Defending milk and ranking a few Summer flicks
July 4th, 2008First off, hope all you Americans, Filipinos, and Canadians had a good Independence Day/Canada Day.
I drink milk. Always have. Always will. Milk over here in PC-ville gets a bad rap. I’ve heard numerous people falsely believe milk is bad for you. That’s bogus. I’ve been hit by three cars while in a car and one more car on foot, played football, done Muay Thai, and NHB wrestling and have only broken one bone, which occurred while recklessly putting away free weights. I dropped a 25-pound dumbbell on my finger, and only got a hairline fracture.
Milk is an excellent protein and it’s still relatively cheap. Yes, bovine growth hormone is bad for you, but you can easily find milk that doesn’t have it. Over where I live, Safeway, Whole Foods, Longs Drugs, Trader Joe’s, and Target all have at least one brand of milk that does not have bovine growth hormone.
The other thing the anti-milk people say is that we’re the only animals that drink milk in adulthood. Oh yeah? Leave out some milk outside. Watch every cat, dog, raccoon, skunk, or whatever come and want a drink of it. They all know it’s good for them, and tastes good.
I guarantee you that if the anti-milk people did the reckless stuff I’ve done in life, they’d have a lot more than a hairline fracture in their finger. Milk also has calcium and now they fortify milk with Vitamin D to help you absorb the calcium better.
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I watched three Summer flicks. I liked The Hulk, thought Iron Man was better than The Hulk, but liked Hancock even better than Iron Man. I’ll hopefully get at least one of those reviews done this weekend.
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This is from the Tilden Park Botanical Gardens in Berkeley, California. Great place to chill.
I’m not one of those purer-than-thou vegans who mistake diet for virtue, so I’m not going to get all preachy about this. Drink your milk if you want. But note that every vitamin available in milk is available in other, non-dairy products. You’re also getting fat, cholesterol, allergenic proteins, sometimes blood and other cow fluids, and cow antibiotics even if you’re drinking the hormone-free stuff. Milk alone is not a defense against osteoporosis; in fact, much of the world doesn’t consume real milk, yet osteoporosis rates are highest in Western milk-drinking countries. What’s up with that?
Also: Milk cows are kept almost continuously pregnant, never leave their stalls, and live about one-fifth of a cow’s natural lifespan.
SME - It’s more a problem with the process than milk itself. That’s another reason I believe if you can afford organic milk, then by all means, buy (and drink) only organic milk.
Fat and cholesterol are both good for you. Of course too much of either will kill you, but none will kill you too. Fat is another thing that gets a bad rap. If you don’t have fat, you cannot break down Vitamins A, D, E, and I think K as well. Fat also cushions your organs, and it’s stored energy.
No food is pure. I can find impurities in everything, including any vegetable product. But then again (I’m going to sound like a broken record here), buy organic if you can afford it. Or else you’re going to be eating things you don’t want to eat - like chemicals, pesticides, hormones, etc.
As for osteoporosis, if I’m not mistaken, the reason we’re so high is because of our sedentary lifestyles. I’m pretty sure those who exercise regularly have lower rates of osteoporosis.
I’ll just exercise, get non-dairy sources of calcium, and hope for the best. I’m sure there are some weird things in soymilk, but I just don’t feel as bad for the soybeans as I do for cows so I’ll take my chances.
Speaking of sedentary lifestyles, WALL-E is a pretty good summer flick!
SME - I’ll have to see it. I was pleasantly surprised with Hancock.
As for soybeans, they have a lot of estrogen, so I heard they’re good for post-menopausal women. Not good for men though.
Yeah, there is the problem of too much estrogen in soy. Or, as Pat Robertson would put it, “Soy will make you gay.” Eh. There’s always rice milk. Rice will definitely not make you gay.
Are you two done yet?
You both made some valid points, and I agree/disagree with both of you. Milk is a good food, if your body can tolerate it. Beans are good food, and, unlike corn, they replenish the soil. Soy IS a phyto-estrogen, that has spared me from the “evils” of HRT during menopause.
The one thing that all three of us can agree on is the evil of CORPORATE farming! In my day, milk cows came to the barn(on their own), twice a day, to be milked.
