Is Milk Good For You?

For the purposes of this article, unless otherwise stated, when we say milk we mean pasteurized, homogenized, conventional cow’s milk.

While I have yet to see an actual study that proves milk is good for you, there are countless studies out there that state that calcium is good for you and you can get it by drinking milk. This is true. Statements such as this sum it up perfectly: “Indeed, it is impossible in a diet based on conventional foods to obtain adequate intakes of calcium if milk and dairy products are not consumed.”1

They’re correct. But consider a conventional diet: microwaved dinners, cereal, and frozen vegetables at best. Maybe a salad made with pre-packaged iceberg lettuce, a few pieces of romaine lettuce, some shredded carrots and Hidden Valley ranch salad dressing when it’s supper time. With the soda most Americans drink, which leaches minerals including calcium from the body in order to keep the blood’s PH at 7.4, it’s no wonder milk can do a body good. So does this mean milk is good for you?

Most alternative health care practitioners and a growing number of conventional doctors say “no”. They know milk is a major source of allergen in people, especially children. Okay, so maybe a more realistic statement would be, “Milk is good for you, unless you are one of the millions who are allergic or intolerant.” On the other hand, milk allergy or not, on the holistic side of health, it’s not uncommon to have relief from other allergies when one stops consuming milk. In fact, most alternative health care practitioners will tell you before you do anything else, “Stop consuming dairy and refined sugars!”

There are so many studies. Some say milk may make you fat2, while others claim milk helps you lose weight. Some studies state that milk can help prevent heart disease3 while others claim the opposite is true4.

Many people advocate drinking raw milk, which is unpasteurized and non-homogenized. We at OLM are not fans of pasteurization or homogenization at all. And milk does contain a wide variety of vitamins and minerals and very easily assimilable protein. Some argue that it is not at all easy for humans to absorb the calcium from cow’s milk, but others say that you can if it’s raw.

So what’s our take on the milk issue? Cows have four stomachs. Humans have one. Raw cow’s milk from a healthy cow is a much better choice than the homogenized and pasteurized varieties, but there is still some minor risk of food poisoning (though if the cow and the human ingesting the milk are healthy, the risk is extremely low). This is what confuses many. “Healthy” and “Safe” are not the same things. Raw milk, provided it is not tainted with e-coli, is healthier than pasteurized milk. But the pasteurization of milk does make it safer to consume. For health, raw sheep’s milk is a better choice, and raw human milk is the best. Isn’t it silly that the idea of human milk is disgusting to many people, yet cow’s milk is the norm? Come on, guys, would you rather suck on a cow’s udder, or… Well, you know.

So how do you get enough calcium? You may have heard us say this before: At least 80% of your diet should be raw fresh fruits and vegetables, mostly vegetables. And if you want to get more vitamin D, we recommend sunlight.

If you are an animal lover, there is also the animal cruelty issue to consider when evaluating milk as a part of your diet. The intensive dairy practices for milking cows for any type of milk significantly reduce the animal’s lifespan. If you’re considering giving up cow’s milk all together and need a little extra push, check out the video on the right and this website for some more information.

Organic or not, a dairy cow’s life is not a pretty picture.

Editor’s Note:

As a child I was sick regularly. I had many allergies and other health issues. Eliminating milk made a huge difference in my quality of life. The last time I drank a glass of milk, years ago, it immediately made me feel terrible.

Is Chocolate Good For You?

Almost all of the recent studies on the health benefits of chocolate that we came across were positive. Findings ranged from improved function of cells to lower blood pressure.¹ Chocolate is touted as a superfood by some, but this doesn’t mean you should go out and buy Hershey’s chocolate by the box. First and foremost, all of the studies we found suggesting health benefits from consuming chocolate were related to dark chocolate1 ², not milk chocolate. Also, flavanols are the antioxidant that many researchers believe are responsible for much of chocolate’s health benefits, and it should be noted that manufacturers often remove the healthy element – the flavanols – because of their bitter taste.³

An addition, the sugar in chocolate is cause for concern. The study,Can a daily bar of chocolate cause brittle-bone disease?, states the following: “The researchers believe the findings may be because chocolate contains oxalate, which can reduce calcium absorption, and sugar, which is linked to calcium excretion.” ³

Editor’s Note

I must admit, I love chocolate. I eat chocolate on a regular basis. But I always make sure it’s fair trade, organic chocolate and I prefer to find it sweetened with a healthier sweetener like sugar cane juice, or maltitol. I would not venture to say that chocolate is good for you. I know it has some health benefits, but overall, it is not something that makes me feel healthier after I consume it. But if it’s organic, sweetened in a healthier way, and not consumed too often, I don’t think it’s a cause for concern.

