“Got milk!” equals “Not Milk!” on a natural fitness diet

What’s in milk that is so good for the body?

Lots of people today believe that the consumption of milk is good for the body.  So I asked the question: What is it in milk that does a body good?  The answer, I have found, is not much- it seems milk may be doing more harm than good,and in fact may be a cause of an increase in obesity – something you definitely don’t want in a natural fitness diet.  So have we been brainwashed?  In my humble opinion, yes we have.  Highly paid celebrities promote milk in television and print ads. The dairy industry insures that milk gets into the schools, promoting “strong bones” as a cornerstone of a correct diet.  They continually promote strong bones and “milk does a body good.”   It is sad to see this lie and many others spread around only for one reason – profit.  I have always said a lie told enough times will eventually become truth.  My intention for this article is to inspire more people to investigate and understand the realities underlying milk drinking, and to decide the truth for themselves.

The fact is, drinking from a cow’s udder is not natural for humans.

Do you think before we had the ability to process milk the way we do now that we knelt down to drink from a cow? As we roamed this earth thousands of years ago, did we take part in this action?  If you say yes to this question, you are lying to yourself and denying the real truth. No other animal on earth receives milk from anything but its mother.   This is as it should be.  Lets first look at one of the big statements that the dairy industry makes: milk does a body good.  They claim it has a lot of calcium that builds strong bones.  Yet they fail to point out the fact that the protein in milk is predominantly casein protein. This protein severely limits the body’s ability to absorb ANY calcium benefit (not just from milk, but from any other source of calcium).  One of the largest nutritional studies ever conducted with over 880 million people in 2,400 counties points out this interesting fact.  Meat based diets cause many diseases and that casein is linked to the promotion of cancer as well as many other diseases.  You can take from this what you will, but the fact remains we are not designed for the consumption of any animals milk.

Just say NO to milk.

So if you follow a natural fitness diet, should you drink milk?  The short answer is no, for one simple reason: milk from animals is not natural no matter what the label says, whether its fat free, 1%, 2% or whole milk.  I have seen several articles published on the web that urge you to mix your protein with fat free or skim milk.  Please, for the health and safety of your body, do not follow this prescription.  This ultimately will do your body harm and ruin your long term health. Also, your ultimate goal of natural fitness will be long lost as milk, is not natural for the human body to consume.  A natural fitness diet assumes you are following the idea that nature will provide all that the body needs.  Nature will provide us the ability to easily find and consume foods that we would in the wild, as a scavenger.  Some examples of this include banana, apple, orange, lettuce, and peppers.  These can be consumed easily without cooking.  Nature would not have provided these foods to promote disease and sickness.  However, we have been given the ability to create things that can and will do damage to the body.

Don’t just take my word for it!

Harvard School of Public Health, on the Consumption of Dairy Products (2005):
“The recommendation to drink three glasses of low-fat milk or eat three servings of other dairy products per day to prevent osteoporosis is another step in the wrong direction. … Three glasses of low-fat milk add more than 300 calories a day. This is a real issue for the millions of Americans who are trying to control their weight. What’s more, millions of Americans are lactose intolerant, and even small amounts of milk or dairy products give them stomachaches, gas, or other problems. This recommendation ignores the lack of evidence for a link between consumption of dairy products and prevention of osteoporosis. It also ignores the possible increases in risk of ovarian cancer and prostate cancer associated with dairy products.”

“There are 4,000 species of mammals, and they all make a different milk. Human milk is made for human infants and it meets all their specific nutrient needs.”
—Ruth Lawrence, M.D., professor of pediatrics and obstetrics, University of Rochester School of Medicine; spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics.

“Milk, it now seems clear, is not the solution to poor bone density. To the contrary, it’s part of the problem.”
Dr. Charles Attwood

“The association between the intake of animal protein and fracture rates appears to be as strong as the association between cigarette smoking and lung cancer.”
Dr. T. Colin Campbell

Harvard University’s landmark Nurses Health Study, which followed 78,000 women over a 12-year period, found that the women who consumed the most calcium from dairy foods broke more bones than those who rarely drank milk. Summarizing this study, the Lunar Osteoporosis Update (November 1997) explained: “This increased risk of hip fracture was associated with dairy calcium. … If this were any agent other than milk, which has been so aggressively marketed by dairy interests, it undoubtedly would be considered a major risk factor.”

A National Institutes of Health study at the University of California, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (2001), found that “women who ate most of their protein from animal sources had three times the rate of bone loss and 3.7 times the rate of hip fractures as women who ate most of their protein from vegetable sources.” Even though the researchers adjusted “for everything we could think of that might otherwise explain the relationship … it didn’t change the results.” The study’s conclusion: “[A]n increase in vegetable protein intake and a decrease in animal protein intake may decrease bone loss and the risk of hip fracture.”

Researchers from the University of Sydney and Westmead Hospital discovered that consumption of dairy foods, especially early in life, is associated with increased risk of hip fractures in old age (American Journal of Epidemiology, 1994).

In Pediatrics (2000), published by the American Academy of Pediatrics, Pennsylvania State University researchers showed that calcium intake, which ranged from 500 to 1,500 mg per day, had no lasting effect on the bone health of girls in their teens. “We (had) hypothesized that increased calcium intake would result in better adolescent bone gain. Needless to say, we were surprised to find our hypothesis refuted,” one researcher explained

Casein may also be linked to the promotion of cancer and other diseases which was discovered in the 1980s by nutrition and health researcher, Dr. T. Colin Campbell, author of The China Study.

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