I am heartened by the organic farm movement. If we all do our best to support organic farmers, we’ll not only be healthier, we’ll also be saving our planet.
SME - Well, if one is a male and eats a little bit of soy, according to Pat Robertson, can he be just slightly gay, enough to have good color choices? Just wondering.
Tshsmom - I’m all for organic farming. Half the stuff we eat is organic. It’s time we fought this war with our pocketbooks. If people only knew the damage this stuff does to our insides, they’d eat more organic. And of course organic farming is better for the environment, especially the rivers and the fish in them (which a lot of people don’t know).
I like cows… I like milk… I like calcium… I like Vitamin D… I like strong bones… I like corporations that deliver milk to the market…
I have strong bones and good joints. I’m 53 and still run, even though I’m built like a linebacker and played catcher (up/down) for the first 21 years of my life. No pain in my knees, hips or ankles… none… never. Milk? Maybe. Genetics and breeding? Probably.
Okay, that settles it. I’m going to continue to drink milk…
Wait a minute… soybeans make you gay? Is that why there’s so many gay people in China and Japan? WTF. Well, Pat Robertson is a doucher anyway.
I do like milk, but I do have a problem with agribusiness in general. Corporate farming may be able to bring us products cheaper, in bulk, and out of their normal season, but cheaper isn’t necessarily better in the long term. Agribusiness is bad for the land, the environment, family farmers, and the animals… but fuck them… it’s great for the US economy and that’s all that matters, right?
Bo - My Uncle played catcher. Always talked about how catcher was the smartest guy on the field. Baseball wasn’t my thing though because it was a timing game. Never had the eyesight to be any good. Struck out too much.
But as for you, it’s probably a combination of good health and good genetics. I’m blessed with good genetics (besides really bad eyes) too, but the milk surely helps.
Laura - I have that same problem. Family farms are so much better for the environment and also don’t rely on illegal immigrants like corporate farming does. Most importantly, family farming is better for the farmers themselves.
I actually don’t think corporate farming is good for business. We pay for the long term effects of it.
Well, here’s the deal. Some people cannot digest milk properly. There are ‘pills’ that give you the enzyme necessary, but if you don’t naturally produce lactase and you drink lactose, you are going to be confined to the house for at least one day… (I know, I have this ‘missing’ enzyme.)
It is a genetic link. American Indians, largely can’t digest it (even small amounts of it put them out of commission). Milk is milk is protein and fat and some carbohydrate. It is good food and I don’t see why you can’t have it providing it doesn’t send your colon into spasms.
Oh. By the way, dietary cholesterol has about zero effect on your blood serem cholesterol numbers.
Even serem cholesterol is not necessarily a marker for heart disease. Plenty of people die of clogged arteries and have perfect, absolutely perfect blood chemistry!
If you want to do something wonderful for yourself do this: Don’t eat sugars.
Sugars raise your blood sugar level quickly, which doesn’t allow the insulin and receptors to ‘do their job’ right away. Thus you have free floating sugar, with no insulin to escort that sugar molecule to the cell wall (where the insulin receptor allows the insulin molecule to deposit that wonderful bit of nutrition to the cell).
So, that free floating sugar meets up with a nice little free floating oxidant (unescorted oxygen) and boom. Nice.
This can also happen to a cell on the cell wall of an artery or vein… Or nerve or anywhere in the body that there is tissue!). Sugar is an energy source oxygen is an energy source… Boom. Boom. Boom.
No you got a hole where you once had a cell. DAMAGE!!!!! Out come the ‘damage police’ (guess what cholesterol’s role in your body is folks????? Yeah, they are the ‘fix it’ brigade). So they ‘patch up’ that hole leaving a bit of scar tissue… scar tissue? Yeah, scar tissue. Here comes another bit of something ugly, bangs into that scar tissue, more cholesterol is dumped by the liver to fix yet another problem, and… this continues through life. Cholesterol is a ‘good thing’. Without it your brain would die, and you would never heal.
If you keep your blood sugar from spiking, you will be protecting yourself from systemic damage.
