Want Help Minimizing Dairy? This Is Meant To Help
Please note that this section contains my personal notes from my readings on this topic.
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After nursing my daughter, reading the below really struck some chords within me. From Skinny Bitch: Bun in the Oven (2005) by Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin on pages 75 – 80:
- On factory farms, where the majority of our milk comes from, there is no gentle farmer milking cows with a bucket between his feet. Clamps are attached to cows’ udders and cows are milked by machine. (Imagine that after having just given birth!) The udders become sore and infected. Pus forms. But the machines keep on milking, sucking the dead white blood cells into the milk. In the good ol’ U.S. of A., we have the highest allowable upper limit of pus concentration in the world — almost double the international standard.
- To get rid of all the pus, bacteria, and other grossness, milk has to be pasteurized. (Meaning, they gotta boil the hell out of it.) So even if cows’ milk was good for humans — it isn’t — this process destroys beneficial enzymes, makes calcium less available, and creates radioactive particles.
- The U.S. government sure as hell doesn’t bother with Johne’s disease. Oh, wait, you’ve never heard of it? Of course you haven’t. Because Johne’s (pronounced Yo Neez) disease is “something that farmers talk about secretly — whisper behind hands.” One dairy scientist calls it the “whispering campaign” and stated he had never heard a frank, open discussion about it. One dairy farmer referred to Johne’s as a “dirty word. It’s like AIDS — you don’t talk about it.” When the USDA released a report on 2,500 dairy producers in 1997, they estimated that up to 40% of those dairy herds were infected. (They also conceded that it was likely an underestimate.) Health experts correlate the high rate of Johne’s disease in cattle with the growing epidemic of Crohn’s disease in humans. How is it transmitted? People suffering from Crohn’s disease suffer from uncontrollable diarrhea. And apparently, cows with Johne’s disease suffer the same affliction. The diarrhea can come shooting out of the cow in liquid form. And because her butt is so close to her udders, poo gets on her udders. And unless someone takes the time to wash and clean the udders of every cow before every milking, the infected fecal matter makes its way into the milk. And, within that poo, there can be as many as one trillion paratuberculosis bugs per gram. Surprise, surprise: The good ol’ U.S. of A has the highest incidence of Crohn’s disease in the world.
- The bovine leukemia virus involves about 80% of dairy herds. The virus can be killed if the milk is pasteurized, and pasteurized correctly. But sometimes milk is sold “raw.” In a study of randomly collected raw samples, the virus was detected in two thirds! … Unfortunately, states with known leukemic dairy herds have higher rates of human leukemia.
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This is very scary. My son is an extremely picky eater at 2.5 years old and primarily wants milk as his meals. I read your post on how your daughter’s complexion changed and I wonder if cutting back or cutting out milk would help my son in more ways than just getting him out of drinking milk and wanting only “snack food” (crackers, pretzels) as meals. This is one of the reasons I’m seriously considering giving him juice as opposed to getting no veg at all. How do I transition him out of dairy as his main staple?
Hi Jane,
My daughter was on a mainly dairy-based diet, as I have written. The transition for us was not that big a deal. She was about 1.5 years old at the time, but we substituted dairy milk with nut-based milks — hemp milk, almond milk, and, more recently, oat milk. My daughter never articulated or expressed resistance. She loved cheese — still loves cheese — but we cut that out for about a year and recently started re-introducing it on occasion. Our household craves pizza, so we have pizza once a week.
I would suggest that you experiment. I have come to believe more in diversity. I think that it will take a long time and a lot of experimentation to figure out the optimal diet for each person. In the meantime, while I’m still trying to figure it out, I’m constantly fine-tuning, trying to hedge my risks by increasing diversity over time. With dairy, she doesn’t have too much of it now and never complains about it. Try the nut-based milks. There are nut-based cheeses as well, which we tried but don’t use regularly.
The other night, I made fresh tomato sauce with whole grain pasta and my daughter did not want the tomatoes. She then agreed to try it with some parmesan cheese. After a few spoonfuls, she didn’t realize that I stopped dipping it in the cheese and ate the rest of the tomatoes / onions / garlic with no cheese.
With veggies, my daughter still loves cold-pressed juices so she gets kale, spinach, celery, cucumber, pineapple, apple, wheatgrass, etc in her juices. However, she’s recently decided that she doesn’t like green vegetables (even though she’ll drink it). So we constantly reinforce the story of “Green Eggs and Ham” and reinforce the idea of just trying new things. It’s slowly working. I’ll ask her to try just one bite of something that has greens. 90% of the time she doesn’t want it. 10% of the time she’ll continue to eat it.
My goal in the short-term has been to get her body accustomed to how much more energy it feels with higher quality food. With this, I hope that later on she notices her body’s disappointment from eating less healthy foods.
What also helps immensely is what she sees from my husband and I. We eat what we preach, and she is naturally inclined to imitate.
Good luck! And please let me know how it goes.
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