During this festive holiday season my sister and her family are in town. The other day she informed my parents, brothers and other sisters that she wasn’t allowing her kids to consume any milk or any other dairy products. Her reasons are that she feels that milk/dairy is giving/was giving her kids cold like symptoms (runny noses, sore throats) as well as ear infections. She also doesn’t believe in anti-bionics but that is another story (she has her degree and is a practitioner of acupuncture and oriental medicine).
My question is…do dairy products have this kind of effect? Should they be cut off from kids? Will this actually help? What is this, um, theory based on? My sister, for all that she has her degree in, I suppose, sort of a medical art, is pretty vague on WHY she is doing this. Something about additives and hormones in the milk/dairy products, and how cutting off her kids has helped so much (to my mind it appears all three of her kids HAVE colds atm, but that is beside the point I guess).
Her theory about dairy products causing colds is nonsense.
Preventing her children from eating these foods puts them at risk of not having enough calcium in their diet for proper development of bones and teeth. Other sources of calcium exist (for instance, plant sources) and supplements can be given, but she’d have to be careful about making sure these adequately compensate for lack of milk and other dairy foods.
If she’s concerned about “additives”, there’s milk on the market from cows that are not given hormones.
The hormone that we give to cattle is simply more of the growth hormone that cows make naturally. It gets into the milk whether the cows get supplemented or not, and it’s not in any higher quantities in milk from supplemented cows.
Moreover, it is Cow growth hormone, not human growth hormone. If you somehow got it into your system, it wouldn’t have any effect on you because your cell’s receptors are different.
And, provided you are eating the milk instead of injecting it into your veins, the acid in your stomach will denature the hormone anyhow, turning it into harmless, nutritious amino acids.
There are plenty of reasons to object to dairy without siting the use of growth hormone.
Pullet, extensive studier of modern animal produciton
What are they? I don’t know if hormones are the reason she is objecting…as I said, it has something vaguely to do with cold like symptoms and supposedly suppressing them…or something.
XT, IT Engineer who knows virtually nothing about medicine OR animals…
Dairy does cause some people to have an allergic response that can look like a cold.
I am somewhat lactose intolerant, but eat some dairy anyway. However, there’s a direct correlation between my dairy consumption, stuffiness, and postnasal drip. If I have an earache, consistently eating dairy makes it worse.
Through breeding alone, we have created animals that lactate up to 20 gallons a day. They do this for 300 days out of the year. Cows who get the hormonal supplements will on average produce more milk per day than cows who don’t. We then allow them two months to rest, after which they give birth again and repeat the cycle. The whole event is so taxing that, even with a perfect nutrition program, most dairy cows can’t sustain economic production past their second lactation.
The mammary glands on the average dairy cow are so large that they stand a significant risk of stepping on them.
We keep them in huge numbers. Dairies with thousands of cows are not uncommon. Because the numbers are so large, the level and method of care for sick animals is different. The specifics are frequently objectionable to the gentle reader. Same problem with beef feedlots.
Baby cows are removed from their mothers, usually before they have had a chance to suckle once, and bottle fed milk replacer. Boy calves are almost worthless, both because they will never make milk and because they produce very little muscle. As a result, they are often treated poorly in modern agriculture. Not outright mean, mind you, just that the farmer might not bother treating it if it gets sick.
All these points have their own justifications and objections, and I won’t derail the thread further by getting into specifics (email me if you’re really curious). But, at least these are better things to get upset over than hormone supplements.
Also, because I have an audience: Chickens are never given hormones.
The belief that consumption of milk and other dairy products leads to increased mucus production and/or other symptoms of a “cold” is more widespread than you might expect. I know I’ve heard it a number of times from patients. (It’s also interesting to me that both sets of authors of the two abstracts below use the word "belief’ in the very first line of their report. And, of course, despite the fact that proper “blinding” seems not to have been employed, neither study could demonstrate a relationship between milk consumption and mucus production).
Thank you KarlGauss for the literature search because I didn’t really want to do it. Parents should be cautioned not to leave a baby in bed with a bottle propped into its mouth though, this reportedly can lead to ear infections.
I’ve heard the calcium argument a lot, it just doesn’t hold water. You can get calcium from a lot of other sources, like oranges, or brocoli and spinach, or almonds and sesame seeds. You don’t have to consume any dairy products in order to get calcium. Not that many people in Asia eat/consume milk and dairy products in the same quantities that people do in the western world. I don’t think thay all suffer from osteoporosis or have other calcium deficient diseases.
Cow’s milk is specifically tailored for little cows. Just like our mother’s milk is specifically tailored for us.
Calcium can be eaten through alternative foods. But the normal American diet makes this very difficult to do in a palatable way. Studies of all ages of Americans show that they do not get sufficient calcium in their diets now. Removing dairy products would just make this task far more challenging.
That cow’s milk is tailored for little cows is one of the great talking points of the vegan movement, and one of the things that most disqualifies it from serious discourse. First, babies do not get cow’s milk. No professional organization that recommends milk wants infants under one year of age to drink it straight. Properly fortified cow’s milk formula is always used instead. (Though I should add that historically, cultures in every part of the world for the last several thousand years have used animal milk as a successful means of nursing children who had no access to breastmilk. Does that make all of humanity morally bankrupt?)
After that age, who cow’s milk is “intended” for is entirely irrelevant. There is no food on earth that is “intended” for human consumption and so all food we eat - in every culture on earth - lacks certain of the nutrients human need. That’s why human are designed to be omnivores and take in a variety of foods at each meal so that in toto all the nutrients are accounted for. If anything is true about humanity it is that it is designed to eat both animal and plant material. Going vegan is a choice, not a moral imperative.
Whether mothers should breastfeed is a separate issue. I’m completely in support of exclusive breastfeeding for at least six months, but if mothers can’t or won’t, then I’m in favor of the best possible alternatives. And cow’s milk formula is one excellent alternative, barring the tiny percent of children who have dairy allergies.
Dairy allergies are present in probably no more than 3-5% of children and 1-2% of adults. This is true although propaganda campaigns have convinced many people that they are allergic based on vague symptoms that they attribute, falsely, to milk. A recent study in Britain found that 20% of the population thought that they are dairy allergic. Not true.
Dairy allergy symptoms can include some respiratory symptoms but are more likely to be skin responses. Most things people attribute to dairy, like phlegm, do not come from dairy. Lactose intolerance causes solely gastrointestinal symptoms.