The "healthy milk" scam - how millions of us every day succumb
to one of the greatest dietary myths since the snake told Eve
"Eat that apple and you'll never regret it!" Chris Wheeler gets
to the roots of the Great Milk Disaster.
"Cow's milk in the past has always been oversold as the perfect
food... but the Government really shouldn't promote it as such."
The words are those of Benjamin Spock, for years the baby guru
whose book on child care many of us relied on through the 60s to
the 80s in the bringing up of our own children. Spock was not one
to mince words or hold back from expressing controversial ideas,
but these words of advice given several decades ago have passed
into history with little reaction from the world's cow's milk
consumers amongst whom most of us can be numbered.
We, after all, are members of a nation which makes a substantial
income from its dairy trade. We are also convinced consumers of
our nation's leading agricultural product as any survey of any
New Zealand household fridge will demonstrate. I've always suspected
the idea of cow's milk being healthy for us might be a bit of a con
job on behalf of the dairy industry.
My interest didn't start becoming very pronounced, however, until
I started paying more attention to what my own body was trying to
tell me as I became older. For example, the old English/Kiwi custom
of having a hot milk drink before going to bed. It's immediate effect
on me was that my throat and nasal passages clogged up with so much
mucus sleep was delayed for an hour or so, so I stopped that practice.
Then I clicked on to the fact that all my throat clearing after the
morning's corn flakes and lashings of milk was also a sign that milk
probably wasn't doing me much good at that time either.
That's all some twenty years behind me now, but it put me on the
case of milk as a possibly toxic product. Then in 1993, rather
belatedly, I'm afraid, I came across an, unfortunately, rather
obscure scientific book by Kurt Oster MD and Donald Ross PhD
entitled The X-O Factor (Park City Press, NY, 1983) which detailed,
for the first time to my knowledge, some disturbing facts about
homogenised cow's milk.
Drs Oster and Ross during the course of prolonged and detailed
research clearly identified homogenised cow's milk in particular
as a major factor in the cause of atherosclerosis and a variety
of other circulatory and heart-associated medical problems. In a
report initially published in 1979 they disclosed that the
homogenisation of cow's milk entraps a plaque-building enzyme
contained in cow's milk called xanthine oxidase (XO) within milkfat
globules, thus protecting the enzyme from being broken down by the
normal processes of digestion, which, in any case, are slowed down
and even stopped by the fact that cow's milk in particular neutralises
stomach acidity and otherwise interferes with the normal human digestive
processes.
What is worse, Oster and Ross discovered that protected in its
homogenised milkfat globules, the XO enzyme was able to transit
the stomach wall into the bloodstream where it immediately started
playing havoc with the whole circulatory system by forming deposits
on the arteries throughout the body. This fact in particular
clarified for the two doctors why the arteries of modern young
Americans in their 20s were suddenly displaying all the symptoms
of chronic arterial degeneration exhibited in previous generations
(prior to the 60s when homogenising milk started to become popular)
only in the very old.
When I read this information in 1993 I was the editor of Soil &
Health magazine and immediately put out an alert (Soil & Health,
April/May, 1993, page 4-5) to readers which I was still repeating
at regular intervals through till the time I resigned as editor in 1998.
What particularly concerned me then and still concerns me now is
that over 80 percent of milk sales in New Zealand including "trim"
varieties and particularly all "blue top" milk is now homogenised
and less than 7 percent of milk sold is the full-fat, non-homogenised
variety. My conclusion was that New Zealanders were hastening an earlier
than necessary death and the certainty of significant heart and
circulatory problems by continuing their romance with homogenised milk.
More was yet to come, however. I began to realise from what I had
already found out that probably only a fraction of the cow's milk
problem had been exposed.
Then Robert Cohen of the US Anti-Dairy Coalition (www.antidairycoalition.com
and www.notmilk.com), in the course of informing me
regarding the growing scandal over the use in the USA of bovine
growth hormone, drew my attention to an issue of the Townsend
Letter for Doctors and Patients (May, 1995)
which told doctors: "In reality, cow's milk, especially processed
cow's milk, has been linked to a variety of health problems" and
then proceeded to list: (1) Mucus production, (2) Haemoglobin loss,
(3) Diabetes, (4) Heart disease, (5) Atherosclerosis, (6) Arthritis,
(7) Kidney stones, (8) Mood swings, (9) Depression, (10) Irritability,
(11) Allergies.
Robert Cohen also drew my attention to the August, 1994 issue of
Natural Health, where, in an article entitled Don't Drink Your Milk!
author Nathaniel Mead describes "nature's perfect food" as being
linked to a great number of serious health problems.
Mead's article begins by including a quote from a Washington, D.C.,
paediatrician by the name of Russell Bunai, M.D. When asked his
opinion on what single change in the American diet would produce
the greatest health benefit, Bunai responded: "Eliminating dairy products."
Mead went on to interview Frank A. Oski, M.D., Chief of Paediatrics
at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, who stated: "At least 50 percent
of all children in the United States are allergic to cow's milk, many
undiagnosed. Dairy products are the leading cause of food allergy,
often revealed by diarrhoea, constipation, and fatigue. Many cases
of asthma and sinus infections are reported to be relieved and even
eliminated by cutting out dairy. The exclusion of dairy, however,
must be complete to see any benefit."
At this point the penny really began to drop as I hope it is
beginning to drop with you, dear reader! Doesn't New Zealand
lead the world in asthma cases? Aren't we up among the leaders
in diabetes? Could it be that the basic cause behind a host
of common medical problems experienced by New Zealanders is
simply the fact that we consume too many dairy products for
our own good? Could it also be that the NZ Dairy Board and in
fact the whole NZ dairy industry, far from being the purveyors
of what we are frequently told is one of the world's healthiest
products, are actually the unwitting contributors to a worldwide
medical disaster?
I don't, of course, want to overstate the case. Don't get me wrong.
I like my cheeses and my yoghurts and the occasional dash of icecream.
But I'm also aware of another well-known fact and that is that the
majority of the human population of planet Earth are actually cow
lactose intolerant to some degree or other. It could be that same
intolerance is making a lot more of us sick than we presently recognise.
In fact I'll put money on the fact that in 50 years time that
household fridge and, in fact, your local supermarket will have
one characteristic in common - an absence of most of the dairy
products we currently take for granted.
Chris Wheeler is a past president of the New Zealand Soil & Health Association
and a co-author with Walter Last of the Self Help Cancer Cure Book.
Further information on the real story behind milk can be obtained
from Robert Cohen's recent book Milk - The Deadly Poison, published
by Argus Publishing Inc, 301 Sylvan Ave, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 07632,
USA.