Is Red Wine Good For You?

Resveratrol is a natural antioxidant found in the skin of red grapes. Many studies suggest that resveratrol is the reason for the French paradox, the observation that the French suffer considerably low incidence of heart disease, while enjoying a diet rich in of saturated fats. While we at OLM have our own theory as to why the French do not suffer from high incidence of heart disease, that’s another article.

There are two common types of studies supporting red wine consumption. One kind is where animals and/or humans are given resveratrol, not actual red wine. Red wine consumption is said to “possibly” reduce chances of coronary heart disease,1 fight diabetes,2 aid in weight loss,3 prevent prostate cancer,4 kill pancreatic cancer,5 increase one’s lifespan,6 and more. But with the many studies claiming resveratrol has these benefits, note the usual little bit of “fine print” that reads something to the effect, “Researchers warn that you would have to drink three liters of red wine a day in order to receive the benefits of…” (this is not an actual quote, but the messages are similar).

The other kind of studies that lead us to believe red wine may be good for us are statistical correlation studies, or epidemiology. These studies will say things such as, “Among men who consumed four or more 4-ounce glasses of red wine per week, we saw about a 60 percent lower incidence of the more aggressive types of prostate cancer.”7 Consider the problems with such studies, specifically in the case of red wine. A person who drinks one to two glasses of red wine a day, typically no more, no less, is an individual who generally shows restraint, has refined taste, and is likely to be more affluent than the average person. This individual could be healthier than the average person who doesn’t drink alcohol at all due to multiple factors. I would venture to guess that the average single malt scotch drinker is healthier than the average Budweiser drinker. Does this mean that Scotch is healthier? Maybe, maybe not. Does this mean that Scotch is healthy? Certainly not.

And then there are other studies that suggest red wine is not all it’s touted to be.8 It’s interesting to note that some research indicates one or two glasses of red wine a day may prevent cancer, other research tells us the opposite is likely true.9

So is red wine good for you? OLM believes that alcohol is not good for you, period. In some cases the ends justify the means, such as the alcohol content in tinctures, which are used as herbal remedies, but we do not recommend consuming red wine. If resveratrol and/ or other antioxidants are what you seek, seek elsewhere. There are better and more natural ways of getting them—like eating grapes.

That said, if you want to enjoy an alcoholic beverage every now and then, provided you do not suffer from Candida, and your health is better than most people’s overall, red wine may be the best choice.

Editor’s Note

I love a good red wine. While I’m picky about the quality, I am not stuck on any one kind, such as cabernet or merlot. I’ve tried many different varieties; I once fancied myself a bit of a connoisseur. But while I still love a nice red on occasion, it has become rarer for me. Why? I am simply too in tune with my body to enjoy things that do not make me feel good. Every now and then, with the right social circumstances, I can turn off that warning in my head, but it’s rare. And even after only one glass, I tend to ask myself, “Was that really worth it?” It just plain doesn’t make me feel good. Well, mentally, yeah, it feels great, at the time of consumption. But physically and mentally, hours later or a day later, even one glass feels makes me feel as though I just abused my body.

Is Coffee Good For You?

One popular study suggests moderate coffee consumption (three to five cups a day) diminishes risks for dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.¹ Another study states coffee has several metabolic effects that could reduce the risk of gallstone formation.² Many coffee advocates speak of enhanced brain function and athletic performance. And perhaps the most common argument for consuming the substance more people are addicted to than any other is its antioxidant content. But not all studies on coffee are positive. There is a study that links coffee consumption to reduced incidents of breast cancer, but also states it may result in shrinking women’s breasts and enlarging men’s breasts if three or more cups are consumed per day.³ While some studies would disagree, many studies suggest diminishing health benefits and increased risk with greater consumption.^4,5 At OLM, we believe there are much better ways to prevent and cure Alzheimer’s disease and dementia than drinking coffee. A healthy diet will prevent these age-related diseases, and chelation therapy can cure them. Gallstones are also a sign of overall poor health and poor diet. Enhanced brain function and athletic performance can be attributed to caffeine intake, but its effects are fleeting. Like any drug, caffeine works great at first, but sooner or later more and more caffeine is required for you to function at the same level. As with any stimulant, you are better off in the long run without it. As far as antioxidants are concerned, if cocaine were high in antioxidants, that wouldn’t make it healthy. While coffee is high in antioxidants,⁶ there are plenty of other ways to get antioxidants. And while studies have suggested that coffee consumption may reduce the risk of heart disease due to the antioxidants, another study suggests that coffee leads to heart disease.⁷ So, is coffee healthy, or unhealthy? One concern we at OLM have is the pH. Coffee is low-acid, with a pH between 4.5 and 6. While citrus juices are significantly more acidic, alternative health practitioners usually tell you coffee has more of an acidifying affect on the body than any fruits or fruit juices. Regardless of the pH level, the most significant concern we have with coffee is the sugar and/or fake sugar, and the cream and/or fake creamer people put into their coffee. There also may be a significant difference between fresh ground bean coffee and instant coffee. While we did not find studies comparing the two and their health benefits, we typically don’t trust refined processed and/or packaged foods.

