Is there anyone saying this other than wacko animal rights groups? The only group I know of that says milk is unhealthy is PETA.
Milk does have saturated fats, which are unhealthy in large quantities over a long period.
Except that sales of whole milk have plummeted over the past couple of decades in the U.S. while sales of low-fat and skim milks have correspondingly soared.
And it’s not just PETA but a huge number of people in the vegan movement who demonize milk. The “milk is poison” crowd is loud, uncompromising, and bereft of any acquaintance with fact. You continually hear statements like “Humans are the only animals on the planet that drink another animal’s milk. Thus, by definition, drinking cows’ milk is extremely unnatural.” although they never get around to say what is natural for humans to eat. (Obviously not cooked food.) It’s basically creationism lite.
My two happy little (adult) kitties love lapping up a bowl full of fresh (cow’s) milk. Clearly PETA is wrong.
I don’t see any reason there would be a benefit other than to those societies that happen to eat dairy. It a benefit not because it’s good but because it’s available and consumed.
It’s not that big of a mutation genetically to simply extend the time period and already existing enzyme continues to be produced. This says nothing at all about the magic of milk.
Isn’t that kind of a truism? lol :rolleyes: That’s like saying gas stations are widespread in every culture that developed combustion engines…
Yes, imitating Westerners is a well known Asian trend. So?
Yes, something that is “fast growing” cannot be a tradition. You’re great with those truisms :rolleyes: It does fit the other category I mentioned though, “aesthetic”.
Granted, a lot of the unhealthiness of drinking milk has been mitigated with lower fat milk. There’s still the issue of course of other dairy products especially those not grocery store bought, and of nonorganic dairy products which can contain other potentially nasty things. If you’re just drinking non fat milk organic milk though you’re probably not too bad off. There’s some controversy about milk actually being detrimental to calcium absorption, but I’ll let others weigh in on that.
They are not without fact, but they are loud and uncompromising, and possibly have ulterior motive - the main milk is poison bandleader is trying to hock his soy milk making devices…
Also the only mammals to drink milk past solid food stage. Not all of them are hypocritical, a lot advocate not only vegan but also raw foods.
Simply eating raw food is obviously too simplistic, but the question of what is ‘natural’ diet for humans, or even for specific groups of humans is a difficult, controversial, and ongoing question.
It’s important to look at studies and principles, not just dismiss all ideas that come from partially misguided people. Facts are fact, independent of who happened to want to endorse them. This includes both people who want facts to be nice, and people who want facts to be convenient.
May I point out that you didn’t cite any facts, any studies, any history, or any genetics in any of your posts?
Like this?
In the Nintendo game Animal Crossing: City Folk, there is a pigeon character who sells coffee. Sometimes he offers to include “pigeon milk”. I didn’t realize the implications of that until now. :eek:
That may be technically true, but
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it’s mostly irrelevant since most of my arguments were logical in nature and
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it’s definitely irrelevant to the quote of mine you claim to be responding to, which was about dismissing facts based on who endorses them rather than on the quality of the facts themselves. Which is not something I did in any of my posts.
If there is something specific you think needs a cite, ask for it.
Cite?
Cite?
Cite?
Cite?
Are these all actually things you disagree with and want cites for?
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I would think that all mammals have pretty much always been able to digest lactose.
Are you really disputing that? I was responding to the statement “considering that people evolved to digest lactose” in a joking fashion - obviously what they meant to say was “people evolved to retain their ability to digest lactose into adulthood”.
My actual serious objection was to their other statement that “there was an evolutionary benefit for drinking milk”. In this case it’s possible it was another misstatement, but I didn’t get that impression. I think it would have been more accurate to say “there was an evolutionary benefit for retaining the ability to digest lactose into adulthood in cultures where dairy was a significant part of the diet”.
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In cultures where they drink milk or eat dairy products they will retain the ability since they are still consuming lactose. This has nothing to do with evolutionary benefits of dairy consumption and everything to do with compensating for dairy consumption.
Taken out of context this comes across meaning something different than I intended, which was the above secondary response. If you still have a problem with my rephrased statement let me know what you find objectionable about it.
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While dairy products use to be convenient in places where normal agriculture was difficult, and still is in some areas, most dairy consumption in industrialized areas is merely traditional or aesthetic.
From your own source:
I think it’s pretty obvious that in industrialized nations, we don’t have those same problems with seasonal food shortages, sparsity of nutritionally rich foods, or parasites. Which leaves as reasons for continuing to eat dairy that “Mom fed us that way” / “people used to think it was good for you” (tradition), and “it tastes good” (aesthetics), as well as perhaps propaganda (milk mustache ads).
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Dairy isn’t really all that healthy for adults.
My later statement was more specific so I’ll tackle that one instead:
You can probably break this down as such:
- Other dairy products are high in saturated fat and calories
As you can see, most cheeses have a much higher concentration of saturated fat than low fat milk, or even regular milk for that matter.
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Many babies and small children are allergic to milk - also some adults but that’s relatively rare. This, along with lactose intolerance are basically not issues with milk itself but with some of the people that drink it, so we can skip them for our purposes here.
