Chris Wheeler – 15/10/99
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.
