Milk: The Deadly Poison

by Robert Cohen

We'll be hearing about the wonders of milk until the cows come home, but few people realize the dangers contained in each and every glass.

Milk consumption is probably the number-one cause of heart disease, America's number-one killer. By the time the average American reaches the age of fifty-two, he or she will have consumed in milk and dairy products the equivalent cholesterol contained in one million slices of bacon. In 1994 the average US citizen consumed 26 ounces of milk and dairy products per day. One 12-ounce glass of whole milk contains 300 calories and 16 grams of fat. Beer is taking a bad rap - protruding stomachs on overweight people should be called milk bellies, not beer bellies.

Twenty-five million American women over the age of forty have been diagnosed with bone-crippling arthritis and osteoporosis. These women have been drinking, on average, more than two pounds of milk (approximately one gallon) per day for their entire adult lives. Clearly, drinking milk has not prevented osteoporosis. Doctors remain unaware of this, due in part to the effects of millions of dollars spent on ads and the promotion of articles that extol the virtues of calcium in milk. Scientific research has shown, however, that the calcium in milk is not adequately absorbed by the body, and that milk consumption could actually be the cause of osteoporosis.

Milk is not a healthy drink. Attentive parents are noting that when milk and dairy products are eliminated from their children's diets, so too are colic and colitis, earaches, colds and congestion. One bovine protein in milk destroys the insulin-producing beta cells of the pancreas. Sixty percent of America's dairy cows have leukemia virus, and after cows graze in fields treated with pesticides, their milk contains a toxic brew of chemicals.

Consumers shouldn't drink a fluid that contains high levels of antibiotics and today's farmers are permitted to give their animals increased levels. At the start of 1990, the standard allowable amount of antibiotics in milk was one part per 100 million, and that amount was increased 100 times to one part per million by the end of that year.

Milk also contains harmful hormones. When a group of cows was injected with rbST growth hormone, their milk was found to contain increased levels of insulin-like growth-factor 1 (IGF-1), the most powerful growth hormone occurring in nature. By a great biological coincidence, IGF-1 is identical in both cows and humans. That means that when we drink milk containing this growth factor 1, we also take in an added amount of a powerful growth hormone which is already produced by our own bodies. While strong digestive acids and enzymes in the human stomach destroy powerful growth-hormones present in such foods as steak, when we drink milk these stomach acids are diluted and no longer destroy these hormones.

In 1985, a Chicago milk-processing plant incorrectly pasteurized one day's output of milk: Four people died and 150,000 more were made sick due to salmonella poisoning. That tainted milk also may have contained live leukemia virus, tuberculosis virus and vast assortments of other infectious organisms. No records were kept to monitor subsequent cases of encephalitis, meningitis or leukemia.

The FDA is supposed to act as a fiduciary to US health needs, but this agency is influenced by special-interest groups that include pharmaceutical companies. In 1994, Monsanto lobbyists paid enormous sums to members of the Congressional Agriculture Committee's Dairy Livestock and Poultry Subcommittee, who were considering a bill designed to label milk from cows treated with genetically engineered hormones. The legislation was stalled in committee, and the bill died when the session expired. Excessive fat, antibiotics and hormones, heart disease, osteoporosis and so much more: All are brought to you by milk.

Robert Cohen is the author of Milk: The Deadly Poison. Copies of the book are available by faxing (888) NOT-MILK.