This is not a little bit of theory, this is a well known fact.
Diabetics die at far higher rates of almost all (cholesterol related ‘diseaases) than the normal population.
Retinopathy
heart disease
heart attack
neuropathy
the list goes on.
Think about that and enjoy your glass of milk. An excellent source of fat and protein, which should make up the majority of your diet.
Sorry, hope this makes sense, don’t have a lot of time right now to review my words, but I am sure you will get the drift….
Dang. Finished that, and went back to read my last post. Lousy writing, sorry… Also, I know how to spell, but just didn’t review my work!!
As to ‘factory farming’. I’m with you ZS. I grew up on a ‘family farm’. Dairy farm primarily, but we kept our oar in a lot of different ponds. A few goats, 20-30 sheep, some pigs, lots of chickens (hundreds - for eggs and neat), geese to scare off salesmen and… Maple Syrup in the winter and Cider in the late Fall (this is in Vermont).
This allowed us to stay in business with only a 60 head herd of milkers. The milk price fluctuates but Maple Syrup keeps getting more expensive (!), so we’d do OK. But factory farming IS more profitable. But the problem is that it consists of a huge amount of land and livestock, that are all treated like ‘factory workers’. Generally a corporation is the owner, and they can drive the price down so far that they are scrimping by on each of the factories, but they own 10 of them, ergo, they make an OK profit… We are ‘beholding’ to the corporation… Not all that bad on the face of it (it is, but let’s pretend it isn’t just now), because the farm is in the continental US. (Or Hawaii or Alaska, OK). But then, we get foreign competition… Third world countries can do stuff cheaper than we can, because they hire people for dirt wages, work them to death (including their little ‘uns - yeah, I worked my butt off too on the farm, but it was MY farm too! AND my chickens!! Those little kids will NEVER have the opportunity EVER for a life.)
Factory farming is bad. Importing more and more of our food from foreign countries is so very much worse. It is a national security issue, and we should avoid buying it, but we can’t. Not if you want to eat lettuce in the winter.
Sigh…
But that brings up something interesting… Opening a small (really small) market that caters to locally grown - OR just US grown) vegetables and meats might be a growth industry. If there was one that I could rely on locally, I would always shop there. But our local ‘Whole Foods’ (or Food Hole as I call it) and other big ’specialty’ supermarkets don’t label the source for their foods.
I’m repeating myself again and getting short of time, but - we SHOULD buy as much as we can from local producers. Even if they are agri-biz, it is better than supporting ‘offshoring’ a strategic necessity for the future of Our Fair Nation.
Perhaps I read too much Clancy…
Oh Gods, I just read a post I gotta take issue with.
Why do Americans get osteoporosis at higher rates? WHY? Because:
1. We live longer. (Older people do less because it hurts more! See #2)
2. We also don’t do much physical labor. Sitting down in an office all day long doesn’t promote keeping bones strong.
3. Osteo-arthritis HURTS. Get a physical therapist to help you ‘work through it’. Keep the replacements for when you really need them. If you can walk, you don’t need a replacement.
Downward pressure on the spine promotes bone density. Period. The ‘pundits’ say ‘walking is good!’ Sure it is, lots of it is. But not just going down the block. You can wreck your knees on the treadmill and get good bones, but what you are doing is putting downward pressure on the spine - jarring it.
You can get that same effect by carefully lifting weights. (Walk too, DON’T RUN. DON ‘T JOG. Your knees will last your whole life if you care for them!!!!)
Ever known a serious weightlifter that has osteoporosis? Bet not. I’m 58, female, post-menopausal and I just had my yearly heel scan (it is good enough and it is cheap), and I continue to have the bones of a 20 year old. I’ve lifted for many years… But
Guess what? You can get tough bones too. Start slow. Pick up heavy things. It is the wonder of your body that BONES will reform, if you remind your body that you NEED them. The body is efficient and will strip them if there is no need to keep that calcium around. Here are a few rules that will help you (do NOT allow a personal trainer to hurt you, most are morons. If you can afford it, go to a physical therapist and have them evaluate your lifting ‘form’.)
