Dairy Foods and Calcium at Her Active Life

Click here for the Lead Stories

Dairy Foods and Calcium

Posted May 7, 2007 at 11:00 AM by Seth Braun

Section: Her Nutrition, Healthy Eating, Vegetarianism

This article is written by Mr. Seth Braun, a network guest contributor, natural health expert and best-selling author. Seth can be contacted for a complimentary consultation through his site or at his clinic, (303)-444-2357.

To begin, I want to emphasize the need for a balanced view on animal foods. Strict vegan viewpoints on animal foods make great strides in showing the public the extremely poor quality of modern industrial factory farming practices.

But another view is often overlooked and that is the role that animal products, in this case, dairy products, have played in the lives of traditional people that maintained excellent health with these high quality foods. Stay with me while I get under the surface of the conversation about dairy and calcium that we hear so much about.

In the Awaken Health program, I suggest the elimination of dairy for two weeks so that participants can gauge their tolerance for dairy. The big question then becomes, ‘How am I going to get my calcium?’

This is another potent point for disagreement in the world of nutrition. I would like to do this discussion justice and address the many sides.

High and Low Quality Dairy Products

The first definition to set fourth is the distinction between high and low quality dairy products.

Generally, the milk, cheese and butter that you can purchase in national supermarkets come from cows that are raised in industrial, rather than pastoral settings.

Cows are meant to eat grass. Eating grass is beautiful because cows can create food sources for humans where no cultivation has occurred. This is especially true in hard to cultivate areas. Most cows today are being fed a mixture of feedstock that are not functional for cows’ optimum health and thereby increase the need for antibiotics being given to the cow. Why is this important?

Since dairy products are near the top of the food chain, they are going to have higher concentrations of whatever substances have been in the lower food chain. In the case of grass fed cows that pasture year round or are fed hay and silage in the winter, this is a good thing. Many beneficial nutrients concentrate in the products from those animals. Conversely, the cow that has been fed poor quality feed, with routine antibiotics will have the build up of many undesirable elements.

High Quality = Super Nutrition

Raw milk from pasture fed cows is an excellent food from a nutritional perspective. For those who cannot digest lactose or who are allergic to casein, fermented raw milk products often are tolerable and beneficial.

Butter from grass fed cows is nutritionally superior to industrially raised cows. In fact, it is almost two different substances.

The Sacred Cow

Since so many people grew up drinking milk as a healthy choice, it seems tough to look critically at modern dairy products. If you are serious about your health, you need to penetrate into the assumptions and look at the common sense that appears in the light of inquiry.

The modern cow is force fed a feedstock that promotes disease of the animal. This includes soybean meal, corn meal, and food industry leftovers including bakery waste (full of trans fat), citrus peel cake (leftovers from the citrus industry) and up until 10 years ago, they were being fed the remains of other farm animals and road kill ground up and placed back into the food supply. I am not kidding; Check out why Howard Lyman and Oprah Winfrey were sued when Howard brought it up on her show. The cow is then given antibiotics to maintain the feed practices.

The modern cow is bred to have over active pituitary gland and over-sized udders. In addition to the higher levels of growth hormone naturally present in overactive pituitary gland, the cow is also given growth hormone to promote milk production. One result of these practices is mastitis. Any nursing mother knows that mastitis is a painful infection of the breast. This infection becomes chronic in milk cows and additional antibiotics are administered. Unfortunately, I have got to tell you that this means there is pus-contributing volume to milk production through the infected udder. There is a regulated acceptable level of pus in modern milk.

What Is In Modern Milk?

The milk collected from mainstream cows has these negative qualities:

Significant levels of growth hormone
Significant levels of antibiotics
Residual build up of toxins from feed (unless it is organic feed), including pesticides and herbicides
Higher levels of pus

Raw vs. Pasteurization

Raw milk contains enzymes that assist in absorption of nutrients. Pasteurization is the result of large-scale food production and the need to eliminate contamination and potential problems with potentially fatal bacterium. Pasteurization represents the dynamic of “good for society, bad for the individual.” Sure, you have greatly reduced the possibility of contamination, but you have reduced the quality of the milk too. This would not be necessary if dairy farmers had an incentive to produce lower volumes of better quality raw milk and the distribution of the milk was set up to ensure freshness.

Raw milk can be difficult to obtain. In Colorado, some consumers have created access to unpasteurized milk, which is illegal to sell in the state, by buying shares of dairy cows on an organic, grass fed farm. In this way, the milk form the cow is owned by the share owner and the dairy farm is not selling milk. Don’t you think that it is odd that raw milk is illegal to sell in Colorado?

Won’t I Miss Out On Calcium

Reducing your dairy intake will not lead you become calcium deficient. Calcium in your body is dependent on uptake ability, collaborative vitamins and minerals and overall diet.

In fact, the Harvard Nurses Health study, the most comprehensive controlled study of human nutrition has shown that there is not a positive correlation between milk consumption and lowered rates of osteoporosis, but rather a negative correlation. America, second only to Scandinavia in diary consumption is tied with, guess who, for the highest rates of osteoporosis… Scandinavia. And Japan, a non-dairy culture, has one of the lowest rates of osteoporosis in the world.

Here are the facts for healthy bones. You must eat a whole, natural food diet with plenty of calcium rich foods. Understand that our bodies use the elements of food more effectively than isolated components because that is the nature of our physical life. Our bodies are interconnected with the plants that have evolved right along side of us. Our physicality is a product of the earth so it just makes sense that nutrients are best assimilated when obtained from food. T

There are many studies that demonstrate this principle in part. Some of these show:

There is a relationship between chlorophyll form green plants and the ability to use calcium (dark green leafy vegetables are a great source of calcium)
Silicon aids in calcium uptake (green leafy vegetables are a great source of silicon)
Magnesium is part of calcium absorption
A high protein diet leaches calcium, thereby depleting your stores and taxing the bones
Vitamin D is essential for calcium absorption. The sun is the best source of Vit. D.

Great sources of calcium include sardines with bones (a great food all around), green leafy vegetables (eaten as a staple, not as a garnish), nuts and seeds such as sesame, brazil nut.

Our family favorite for calcium intake is homemade soup stock from animal bones. We usually roast a chicken once a week and then save the bones and carcass in the freezer (we also save most of our veggie waste for stock as well). We are not purists for stock so we will throw in beef bones, anything really. We cook this stock up with a plash of vinegar. This helps pull out the good stuff from the bones.

A story from Dr. Christine Northrup corroborates this as a good source of calcium. She tells of Japanese immigrants arriving in the states and being told that they needed to add milk to their diets (even though many Asian peoples have not historically consumed dairy products and are therefore lactose intolerant). This group, however, was not deficient in calcium, even though the western doctors could not see where they were getting the calcium from. It turns out that they had a regular practice of making broths from bones with added vinegar.

Copyright, 2006, Real Simple Nutrition, LLC.