Obituary: Dairy Overdose

Both of my parents died from overdosing dairy. In the seventies, two friends of mine in Holland were working as drug counselors and they periodically would speak to audiences of high school parents, in order to give the parents more of an understanding of their work with the students and how they could be more helpful to their kids. Parents needed to become more involved in the issues their school-going kids were dealing with. My friends, Hans and Ludwig, would invariably try to wake up these concerned parents with the statistic that more people died of heart disease than of drug overdoses by a wide margin and point out that addictions to sugar and whipped cream were obviously bigger problems than drugs. Generally, that got them a chuckle but perhaps not a lot of understanding. A similar statistic applies to the US today: at about 200 opioid deaths a day, versus about 2,000 from heart disease, the former is a national emergency, and the latter is business as usual. Dairy will continue to be part of the nutritional guidelines, despite all evidence to the contrary.

We now know so much more of just how bad dairy is for us, it really boggles the mind. One place to start is The Cheese Trap, by Dr. Neal Barnard. Simply put, cheese does seem to have mild addictive properties and that’s why so many people have trouble giving it up – it is an addiction for many. For one thing PCRM just petitioned the FDA to put a cancer warning label on cheese. Once you know what Dr. Barnard knows, you won’t ever want to touch it again.

The complete picture of cheese is really horrifying for what you are eating is milk protein, milk sugars, salt, and saturated fat not to mention hormones and casomorphins. None of it is good news. Casein has long been proven to promote tumor growth, refer to The China Study and the original experiments with rats where it was demonstrated that the amount of casein in the diet could, in the words of T. Colin Campbell “turn cancer on and turn cancer off.” In his subsequent work it became clear that plant based proteins generally inhibited tumor growth and animal-based proteins promoted tumor growth above certain levels. In cheese the hormones and casomorphins in milk become concentrated. Generally, also our levels of protein intake are much too high in the industrialized world.

As it is, my parents were vegetarian since a few years after they got married – I was 2-1/2 years old at the time. But, not having today’s knowledge of plant-based nutrition, they were under the impression that it was hard for vegetarians to get sufficient protein. My father ate cheese by the ton and used a lot of butter in his cooking, which he did once a week. My mother was much weakened by Crohns and IBD, which did her in at the end of her life. It would have been easily reversible if she knew what we know now.

Lactose Intolerance

Lactose Intolerance is a much bigger problem than people think. I will slightly expand the list from the below video by Dr. Milton Mills. Dr. Mills calls the inclusion of dairy in the nutritional guidelines institutional racism, and if you just stop to think that 65-75% of the population is lactose intolerant. It is hard to believe that the USDA/HHS have the guts to continue to recommend dairy as part of the diet, but they do. Here are the stats for lactose intolerance in the major ethnic groups in the USA:

• 70-75% of African Americans,
• 95-98% of Asian Americans,
• 74-78% of Native Americans,
• 80%-85% of Southeast Asian Americans,
• 53-58% of Hispanic Americans,
• ca 33% of Caucasian Americans.

In short, it is simply abusive to recommend this as food, let alone to tout any health benefits for it. My parents were not alone in OD’ing on dairy.

In general, the understanding of the addictive nature of bad food is beginning to be much better understood, even aside from many junk foods that are designed to be addictive.