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Milk, especially non organic has other issues - infection, antibiotics, hormones, pesticides
A) Infectious agents and antibiotics
Not entirely clear - it was definitely a problem up until 1988. Since then there has been more oversight and testing, although there was some controversy about the tests conducted in 1990. Theoretically it should no longer be an issue, and presumably the introduction of antibiotics has taken care of the infection problem.
Interesting information though, not from that source - supposedly Margaret Miller of the FDA arbitrarily increased the allowed level of antibiotics 100X, her previous employer being a manufacturer of these antibiotics. This is the allowed amount of each, not the allowed total. Also of the 52 actually in use, only 30 are actually approved and only 6 are actually tested for. It would seem to be pretty easy to get around the regulations, and the regulations might not even be strict enough to begin with. I’m not going to cite this because it’s from secondary sources and I’m still looking for primaries. So you can take or leave it - I think it’s worth looking into though.
B) Hormones
Int J Cancer, 2000 Aug, 87:4, 601-5
The common response is that IGF is not active orally.
Journal of the American Dietetic Association, vol. 99, no. 10. October 1999
Not sure why this effect is still seen. Perhaps the milk itself or other factors lower stomach acidity so that the IGF is not fully digested. It could also just be the high levels of casein, which promote production of IGF, rather than IGF from the milk. Just speculating here though.
C) Pesticides - note: link is to html, but the actual article is eventually a PDF
Regulation and testing has in the past brought the levels down. The recent increase appears to be a result of more sensitive tests, and the amounts found are still relatively low (allowable by FDA standards). Still, dairy and apples seem to be the predominant sources of exposure of pesticides to children.
As far as organic milk is concerned:
- Cancer - China Study
Yak milk is quite tasty as is yak cheese. Yak butter boiled in tea is an acquired taste but really nice.
Lister: What kind of milk are we using now?
Holly: Emergency back-up supply. We’re on the dog’s milk.
Lister: Dog’s milk?
Holly: Nothing wrong with dog’s milk. Full of goodness, full of vitamins, full of marrowbone jelly. Lasts longer than any other type of milk, dog’s milk.
Lister: Why?
Holly: No bugger’ll drink it. Plus the advantage of dog’s milk is when it goes off it tastes exactly the same as when it’s fresh.
Lister: Why didn’t you tell me, Holly?
Holly: What, and spoil your tea?
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This reminds me of a Dirty Jobs episode in which the owners of a bunch of Camels tried to say that Camel milk didn’t contain lactose.
Aww, hamburgers. I mean, damn it!
I somehow lost sight of this thread, so I’m glad it got bumped.
My last post probably got viewed as snarky, which is was, but that snark was for a definite reason. The subject of milk in relation to health and nutrition is an extremely complex one and is not reducible to sound bite statements.
Take jackdavinci’s statement that “I would think that all mammals have pretty much always been able to digest lactose.” He apparently thinks this is self-evident, even if you take off the qualification that no adult mammal can digest lactose. (Humans and their mutation being the exception, of course.)
Yet it’s not true. I actually told you so all the way back in post #2. The Pinnipedia, a group of large marine mammals, do not produce lactose at all, having evolved a higher level of fat for extra energy instead. The Carper book I cited earlier says that this was discovered when a baby walrus was shipped from Alaska to a California zoo. The handlers naturally gave it cow’s milk not having a lactating walrus around. Oops. Clean-up on aisle 6.
In addition, the earliest mammals, the Monotremes, have no more than traces of lactose in their milk, showing that lactose was a presumably superior adaptation. It’s still not known exactly why a unique sugar that has to be synthesized in the breast by a complex series of chemical transformations before being hydrolyzed back to simple sugars in the small intestine was the best answer. It does serve to indicate the complexity of the problem.
Not that milk hasn’t been extensively studied. It has, both mother’s milk and commercial processed milk. There are thousands of studies on milk. Cherrypicking one or two to make a point always fails. Some studies show that milk has a wide varieties of health benefits (or is correlated with them), some show that milk can cause (or is correlated with) a wide variety of problems. And you can find studies that refute these earlier studies and studies that refute those. Epidemiological studies are the hardest in which to pin down specific sources of good or ill. That doesn’t stop either side from making claims that cannot be backed up.
Pathogens can enter into milk at a number of places in the food supply but history shows that to be true for virtually every food we eat.
I’ve studied milk extensively for a long time. Yet that gives me no more than what I would consider to be some basic knowledge on this complex subject. That’s enough to spot when others who have not studied milk extensively or at all toss off statements culled from a few newspaper headlines as if they are definitive.
The mutation, of which at least 43 variations are know, that allows humans to drink full-lactose milk without symptoms past the age of weaning (even that statement calls for many careful calibrations) is unique. It is associated with a number of seminal events in the history of western culture, from the development of herding in the Middle East to the push of Indo-European-speaking farming cultures into the west and north of Europe to the colonization of much of the world by those milk-drinking cultures. It is considered to be the supreme example of recent evolution changing humanity.
People get blasted in threads about, say, guns, for not having deep working knowledge of gun anatomy and culture. Yet so few people know anything about a substance as important as milk that similar misinformation and generalization go unchallenged. That’s wrong, and that was my point.