1. Do NOT round your back for any exercise.
2. Do not ‘bounce’ while stretching (but you know that now, right?) Do not overdo stretching! Just a little beyond the ‘tightness’ is what you are looking for. Yoga is perfect.
3. do NOT allow your hands or elbows to disappear behind your chest when doing ANY exercise (think bench press - America’s favorite exercise. You can do it lying down!). The rotator cuff is the most ‘at risk’ area of your body - the small, very small, muscles in your shoulders.
4. Keep the weights light, work up slowly. Your muscles grow fast, your tendons and ligaments do not. They will become ‘toughter’ at about 1/10th the rate. I made that up, but it is not such a bad rule of thumb.
Move up only a couple of pounds a month for the first year of lifting…. You will get results.
wallflower - you give my complex about talking too much a rest
And secondly.. I like reading your stuff, good info and well communicated.
Zombieslayer - this is what this post made ME think of when you said to put out some milk and see what the animals do… they are a good way to tell if WE should be eating something.
http://www.thebestdayever.com/burger.htm
“they are a good way to tell if WE should be eating something.”
My dog eats cat shit… I’m not so sure I’ll be taking her dietary advice. Also, on the putting milk out for animals theory - cats LOVE cow milk, but it’s actually very bad for them because they can’t digest it properly. Just because something is yummy doesn’t mean it’s good for you.
“My dog eats cat shit… I’m not so sure I’ll be taking her dietary advice.”
thats probably a good plan, but what I meant was what they WONT eat, we probably shouldn’t.. which relates to the link I posted below it…
now that I look at the link it doesn’t immediatly explain what I meant so I will… with the bionic burger.. after you leave it to dry out, you could put it out for the animals, and not only will animals not touch it, neither will any insects…
as Laura pointed out.. “Just because something is yummy doesn’t mean it’s good for you.”
ZS– I hear you with the eyesight thing. I didn’t know I needed glasses until I was about 21… how’d that get by the school nurse? I don’t know. I couldn’t hit over about .333 until my last year playing ball. If I would’ve had contacts, who knows? I loved playing catcher because 1) I’m fidgety and there’s always something going on at the plate 2) the equipment caught my eye at a young age… the only guy on the field that gets to wear the cool stuff 3) guys stealing, bunts and collisions at the plate. How can any of the other positions compete with that?
Wallflower’s right on… it’s all about your genetics. I like lots of fat and protein in my diet… not many carbs, except the complex kind. I would imagine the fat has something to do with joint health. Anyways, exercise seems to be real important, too. My radiologist pal got me a free heart scan on their new machine and it confirmed what I suspected, given my family history. My left ventricular ejection fraction is 65%, which is between normal 55% and an extreme athlete 75%. Calcium score 0. I’m happy.
Oops, sorry… yeah I guess my last comments were more directed to the original post argument that milk must be good because animals love to drink it.
There’s so much preservative in fast food. In Super Size Me, Morgan Spurlock let a mom & pop burger stand burger & fries decompose alongside a McD’s burger & fries and the McD’s stuff just sat there while the other stuff actually decomposed. Ew.
Man look at all the comments!!! I know more about milk and farming than i want to. Notta and tshsmom are right, the bioengineered milk is something I don’t wanna touch (because I can’t stand what they do to the cows). Yes milk has nutrients and I”m glad that you’re taking care of your bod, Z. But for me it’s out of the questions (cholesterol wise, etc).
Have you ever thought about doing a post on what’s in food? I mean, what they give chickens and cows is just nuts. OK I could do one, but….
I must admit that my love of milk may be connected to a childhood event… one of my earliest memories was going to our cousin’s farm and I had to be 4 years old or less. My uncle was milking the cow and I was watching and he tweaked the udder and nailed me right in the face. I can still remember the way it felt and the smell… we laughed.
The other memory from the trip? They showed us where one of their unloaded rifles went off and there were holes in every wall and right out of the house.
Powerful memories. Hmmmm. I just realized something… I don’t like guns, but I love milk. Nurture, not nature?
Happy Belated fourth of July to you!!!
^_^
Tchoden - Thanks.
