Category: MilkAndBones

Harvard Expert: Lose The Cow’s Milk

Picture of pitcher of milk and a glass of milk

The Los Angeles Times recently published an article about how many mainstream experts, health advocacy groups and scientists are criticizing the USDA Dietary Guidelines. Surprisingly, these non-vegan mainstream experts had a big problem with the guidelines recommending that Americans drink even more cow’s milk:

DR. WALTER C. WILLETT
Chairman of the Department of Nutrition
Harvard School of Public Health (Boston)
Author, “Eat, Drink and Be Healthy”

Also, the recommendation for three servings of milk per day is not justified and is likely to cause harm to some people. The primary justification is bone health and reduction of fractures. However, prospective studies and randomized trials have consistently shown no relation between milk intake and risk of fractures. On the other hand, many studies have shown a relation between high milk intake and risk of fatal or metastatic prostate cancer, and this can be explained by the fact that milk intake increases blood levels of IGF-1, a growth-promoting hormone. The justification for drinking three glasses of milk per day on the basis of increasing potassium intake is also not valid as the extra calories, even with low-fat milk, would easily counterbalance the benefit of the extra potassium. Also, the recommendation for people of all ages to drink three servings of milk per day is very radical and would double dairy production if adopted; this would have huge environmental impacts that would need to be considered.

Full Article

Raw milk can make you sick.

picture of a baby with a salmonella infection

A hard to get food with a maligned reputation but in-credible, but disputed, health benefits is not an usual thing in the alternative health business. One of the latest is raw milk.

From the June 12th – 18th 2010 edition of The Economist, page 36
http://www.economist.com/node/16322762?story_id=16322762

Public health advocates dispute the health benefits, though, and say that raw milk is inherently risky, especially for children, old people, and anybody with health problems. Between 1998 and 2008, according to the Centers for Disease Control, some 1,600 people became sick after drinking the stuff. Nearly 200 were hospitalized and two died. The actual incidence of minor illness may be higher, as many people afflicted by food-borne disease suffer in the privacy of their homes.

John Sheehan, the director dairy safety for the Food and Drug Administration, says that the agency has thoroughly examined the claimed health benefits and found no support for any of them. He adds that regulation cannot guarantee safety: in the states where raw milk is sold legally, there have been nearly three times as many outbreaks of illness as in the states where it is not. Presumably there is also more raw milk drunk in the former group, but there is no good way to measure the size of the illicit market in the latter.

Because of the risk of salmonella and other nasty bugs, it is against the law to sell raw milk across state lines. But more than two dozen states let farmers sell raw milk directly from their farms, subject to various rules, and a handful even allow retail sales. Several states are taking a new look at the issue. A serious blow to the cause came last month in Wisconsin, one of American’s largest dairy states. It already allows incidental sales of raw milk –a few galons here and there — but Jim Doyle, the governor, has vetoed a bill that would have allowed it to be sold more widely.

His veto was something of a surprise. The bill had passed both houses of the state legislature by a healthy margin. Many lawmakers were moved by the idea that allowing raw-milk sales would help small farmers. Mr. Doyle had indicated that he would sign the bill. But after lobbying by the dairy industry and public-health pressure groups, he changed his mind. One concern was that an outbreak caused by dodgy raw milk could damage the reputation of Wisconsin’s entire dairy industry.

Got Diabetes?


I originally wrote this book review about 3 years ago. Though published four years ago, this book has an Amazon.com sales rank of about 382 as of this writing. See the paragraph in bold for how feeding cows milk to children may predispose children toward developing Type 1 Diabetes.

I don’t have diabetes. I won this book as part of a package in a fund raising auction.

I found it to be very interesting.

One current theory for the genesis of food allergies is that “leaky guts”, porous intestines leak out proteins from our food before those proteins have been broken down into amino acids. These proteins then get out into the blood where the immune system is alerted to them, thus triggering an autoimmune response.

Infants, whose digestive systems are not fully matured, are predisposed to having leaky intestines. They are vulnerable to developing food allergies if they are fed highly allergenic foods too early ( dairy products, soy, wheat, citrus, meat etc ). The proteins leak into their blood stream and their immune systems are inadvertently trained to see these proteins as hazards.

Type 1 diabetes is believed to happen, in part, when the immune system mistakenly attacks and destroys the insulin producing cells of the pancreas ( pages 30 – 35 ). The book describes several studies of children predisposed to type 1 diabetes or children who were on their way to getting it. It turned out that these children’s immune systems were “on alert” to attacking proteins found in bovine milk. It has been discovered that portions of those bovine milk proteins were nearly biochemically identical to the children’s insulin producing cells.

Wow.

Dr. Barnard’s dietary program for type 2 diabetes has been tested in several studies in partnership with the National Institute Of Health. In a nutshell, he prescribes eating low fat ( only 20% of calories from fat, preferably 10% ), high fiber, low glycemic index valued, and vegan foods. That is, each bit of food that a recovering diabetic eats has all of these qualities.

The really interesting part is where the book explains why this works. Too much fat accumulating on the inside of cells causes the mitochondria in those cells to stop burning such fat, which leads to insulin resistance. Though a person’s pancreas might be kicking out enough insulin, the insulin no longer has any effect on the cells. The cells will not absorb glucose from the blood stream leading to toxic levels of sugar in the blood.

The diet described above has been proven to reduce the amount of fat within cells, restart the burning of this fat by the mitochonria, reverse insulin resistance, and lower blood sugar levels — without drugs.

Again, wow.

Weight control is an important part of treating diabetes and this book has a lot of interesting facts about losing weight from the studies of Dr. Barbara Rolls who wrote the book “Volumetrics”. Unlike the various quack popular diet book authors out there Dr. Rolls is a highly respected scientist who has been researching how to satisfy hunger with fewer calories.

One thing she learned is that for each 14 gram increase of fiber in a diet ( via food, not supplements ) people will eat until they are full, but they will feel full on 200 fewer calories.
200 fewer calories per day is enough to lose 20 pounds over the course of a year.

Her theory is that weight in the stomach triggers satiation.

Interestingly, her studies found that not any weight will set this response off. Having study participants drink a particular weight of water did nothing for triggering early satiation. However taking in the same weight composed of water and food ( stew ) did.

Dr. Rolls recommends eating foods that have natural “bulk” – a lot of water and a lot of fiber together naturally. To encourage weight loss she advises eating food that has the more weight per a particular amount of calories.

A neat trick offered by the book is to focus on eating foods that have an equal number of calories as grams of weight…or less.

Another simple weight loss trick offered by Dr. Barnard is to do a “quick fiber check” when your weight loss seems to be slowing down. He has a set value of points for servings of legumes, vegetables, fruit, and whole grains. You count the number of servings of each you have every day. If your points add up to less than 40 and you want more weight loss you eat more food from those groups of foods.

The book also gave a very clear introduction to the disease of diabetes in accessible, but not dumbed down language that I found fascinating.