Thrawn Rickle 26

Xanthine Oxidase

© 2004 Williscroft

Drink your milk for strong bones and teeth! Did your mother ever tell you this?

She’s right—if you are a calf. After all, milk is nature’s way of adding 300 pounds to a calf and turning it into a cow in about a year.

Television and radio carry generic ads sponsored by the “Milk Council” – which seems to be a sub-unit of the National Dairy Council. These same guys sponsor ads in newspapers, magazines, bill boards – in fact, just about wherever you look, you will see something enticing you to purchase and drink milk.

“Milk does a body good” – I’m sure you have seen this a thousand times. Did you also notice that you don’t see this slogan anymore. “Got Milk?” has replaced it, and for good reason. When challenged in court recently, the Milk Council could not substantiate its claims that “Milk does a body good.”

The truth about milk and its dubious benefits is one of the best-kept secrets in America.

Cow milk has several inherent problems. Everybody knows that milk is laden with cholesterol. In fact, butterfat has the highest percentage of cholesterol of any routinely consumed animal fat. Milk also contains lactose—milk sugar which requires the enzyme lactase for proper digestion. Nearly ten percent of white American adults, fully seventy percent of black American adults, and virtually all Asian and Amerind American adults are deficient in this enzyme and so cannot properly digest milk; the result is gas and diarrhea.

The ratio of calcium to phosphorus in cow milk is about 1:1.2. In this ratio, they tend to combine in the intestine to form nearly indigestible mono-calcium phosphate. Despite this near indigestibility, cows can utilize it anyway by processing it through four stomachs. With our single stomach, however, much of this calcium simply passes through humans. In contrast, human milk contains a calcium to phosphorus ratio of more than 1:2, and in this ratio, less mono-calcium phosphate is produced. Thus, although human milk has less total calcium than cow milk, more calcium is actually available after digestion.

The Milk Council website (www.whymilk.com), is one of those sites where many pages are filled with very little actual information. In fact, you cannot even discover who these guys really are at this site. It promotes milk, and repeats much of the “common wisdom” about milk. In today’s litigious world, however, they use the language very carefully. For example, here is a direct quote from their site regarding calcium:

Calcium is one of the nutrients most likely to be lacking in the American diet. The calcium found in milk helps build and maintain strong bones and teeth. This mineral also plays an important role in nerve function, muscle contraction and blood clotting. Each 8-ounce glass of milk provides 300 mg or 30% of the Daily Value (or recommended intake).

Notice that they don’t actually say that milk supplies this calcium – because it doesn’t. The calcium is in the milk, but the human digestive system can’t access it very well. So, according to the Milk Council the “calcium found in milk helps build…” and “Each 8-ounce glass of milk provides 300 mg…” But they never actually say that if you drink milk, you will get the calcium you need.

It all depends on what the meaning of “is” is…if you get my gist.

Milk typically consists of water, protein, sugar, and fat. The protein consists of the curd (cheese) portion, predominately casein, and the whey portion. Human milk protein contains approximately twenty percent casein and eighty percent whey. Cow milk is almost the reverse. Cow casein is nearly indigestible by humans; it is used to make glue and latex paint, among other things. This protein complex is thought to be responsible for much human milk allergy. According to Dr. Frank Oski, the world renowned pediatrician who chaired the Children’s Center at Johns Hopkins University before he passed away on December 7, 1996, even teenage acne may result from cow casein.

In his disturbing book, Don’t Drink Your Milk (published by Mollica Press), Dr. Oski cites a

…study of over twenty thousand infants conducted in Chicago as far back as the 1930s… The overall death rate for the babies raised on human milk was 1.5 deaths per 1,000 infants while the death rate in the babies fed cow milk was 84.7 per 1,000 during the first nine months of life. The death rate from gastrointestinal infections was forty times higher in the non-breast-fed infants, while the death rate from respiratory infections was 120 times higher. An earlier analysis involving infants in eight American cities showed similar results. Infants fed on cow milk had a twenty times greater chance of dying during the first six months of life.

Just how does this study correlate with “Got Milk?” or the many other ways the National Dairy Council pushes its products?

Most milk drunk in America is homogenized, a process that extends milk’s shelf-life to about eleven days. Since non-homogenized milk spoils in less than three days, it is pretty obvious why the entire industry has gone homogenized – except for a small cadre of hold outs who serve local niche markets.

According to Dr. Kurt Oster, Chief of Cardiology, Emeritus, at Bridgeport Park City Hospital, Dr. Donald Ross of Fairfield University, and Dr. John Zikakis of University of Delaware, homogenization allows the enzyme xanthine oxidase to pass intact into the blood stream. There it attacks the plasmalogen tissue of the artery walls and parts of the heart muscle. This causes lesions that the body tries to heal by laying down a protective layer of cholesterol. The end result is scar tissue and calcified plaques and a buildup of cholesterol and other fatty deposits.

We call these atherosclerosis (artery clogging) and arteriosclerosis (artery hardening). According to these esteemed researchers, dietary cholesterol isn’t the main cause of heart attacks, homogenized milk is.

About fifteen years ago I was involved with a multi-level marketing effort to sell a milk substitute that avoided all the problems described in this article. As part of my campaign, I created and mailed into Northern California about 20,000 brochures that laid out the facts contained in this article. Within a week, I received a cease and desist from a Washington, D.C. law firm representing the National Dairy Council. They cited decades old research and completely side-stepped the actual issue raised in my brochure. I contacted Kurt Oster who was doing some research in France, and he offered to do anything possible to help me, so long as I just paid for his round trip between the U.S and France. Although I appreciated his offer, I did not then have the personal resources to fight these guys.

So the bullies won by default.

Consider this: The average Finn drinks about 600 pounds of milk a year; 90 percent is homogenized. The average Swede drinks about 375 pounds, but only 2 percent is homogenized. The heart attack death rate in Finland is about 245 per 100,000. In Sweden it is only 75. While this doesn’t prove anything, it sure gets your attention.

Dr. Oski finished Don’t Drink Your Milk with this:

Milk has no valid claim as the perfect food. As nutrition, it produces allergies in infants, diarrhea and cramps in the older child and adult, and may be a factor in the development of heart attacks and strokes.

Perhaps when the public is educated as to the hazards of milk only calves will be left to drink the real thing. Only calves should drink the real thing.