Bo - If they were unloaded, they shouldn’t have gone off. They must have thought they were unloaded.
I never keep a rifle loaded, although I have one shotgun loaded and there’s nothing in the chamber (it needs to be chambered). Guns, like any other tool, are dangerous when used incorrectly.
As for milk, that’s awesome. To be honest, I never had milk from a farm. I do drink non-bovine growth hormone milk, and one of these days, I’ll drink full on organic milk. It’s just so dang expensive.
And yes, nurture, not nature in that case.
Bridget - Yup. Done one on slow foods once on my old blog. I’m all for the slow food movement.
Laura - I’ve been meaning to see that movie for the longest time.
Bo - 333? Geez. I wasn’t even hitting 100. The thing is, I was a heck of an outfielder. Not fast, but quick, and I’ll catch pretty much anything, including ruining a lot of would be hits. But if you have no bat, you have no business taking baseball farther than Little League.
As for genetics, I think that’s 50/50. Sure, some folks are blessed, some are cursed, but I see too many people using genetics as an excuse. The thing is, those people seem to know a tremendous amount of what’s on TV.
Laura and Clothosfate -
Ok, that’s true. But my point is milk is very high in protein, calcium, good calories, the right amount of fat (if you get 2%), sodium, potassium, etc. It’s also the one think you should drink in excess if you accidentally ingest poison.
Clothosfate - Yuck! I heard a story of a 600+ pound woman who one day felt an itch and found an old, moldy burger in one of her rolls of fat. But this is even more gross.
Wallflower - Loved your posts. I love Maple Syrup, and one of my Vegan friends was heavily into it. It was something we agreed on. The price of maple syrup has skyrocketed, so I’m sure those alone help big time.
Yes, we live longer. That is one reason cancer is skyrocketing. The longer you live, the higher chance for cancer. Fact of life. The thing about men is most men will eventually develop prostate cancer if they live long enough.
I’m forwarding what you said to my father. He’s always bouncing when he stretches and it really irks me. I remind him not to do that, then the next day, he’ll do it again.
By the way, you are very much right on about sugars. I have a bad, bad sweet tooth and I’ll have to fight it. I need to lower my sugar intake. It’s one of my flaws.
If you reeeaaaaly love maple syrup and you’re ever in Quebec… well, you’ll know what to do. There’s this place that has outdoor ovens and they bake bread, old skool. Then, the load it up with maple butter… amazing.
We knew some folks in Maine that tapped the trees in town and had a sugar house… they would have to stoke the wood fire all night… you show up with your own container… oh, my!
Well, dang, I see people commenting on this blog that still have that oft repeated lie that eating foods ‘high in cholesterol’ will somehow translate into clogged arteries.
That is nonsense (and has been proven bunk for several years now.) The whole mythos built up around dietary cholesterol came from the Framingham Heart Study (very famous heart study for those not in the ‘business’). Great study, well constructed for the most part, but the analysis by some of the folks that got hold of the data WAS BOGUS!!!! The Father of the FHS, was scandalized that someone would make that gigantic leap of stupid concerning dietary cholesterol (there was no evidence, NONE that dietary cholesterol translated into blood cholesterol in any way, shape or form.)
But the media got hold of it, even JAMA published the junk study (really), and doctors started yammering it to their patients. Thus everyone started eating margarine… then heart problems really started escallating. Why? Because people started eating high carb diets (IMHO - but at least I can trace the metabolic pathways and show where this is very possible unlike dietary cholesterol which is broken down in the gut, and only reassembled into ‘cholesterol’ if the body NEEDS IT!!!!!)”
OK. So. Altering your diet to reduce ‘dietary cholesterol’ works, ONLY if you also remove a lot of the simple sugars. Stop eating breakfast cereal!!!! Except oatmeal or other unrefined grains (rice is good). And really, you are far better off eating eggs. Vegans? I don’t even want to hear it. If you are doing it for your ‘health’, you need to go take some classes in biochem, physiology and then talk to me.
I’m pleased to see that even nutritionists (the citidel of ‘food pyramid’) have started to pooh-pooh it in favor of a protein/fat centric diet. They’re learning… slowly.