References:

Editor’s Note

When I drink coffee, I get a headache in the back of my head near my neck and my kidneys hurt almost immediately. I never developed much of a taste for coffee, but I know for a fact that it is not good for me. I also believe that coffee can be very hard on the kidneys causing diarrhea, kidney stones, and urinary tract infections. It’s also bad for your central nervous system (that’s why some people get those headaches). When advising people on their health, I always recommend cutting out coffee. But if you do choose to drink coffee, avoid the junk most people put into it. Drink it black or sweetened with raw sugar.

Eat Less, Live Longer

Restricted Calorie Diet

How many times did your mother tell you to eat up because kids living in a place you weren’t going to visit anyway were starving? How many times did you respond by saying, “Why don’t you send this plate to Ethiopia?” Believe it or not, the child’s wish to not eat is sometimes more nutritionally appropriate than the mother’s position.

According to the results of a long-term rhesus monkey study from Wisconsin, modest reductions in daily calories can help primates live longer and healthier. The monkeys were divided into normal and reduced calorie diet groups. Apparently, 37 percent of the monkeys in the regular group died of age-related conditions as opposed to 13 percent of the dieting group. The research is not over, but there is an indication that a very healthy diet of fewer calories might add years to your life.

The researchers reduced the dieting monkeys’ calorie intake by 30 percent, but took steps to make sure that all necessary nutrients were still consumed. The calorie-cut monkeys didn’t just live longer; they had approximately half the heart disease and cancerous tumors of the non-dieting group. Additionally, the rates of diabetes and brain atrophy, conditions associated with aging, were greatly reduced in the dieting group.1

We, at Nancy Appleton Books, applaud this research with both cheers and a “We told you so.” We have commented on food intake and other aspects of our diet making us fat, especially in our recent book Suicide by Sugar.

A sedentary lifestyle, going from bed to work in front of a screen to entertainment in front of another screen and back to bed, leads to lack of exercise and overeating. Too often, people living this lifestyle eat processed foods that are high in sugars, especially fructose. Fructose triggers hunger2 which feeds a vicious cycle of eating more and more, making people fat and unhealthy. Our position has always been to cut back on sugar and preservatives in favor of whole foods, which represents the kind of caloric reductions mentioned in the Wisconsin monkey study.

What the average person reading this article needs to know before applying a 30 percent daily calorie reduction to his or her diet is what is in the monkey chow normally fed to the primates in captivity. Rhesus monkeys in the wild eat insects, fruit, worms, leaves and roots, usually after exerting some energy to get the food. We have it directly from the Wisconsin researchers that the “animals ate a semi-purified, well-defined pelleted diet consisting of 15 percent protein (lactalbumin), 10 percent fat (corn oil) that also contains sucrose, corn starch, dextrin, cellulose and a vitamin and mineral mix. In addition, each animal receives a piece of fresh fruit (~100 kcal) daily.”

At this point, we need to refer the reader to experiments conducted on cats by Francis Pottenger Jr., MD, between the 1930s and 1980s that show how the modern processed diet is in and of itself a cause for alarm.

