The truth about DAIRY

This is an interesting topic. Some of the stuff I hear about dairy really astounds me.

I'm going to try to throw a little devil's advocate into this because I feel milk's getting a bad wrap here.

1st, we are the only species to drink milk as adults BECAUSE we are the only species with the ability, and tools with which to do so (and actually that's not the case, other species will willingly drink milk if given to them, cats for instance, dogs as well). There's no demonic reason why we do this, it's a relatively humane way to receive a very nutritious and renewable food source (large production dairy farms not widthstanding).

2nd, Pasturization has been studied, tested, and proven to do far more good than the bad it can do. If you live on or near a farm, and can confirm a cow is healthy, and get the milk the same day, then fine, go for it, but that's no guarantee that the milk won't have some parasite in it as well. I'll take my chances with pasturization over getting tuberculosis, diphtheria, salmonella, strep throat, scarlet fever, listeriosis, and typhoid fever among other things.

3rd, of course we have less lactase, we are adults who have the ability and need to use many different food sources, but we are also omnivores who have digestive systems able to deal with all kinds of food and as such we still retain the ability to digest and use a moderate amount of dairy products without issue.

4th, many dairy products contain bacteria that help the digestion process. Beneficial bacteria can help keep us regular and healthy. The idea that milk itself contains hormones and other contaminants is untrue, the milk can carry, if given to the cows that produce it, a small amount of hormones and other toxins, the same way a mother can do so with a breastfeeding infant, that's just ignorance and greed on the part of the commercial farmers, but it has nothing to do with milk itself as a food source. If that's someone's argument, then they have no argument against milk from natural, grass fed cows with no hormones, pesticides, or other toxins in their system. And there are plenty of places around that offer this type of milk.

All that being said, I have no problem with someone choosing not to drink milk for any reason, what I don't understand though, is people using these arguments as ways to shoot down Dairy. Consume dairy, or don't, but I see no reason to tell others to avoid it. That's just MHO though.

I agree with everything you said, except for the pasteurization part.

I find that I lose weight when I consume a lot of dairy (even though it is not my favorite thing, I make myself incorporate it). I lose weight even better consuming raw dairy. Just my opinion and what I grew up on, went away in the army and did not touch dairy for years and years. I have rediscovered it when I moved back to Southern Illinois last year.

just some food for thought... IMHO I think dairy is an essential part of our diet (esp. in terms of the calcium) however I am lactose intolerent... :grumble: so I did a bit of research on the types of dairy that would be easy on the tummy :laugh: here are some cheesy basics... relative to lactose intolerence :flowerforyou:

Why can lactose-intolerant people eat some kinds of cheese and not others?


It has to do with how long the cheese is aged. Generally speaking, the older the cheese, the less lactose it has. As the chief sugar in milk, lactose is the main food source for the various species of Lactobacillus used in making most kinds of cheese. These bacteria, which are also responsible for sourdough bread, yogurt, kimchee, and dozens of other fermented foods, turn lactose into lactic acid, which is easily digested by humans, even those who are lactose intolerant. The longer a cheese ages, the more of its lactose is consumed by the bacteria. “In theory,” University of Wisconsin-Madison food science professor Scott Rankin says, “most of the lactose is gone after three months of aging.”


Processed cheese has the most lactose. Christine Gerbstadt, a dietitian and a spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association, points to Velveeta, which has 9.3 percent lactose—as much as whole milk. (Milk is 9 to 14 percent lactose, with skim on the high side and whole on the low side.) Not only is Velveeta unaged, but it also contains added lactose-laden milk solids. Fresh and/or unripened cheese, including Mexican queso fresco, farmer’s cheese, some mozzarella, paneer, cottage cheese, and cream cheese, contains the second-greatest quantities of lactose.

A good rule of thumb: The harder the cheese, the older it is, and the lower the lactose. So the eight-month-old, rock-hard Parmesan will contain less lactose than a softer (younger) Parmesan. Aged cheeses, including Roquefort and some goat cheeses, typically contain around 2 percent lactose.

But there’s no hard-and-fast rule for lactose-intolerant folks to follow—everybody can handle different concentrations. In fact, all people are lactose intolerant to some extent: Eat a whole bunch of pure lactose and you’ll wind up unhappy, no matter who you are. If you have trouble with dairy but still love cheese, Rankin suggests working your way up. Start with small quantities of aged cheeses: a little Parmigiano-Reggiano on your pasta, or some sharp cheddar in an omelet. It is possible to develop a better tolerance for lactose through exposure, so that bowl of Velveeta-and-salsa dip at your Super Bowl party might not be out of reach forever.

Technically, being lactose-tolerant is abnormal, because the enzyme that breaks down lactase (found in lactose) dissolves at some point before we reach adulthood (I think someone covered this already).

Nonetheless, skim milk, lowfat yogurt and cheeses and things of the like have an abundance of nutritional advantages.

Full fat milk, however, is meant to be drank during times of incredible growth *aka cows double their size in weeks!

I'm not exactly sure why this concept is so controversial. There are a lot of things out there that people should swear off, and I just don't see dairy being one of the hot-topics. Lol, but that's just me.

It's an interesting point about the gene expression for the enzyme decreasing after weaning. However, iit does appear that persistence in cultures that do consume dairy may be an evolutionary phenomenon:

"The lactase enzyme allows lactose digestion in fresh milk. Its activity strongly decreases after the weaning phase in most humans, but persists at a high frequency in Europe and some nomadic populations. Two hypotheses are usually proposed to explain the particular distribution of the lactase persistence phenotype. The gene-culture coevolution hypothesis supposes a nutritional advantage of lactose digestion in pastoral populations. The calcium assimilation hypothesis suggests that carriers of the lactase persistence allele(s) (LCT*P) are favoured in high-latitude regions, where sunshine is insufficient to allow accurate vitamin-D synthesis. In this work, we test the validity of these two hypotheses on a large worldwide dataset of lactase persistence frequencies by using several complementary approaches.

...

Our results show that gene-culture coevolution is a likely hypothesis in Africa as high LCT*P frequencies are preferentially found in pastoral populations. In Europe, we show that population history played an important role in the diffusion of lactase persistence over the continent. Moreover, selection pressure on lactase persistence has been very high in the North-western part of the continent, by contrast to the South-eastern part where genetic drift alone can explain the observed frequencies. This selection pressure increasing with latitude is highly compatible with the calcium assimilation hypothesis while the gene-culture coevolution hypothesis cannot be ruled out if a positively selected lactase gene was carried at the front of the expansion wave during the Neolithic transition in Europe.



The "calcium hypothesis" idea is of course one of the explanations for light skin in Northern Europe as well. The locus responsible for 1/3 of the skin color difference between Africans and Europeans, SLC24A5, is a relative recent sweep, on the order of the last 10,000 years. The authors do caution to be careful about the assumptions of their model. Point taken to heart, as I don't think they have a good enough grasp on the fine-grained variation in the lactase persistence alleles and how they track ecology within Europe. The Greenland Norse did not raise cattle just because of lack of Vitamin D (which they ended up getting through a shift toward a marine diet in any case), rather, there were ecological constraints in terms of the maximum productivity of grain-based subsistence farming (particularly with wheat in cold damp climates). In the conclusion of the paper it is noted that Iberia is a good test case of the model, and more data needs to be gathered there. If it is gene-culture coevolution than many Iberian peoples should be lactase persistent, but if it is due to Vitamin D, they should not be. "

taken from http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2009/07/lactase-persistence-pastoralism-in.php

I only have time to look this one source up, but it's such an interesting topic I will look into it more later to get a wider perspective.