Is dairy really so bad?

"hi angela, i thank you so much for your insight! i do not eat nutrition bars which i consider akin to candy. however i do eat beef as i'm addicted to the occasional cheeseburger. my burning question, though, is about dairy and why so many people go on dairy diets and say that dairy is bad for you. is it the hormones? a fertility guru i worked with said to refrain from all dairy. also, what are your thoughts on giving kids yogurt? so much sugar content."

You know, I have to start by saying that not all nutrition bars are bad. It's just that it can be hard to tell the difference between the good ones and the bad ones. But if the ingredients list is a paragraph long you can pretty much bet that it's essentially a candy bar. On the other hand, Larabars have nothing but dried fruit and nuts in them which is fine, and Clif bars actually are all pretty good. That said, they do contain a lot of sugar and you really should only be eating these for the purpose for which they were originally intended: i.e. in the context of exercise. A Clif bar is a great choice if you're going on a 2-3 hour bike ride or hike.

The occasional cheeseburger is certainly not going to hurt you health wise if you are otherwise healthy and I also don't think the environmental impact of this kind of approach is what we really need to be worrying about. Now if you're eating beef 3 or more times per week i think it's worth thinking about what you could do differently.

Now to your burning question: is dairy really so bad?

There is no question that if cows are fed hormones those hormones get into the milk. Why do they give cows hormones in the first place? Well, every extra day getting that cow ready to either sell the meat or get to the point where it's mature enough to get pregnant and start making milk is another day that cow needs to be housed and fed - costing more money and cutting into profits. And since we have allowed a corporate culture in which profits are all that matter at the expense of everything else, companies and farmers tend to adopt practices that maximize profit at the cost of quality, the environment, and even ethics. 

Even though the party line is that bovine growth hormone has not been found to cause problems in humans, it is not at all clear that this is the case. Some health effects take a long time to show up and we don't really have the resources or the attention span to fund studies that take decades. That said, the dairy industry has pretty much stopped using bovine growth hormone, even the non-organic products, because of the public outcry over this. Which again just proves how powerful the food buying choices we make really are. 

So I wouldn't say that it is likely that growth hormone is a problem, at least not any more.

However, I did and still do some research on human milk and it sure looks like the mammary gland is not genetically set up to filter out all of the various modern chemicals that we are exposed to these days. They have found all kinds of crazy stuff in human milk including pesticides, and the levels of these chemicals in milk pretty much reflect the levels in the mother's blood. So I am going to guess that cow mammary glands are pretty similar and that if a cow is fed feed and exposed to all kinds of chemicals those chemicals will end up in the milk. The same can be said for meat. That is why I definitely always choose organic for dairy products. It's not perfect, but at least there are some rules about what a cow can and cannot be fed when it's designated an organic product.

But I doubt that it's all about the chemicals. It looks like many of us have food allergies and sensitivities that we may not even be aware of. The simplest and most obvious of these is lactose intolerance. Most of the world (75%) is lactose intolerant, meaning that we can't break down lactose into glucose and galactose, the sugars that make up lactose. So what happens is that when we ingest lactose it doesn't get broken down and instead gets to the bacteria in the colon, who then eat it up and produce gas that makes us bloated and uncomfortable. Lactose in very large amounts if it's not broken down, can also cause diarrhea because the  high lactose content increases the osmolarity in the lumen of your gut and causes water to get sucked into the gut, resulting in diarrhea. 

Is there a solution to this? Well, obviously you can avoid dairy. But you can also buy lactose-free dairy products or buy the enzyme that breaks down the lactose (lactase) and take the lactase enzyme (usually a tablet or pill) with the first bite of food so that the lactose gets broken down.

The other obvious thing is an overt dairy allergy. People can be allergic to the casein proteins in milk, the whey proteins, or a combination of both. Overt allergy is when symptoms appear rapidly and can be directly linked to the consumption of the food. So if you immediately get, say a rash or hives, or severe abdominal bloating and pain within a few minutes to an hour of consuming dairy then we are talking about an allergy. You can be assessed for food allergies by a doctor. You can either get a skin prick test or just get your blood levels of immunoglobulins to specific food antigens measured. These measurements do not always correlate with symptoms and no one really knows why.

And then there's the "food sensitivity" to dairy, which is a lot more difficult to define. In many cases, and we really don't understand very well exactly why or how this happens, people develop sensitivities to dairy. This means that if you measure blood immunoglobulins to casein or whey you may or may not see higher than normal amounts, which may or may not indicate that your immune system has been sensitized to dairy and therefore whenever you ingest it the immune system thinks it needs to attack it as if it were a foreign substance or a potential threat.

Usually, if this is going on, it's because the individual has what's called a leaky gut, or their intestinal barrier function is compromised. Again, it's hard to know why or how this happens but repeated antibiotic use is certainly bad for barrier function, as are chemicals and toxins (i.e. alcohol in high amounts), and potentially environmental exposures.

As far as fertility, I would guess that it is the possibility of an underlying dairy sensitivity that is the reason why fertility doctors may tell a woman to stop eating dairy. Which is interesting, because you can theoretically be sensitized to pretty much any food, including sesame seeds or apricots. But instead of just measuring each individual for specific food sensitivities we instead tell them to avoid the main allergens (dairy, peanuts, wheat, soy, corn) because that is what a large proportion of individuals are likely to be allergic to. But guess what, if I am trying to figure out why I am having trouble getting pregnant I don't really care what OTHER people might be sensitive to, I care about what I may be sensitive to! 

The tricky thing about trying to grow a baby is that basically you are housing another human being and your immune system is thinking hm, what is this foreign object doing in here? One of the normal physiological processes that occurs in pregnancy is a suppression of the immune system so that the fetus is not attacked. But in some people the immune system is just too "turned on" and attacks the developing fetus because it recognizes it as foreign. So there is a possibility that underlying food sensitivities which chronically trigger the immune system every time those foods are ingested, lead to an overall over-activation of immunity.

Now to yogurt. I give my kids yogurt. I think it's an excellent food. it provides protein and healthy fat (yes, dairy fat actually seems to be healthy), probiotics, and it is tasty. Yes, I avoid the really cheap yogurts that have a lot of added sugar and other unnecessary ingredients (artificial flavors and colors!!) but even if there is a little fruit or jam in there it is not the end of the world. I would much rather my kids get a little bit of sugar to make yogurt something they actually enjoy and really want to eat, than let them eat cupcakes at every single turn like it is so easy to do. Of course, if your kids will eat unflavored/plain yogurt, by all means, that's even better! The natural sugars in plain yogurt are just the lactose that is naturally in milk. No one has ever shown that lactose is bad (other than for lactose intolerance, as we already discussed). Lactose is the most abundant ingredient in human milk too. it's probably why we all love the taste of sweet so much, because it reminds us of our very first food.