I love milk. From the scrumptious stuff you get in Ireland which leaves a white moustache on your upper lip ("Gat milk?") and caf� au lait on a sidewalk in the "old" Sabana Grande in Caracas, to gelato on a Roman side street and its solid form, chewy, tasty cheese.
I long for milk the way a baby longs for its mother's breast. Unfortunately I can't tolerate it.?Like 90 per cent of humanity over the age of one year, I have lactose intolerance or lactase deficiency. I lack an enzyme in my intestine called lactase and have difficulty in breaking down the sugar in milk or lactose, to glucose, which is the way sugar is absorbed into the blood stream. As a consequence, the lactose is changed into carbon dioxide, one bloats and passes the carbon dioxide as gas, the process know to generations of schoolboys as "farting." When severe enough, cow's milk can cause abdominal discomfort and lingering or intermittent diarrhoea.
Milk is quite the dangerous substance. Heresy, you say? Years of indoctrination by the dairy industry have convinced us that "milk is the perfect food" necessary for "strong bones and white teeth," despite the evidence that it is precisely those countries with the greatest intake of milk whose populations have the weakest bones and most dental caries as well as the highest levels of heart attacks, old age fractures, diabetes, hypertension and strokes. Look at what milk has in it and one shudders. Without bothering about its artificial hormones and antibiotics, let's just look at the nutritional content. Start with calcium and the perennial question: "The child doesn't want to drink milk, where is she going to get calcium from?" ?
The same way people have got calcium since time immemorial and the same way most people get it today. From food. From sardines, tuna and other fish. From brown sugar, beans, green vegetables, dates, prunes, oranges, nuts and raisins. From everything healthy that she eats. Apart from the fact that no one needs cow's milk for calcium, there is the question of whether the calcium is well absorbed. Calcium is poorly absorbed when there is a lot of protein in the intestine. It's been shown that the calcium in a milk shake is poorly absorbed if ingested with a hamburger. Of course, as Jack would say, milk is full of protein.
That protein is also responsible for most of the food allergy around. Cow's milk protein is the most important cause of food allergy. About five per cent of the world's population is allergic to cow's milk. No other food antigen comes anywhere close to it. We now believe that the allergy from cow's milk is set up during pregnancy. The old advice about pregnant mothers needing to drink milk is nonsense and contributes to their children becoming allergic. It's the same stupidity about lactating mothers needing to drink milk. The first thing to do when a breastfed baby develops an allergy is to advise the mother to stop drinking milk. That same protein is responsible for a type of low blood count or "thin blood" that develops in babies under one year, who drink more than 32 ounces of cow's milk or formula. Over a certain amount, and it's even less in children over one year (16 ounces), the protein in cow's milk or formula is so toxic to the gut of children that they begin to bleed internally. The bleeding is microscopic so it is invisible but the child slowly loses blood in the stool and becomes anaemic.
It's the number one cause of anemia in T&T, which we know affects about one in ten children. Anemia is associated with decreased cognitive functioning. In other words, you child's brain doesn't function as effectively as it should. Excessive milk, sweetened or not with sugar, is also linked with overweight babies and children, so beloved of doting grandmothers and aunties. This syndrome was first described by the English paediatrician, Bruce Simmons, at the San Fernando hospital in 1959. He coined a term for them, "sugar babies," but they are also known as "milkalcoholics," fat, weak, anaemic babies. ?
Overweight babies tend to grow up to be overweight adults who go on to develop diabetes, high blood pressure, heart attacks, strokes and depression. So there is a direct line between drinking too much cow's milk or formula in infancy and the common chronic non-communicable diseases in adulthood. Of late it's been found that milk is the most common nutritional cause of constipation in children. That's because these children drink so much milk that they eat little else and do not get enough fibre in their diet to have regular bowel movements. Gas, abdominal discomfort, diarrhoea, osteoporosis, food allergy; anaemia, obesity, constipa- tion. These are only the start of future problems of lowered IQ, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart attack and strokes.
Add in the suspicions about growth hormones and antibiotic misuse and one wonders for the umpteenth time, why people insist on forcing their children to drink milk.
