Jess Wilder
Mar 31, 2023
All about dairy
All About Dairy
What is rarely discussed
A brief introduction
We’ve heard these statements: 'drink milk to have healthy teeth and bones’, ‘drink warm milk to sleep better’, ‘milk is good for calcium’, and so much more on how dairy is good for our health.
How true are they?
You can find endless controversial or conflicting research and theories about dairy, as well as abundant scientifically proven common facts.
Let’s challenge some of these statements that have been infused into our lives since we were little.
Feeling addicted to dairy?
Dairy has a component called Casein, a protein that releases a compound which triggers Dopamine production in the brain, a feel good hormone.
Nature is so magnificent that everything it creates has an interlinking reason or cycle. How so? Nature has designed milk to become desirable through its casein protein, to have an addictive and soothing effect on children. That way, it is continuously requested by the child to benefit from the nutritious properties of the mother's breast milk, uniquely necessary and essential to the growth of the child for a certain period of time.
As we grow breast milk is meant to lose its significance in our lives. Then why do we crave it? When things get emotionally charged in life, many of us crave the safety feel of the silky and smooth texture and taste of milk, which regresses us to the time we were held in warm comforting arms to be breastfed.
Food takes you back to a memory, a feeling. Hence why some of us end up sobbing with an ice cream jar when in a sad place.
Plus, dairy foods contain the amino acids tryptophan and tyrosine, precursors to serotonin and dopamine, that are important players in your pleasure and reward system that help level our moods, leaving us feeling calm, satisfied, and well, happy!
For the love of cheese?
Well, as you have figured it out already, cheese is a condensed version of milk, therefore packed with the addictive component, and this is why it is so difficult to withdraw from eating cheese. In addition, today, if not from an organic source, we are not only consuming addictive food but also the antibiotics and hormones injected to the cows.
Feeling a bit hormonal?
Cow milk is for baby calves. If you are not a calf, do you really need a baby calf growth fluid which is what cow’s milk really is. Not really, you will save yourself a lot of problems from acne to lumps, fibroids and surgeries.
Cattle grow fast! An elephant calf becomes a mum at around 15-16 years old, while cattle reach full maturity between 18 to 24 months (certain breeds a bit longer), and could become mums at 5 to 6 months. When we drink cow milk, what exactly are we drinking?
There are a lot of growth hormones in a ‘mom’ cow’s body and in her milk particularly in the industrialized farming system where lactating cows are pumped full of rbgh recombinant bovine growth hormone which stimulates milk production. Which throws the cows’ own hormonal balance out of whack.
In summary, you get a lot of hormones in your body from dairy that tells you to ‘grow like a cow’. The quantity of dairy we’re consuming today may be one of the reasons why the average time of the first menstrual cycle for girls has dropped from about 15 to 16 down to around 8 or 12. We are changing the hormonal balance of women today and dairy is a big player in this. If you are interested in having a more natural rhythm and having your own body’s hormonal balance avoid pumping yourself full of industrialized dairy products. Cow milk in specific.
Dairy products are particularly malevolent where women are concerned, even for men, that’s one of the reasons we see an increase in prostate cancer.
Today all dairy cows are pregnant with their next calf and yet we are sucking milk off their utters. When a mammal is pregnant their body is running with estrogens. Every woman who has had a baby knows what it feels like to have nine months of estrogens.
There is now legitimate medical concern because of the active estrogens (estrogen, estridiols, pregantdial, progesterone are all official mammalian estrogens). The little phytoestrogens in soy should be no concern at all compared to these official active mammalian estrogens that have effects in the body. Cow milk needs to surely be a critical concern.
Studies have been done where they give kids a glass of milk or two to drink and their testosterone levels will plunge, their estrogen levels go up. Why are little girls going to puberty at age 8, 9 and 10? Because it has something to do with this river of milk, cheese and ice cream and yogurt, while marketing is telling them to pour dairy filled with these active bovine estrogens down their throat for their bones.
When you follow these girls into adulthood, they go to puberty very early and they get nasty instances of breast lumps and then breast cancers because they've been stimulating their breast tissue with estrogen since childhood.
And these estrogens affect the uterus that spins out these tumors called fibroids, make the woman bleed and as a result, she gets anemic. So now she’s got to have a hysterectomy. The
dairy products lead to so many malevolent hormone-driven problems. It has been clearly shown that the protein which are the casein and lactobeum in cows milk turns on genes in the skin that foster acne.
Dairy is one of the main contributors of inflammation, which is a natural body immune system reaction or self-defense. Inflammation is not bad, as it means that your body is reacting effectively to what is not serving it positively. However chronic or repeated inflammation leads to obesity, and inflammatory conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis.
The ethical angle
Women don’t realize that dairying is really a crime against a female of the species. Those lovely beautiful female cows are locked up in a stanchion that bull semen is rammed up into
their uterus, they’re made pregnant, they carry their baby for nine months, they give birth to a 65 pound baby. On a dairy farm, within 24 hours a calf that its mother loves so much is taken away from her so the farmer can suck the milk off her. These are painful auditory memories, the sound of the cow locked in the stanchion, just had her calf taken away, put in the veal pen and she bellows the most heart-rending soul-tearing moos and cries hour after hour, it goes on all day, all night, three days, four days, five days. This is a mother whose baby’s been taken from her.
This is an absolutely essential part of the dairy industry. It is a cruel industry and no dairy cow dies of old age, after five years of calves and milk production decrease, they are sent to the
slaughterhouse and killed. Because their flesh is not very appetizing in the meat case, it is ground up and sold as hamburger and ground beef when you go into the fast food restaurant to order your whopper and your burger. What you are eating is actually ground up old dairy cows.
Truth is that people think you don’t really have to kill the cow in order to get the milk. Kid yourself not, the dairy farm is a short stopping off place the way to the slaughterhouse for a
a few years of calves and milk.
Cows are lactating mammals and traditionally in old times, cows did not lactate everyday of the year, they’d lactate because they’d have a baby and would stop lactating until they had another baby. However, the milk industry finds that it’s bad profits, so they have designed the system to keep the cows constantly lactating.
Within the system, their babies are taken away at birth so they don’t even get any of the milk directly from the mother, but instead a little bit of the actual milk in some formula mixed with other elements. Sadly, they don’t nurse past one day of age. Conflicting isn’t it..? While we are loaded with the information that we need dairy to be healthy while calves are deprived of the milk of their own mothers.
Nevertheless, the same cows are producing the milk anyway and in massive quantities! Some of them have utters so big that they drag them on the ground. They are in constant pain because we have bred them and pumped them full of chemicals to make them produce massive amounts of milk.
Just food for thoughts.
Check out my recommended dairy free products on my ‘I recommend’ page.
Disclaimer: This information is not to urge you to stop consuming dairy, but to pass on all the
crucial information so you can make a fully conscious choice. The key is always moderation and becoming an aware consumer.