One of my past incantations, right after graduate school was a stint as a statistical analyst at the NIH (NIMH and NCI). When I couldn’t stand the dogs screaming their agony any more I left (all those pictures you see of dogs dying slowly? They’re real. Oh yeah, they are…. Special place in hell for those monsters that justify sadism in the name of ’science’… think about it folks, it is the perfect hideout for a sadist… NIH can’t do it anymore but private companies can, and they do it without oversight. Sorry, but if I have to think back to that time to back up a point, you gotta read my angst.)
ANYWAY, I was at NIH, and I was privy to a lot of the internal politics associated with study design, interpretation and publication. Here’s something to keep in mind:
Science is NOT about truth. It is about funding.
If you have a ‘theory’, you will do anything to keep that theory alive, because if it dies, you lose your funding and are marked as a ‘failure’, and you wash lab glass ware for the rest of your ‘career’. And that, folks, is why there is so much ‘bad’ science out there… And why mythology like ‘dietary cholesterol’ keeps getting propagated. Progress happens, but it is glacia.
I’m done my rant now. Sorry there, ZS, but you probably don’t mind too much ;-> Also, this post is buried, but I needed to just howl a bit concerning that oft repeated foolishness.
Here’s the wallflower’s rules for living a long happy life.
Keep the simple sugars for occasional treats.
Lift some heavy stuff
Keep a smile on your face and in your heart
Pick long lived, happy parents
Make friends slowly, keep them close
Be gentle with the children (wolf rule #3)
And remember folks, ALL guns are loaded guns.
Cripes. Not inCANtations, inCARnations. One of my former inCARnations. Sheesh.
Buy ‘em books, send ‘em to school… They ignore the books and annoy the teachers with pesky questions. What you going to do?
Corporate farming practices are definitely the main problem with dairy. I wouldn’t even be a vegan if I could buy from small local farms.
The dairy boards of various countries are also a problem. They lobby to restrict consumer choice when it comes to non-dairy products, spread subtly skewed or flat-out false information about the health benefits of things like cheese and sour cream, and just generally act like douches.
But no, milk won’t kill you or anything. You do need some fat and some cholesterol, and if you’re physically active and genetically predisposed to good health you really don’t need to be a fat- and cholesterol-Nazi. I would encourage people to get the organic, hormone-free stuff if they insist on drinking cow’s milk, though. It stays fresh longer and is just plain healthier.
SME:
I really get sick of reading the oft-repeated nonsense of ‘organic is better’ litany, when all sorts of ‘magical’ properties are attributed to the products. Stick with verifiable facts, stay away from woo.
Let’s get one thing straight: Organic milk does NOT stay ‘fresher’ longer than ‘non organic’ milk. It is a Good Thing ™ to drink organically produced milk. But be sure that milk is pasteurized. (Weston Price was a… well, let’s just say that if it walks like a duck…. You might want to insure it also includes that good old Vitamin D, so all that calcium can actually make it into those bones.)
Why pasteurized? Do I really have to tell anyone? Well, I am feeling prolix.
Milk comes from udders and they are alarmingly close to the waste disposal system of a cow. Cows are notorious for diarrhea (I grew up on a farm, meaning there were times where I had shit all over me), it splashes all over the place, including up. Go to a farm. Look at the hocks of a cow… Sure, farmers are required (by law) to wipe the teats with sterilant before attaching the machine, or in the case where a cow must be milked by hand. BUT, is this always done, and carefully, are the ? Are you willing to trust in your farmer’s minimum wage helpers (from countries with far less emphasis on personal hygiene than ours… Sorry to be so politically incorrect.)
Sure it is a rare thing for a speck of shit to make it into the bulk tank, but I posit that it does happen. Milk is a wonderful place for bacteria to proliferate. Pasteurization takes care of that problem. Kills off anything in milk that might harm you.
What I am saying, is you drink raw milk, and you are playing a serious game of Russian Roulette. It is just a matter of time before you hand your 4 year old a glass full of salmonella, camphylobacter jejuni, listeria monocytogenes…
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