarettes are bad for you; the former is consumed for belief in its benefits, the latter is consumed initially out of curiosity and later out of addiction. However, the point remains; you can't assume something has no health hazards just because people consume it.

 

With the quantity of milk sold and drank everyday, it's hard to tell which diseases it may or may not contribute to, because so many diseases have such uncertain causes. But this isn't a reason to assume milk is safe either.

 

...

 

Oh, and Cuthber, the reasons are given in that video and in the article.

Edited by MDJH
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As you say, smoking kills people and the effects are delayed.

We noticed this.

Why would we not have noticed if drinking milk also kills people?

Who's "we"? From my recollection of the article, it argues that some of the medical community HAS noticed, and that the influence of the dairy industry tends to suppress such findings. If you're referring to the general public, how on Earth is the average person supposed to know if something everyone consumes, that they're told is healthy, is a major contributing factor in common diseases?

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In this case "we" means people like me.

 

The article shows that some doctors have noted what might well be a correlation between high protein or high fat levels in the diet and some forms of illness.

Pressure from the dairy industry certainly won't help publicise this but you seem not to have noticed. This report isn't suppressed; you read it and so did I.

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In this case "we" means people like me.

 

The article shows that some doctors have noted what might well be a correlation between high protein or high fat levels in the diet and some forms of illness.

Pressure from the dairy industry certainly won't help publicise this but you seem not to have noticed. This report isn't suppressed; you read it and so did I.

I wasn't saying it was CENSORED.

 

Again, the concern is that the influence of the dairy industry might be part of the reason milk is even considered a health food in the first place.

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What stopped the other food industries doing the same?

I think that the reasons are two fold.

Psychologically milk is seen as "pure" and safe.

 

The doctors and such agreed.

At the time many people were underfed- in particular they were short of calories and vitamins. Milk supplies both.

But you still have to remember that milk has a history that goes back a lot further than modern marketing.

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One of the problems this topic points out, is the one size fits all approach to milk, and many other things backed by medical science. As an analogy, say there were no such things as shoes. A scientist invents this new device called a shoe to help alleviate the many foot conditions due to walking with bare feet. They do an extensive study of millions of subjects and find out that the average man needs size 10 and the average woman size 7.

 

Based on this study, to reach the most people they mass produce this new medical device called a shoe, but in only one male and one size. This may indeed help the most people using only one size, but it does not address the reality that one size does not fit all.

 

All those who need a larger or smaller shoe size might start to develop secondary conditions, such as blisters. Now we need a mop. Milk like shoes, is not one size fits all. But it may look good on paper using studies based on averages.

 

Personally my body can handle milk so the studies of averages don't apply to me. I will walk bare footed, until they have my size to avoid the side effect of blisters, which are worse than the calluses on the bottom of my feet, which never bothered me.

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  • 1 month later...

Whatever happened to just plain old common sense? Grandma and grandpa drank the stuff by the gallon unpasteurized lived on high sodium (salt) high fat diets as well and most of our elder generation was and is healthier than us. Most lived and are living longer than we will as well. Exercise is the key to vitality, combined of course with lesser amounts of processed and commercially produced foods.

 

It amazes me just how many food additives are chemical by products of some manufacturing process and we provide the method of disposal. "Garbage in and garbage out" I was raised on huge quantities of unpasteurized milk having lived on a dairy farm My Grand father lived to 87 Grand mother to 86 with daily consumption. Cataracts was the biggest health concern until his 80's when stomach cancer became an issue. Every elder I know was a farmer some ate bacon and eggs every morning for breakfast with no ill health.

Try and do that today with our sedentary lifestyles and you'll be having bypasses at 50. Just plain common sense as I see it.

 

Also like to note I read somewhere that unpasteurized milk helped build immunity to many diseases because the pathogens were present in small quantities which helped the body build resistance. Nowaday's we see people head for antibiotics at the first sniffle and peroxide for minor scrapes. So........how do you get a strong immune system if you never use it? We all get cancerous cells but generally we destroy them cancer is caused when somthing hinders this immune response.

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