Pottenger’s cats were given a diet of raw milk, cod liver, and either raw or cooked meat. The cooked meat cats showed generations of abnormalities that, left alone, killed off the cat breeding after three generations and took four generations of a proper diet to heal in the cat offspring.3 While it is true that subsequent replication studies suggest a taurine deficiency more than cooking as the cause of the symptoms shown by Pottenger’s cats, which included heart disease, bad vision, lack of balance, and wild variations in birth weight, there is some link between our diet and the symptoms we feel.4

Pottenger’s cats apply to the monkey study in this way: the standard captive monkey diet already has a lot of fat, heart disease and other ailments built in. Making a 30 percent cut in this non-whole foods diet will help because a lot of sugar is being cut out and every little bit helps. More research is obviously needed to see if monkeys and humans would benefit as much from calorie reduction when they go on a diet of more whole foods than not, or if these primate studies just tell us to cut the sugar, excess carbohydrates, preservatives, and other time bombs in our diet to achieve the same effect.

Another minor issue in applying the monkey study to our diet is the distressing fact that portion sizes in human meals keepincreasing. Some food items, like chocolate chip cookies, increased 700 percent between 1982 and 2002.5 We need to find out which year to use in setting an appropriate base meal size, because while any reduction from a high-calorie diet is an improvement, it represents a false hope if the underlying average meal size continues to grow.

However, while there are holes left to fill concerning sugar and carbohydrates, the first bit of research on overeating and longevity is in. Eating a little less without depriving yourself of nutrients will go a long way to extending your life and making you healthier. But there are no magic pills for your health, says Dr. David Finkelstein of the National Institute of Aging, a funding source for the Wisconsin study.

“Watch what you eat, keep your mind active, exercise and don’t get hit by a car,” Finkelstein says.

Sources:

Coleman, RJ, Et. Al. “Caloric Restriction Delays Disease Onset and Mortality in Rhesus Monkeys” Science 325;(5937): 201-204
Tannous, dit El Khoury D. et. al. “Variations in Postprandial Ghrelin Status Following Ingestion of High-Carbohydrate, High-Fat and High-Protein Meals in Males.” Annals of

Sugar and Testosterone

Just say the words gonads, testosterone or any of the unprintable slang associated with testicles, sex, and male virility and you’ll get a laugh or at least amused looks. Now, say those words again, but in a context that says, “You’re going to lose that capability, son,” and watch what happens. The collective scream you hear is shrill enough to replace the air raid sirens America abandoned in the 1980s.

New research so fresh that it hasn’t yet appeared in a journal article says flat out that eating sugar reduces testosterone levels in the blood by up to 25 percent across the board. The researchers found 74 men at Massachusetts General Hospital with a range of tolerances to glucose (42 normal blood sugar, 23 impaired glucose tolerance “prediabetic” and 9 actually with Type-2 Diabetes) and gave them 75g of a glucose solution. In many cases, the effect lasted at least 2 hours after ingestion and affected all types of men in the study. Of 66 men listed as having normal testosterone levels in a fasting state before the test, 10 developed a hypogonadal (low testosterone) state at some point during the two hours of the test.ⁱ

The actual intent of the research funded by the National Institutes of Health and the American Diabetes Association was to refine testing methods for low testosterone levels. Current methodology says to test the man in the morning on two different days and get an average reading to see if the man is truly hypogondal or if the low testosterone will pick up later. So far, no one has said that a man should fast before taking the blood test—until now.

The link between sugar, insulin, obesity, diabetes, the metabolic syndrome and testosterone levels had been touched on in other research that has come out recently. Only these researchers worked backwards relative to this new study; they took people with known elements of the metabolic syndrome (diabetes, obesity, and heart disease) and tested their testosterone levels. Many subjects had low testosterone.

In recent research conducted in Berlin, the conclusion read in part “Lower total testosterone and sex-hormone-binding-globulin (SHBG) predict a higher incidence of the metabolic syndrome…Administration of testosterone to hypogondal men reverses the unfavorable risk profile for the development of diabetes and atherosclerosis.”ⁱⁱ

In Finland where similar research is regularly conducted the researchers came up with this gem: “Low total testosterone and SHBG levels independently predict development of the metabolic syndrome and diabetes in middle-aged men. Thus, hypoandrogenism (hypogondal) is an early marker for disturbances in insulin and glucose metabolism that may progress to the metabolic syndrome or frank diabetes.” ⁱⁱⁱ

It seems that these previous studies were waiting for someone else to have a “The Emperor Seems Naked” moment and try out the inverse of their results in which you give sugar to mostly healthy people and see what happens. No longer should low testosterone be considered just a symptom of the metabolic syndrome, but as what both are…a result of too much sugar in our diet.

We at Nancy Appleton Books have already touched on sugar causing the metabolic syndrome in previous articles like 140 Reasons Why Sugar Ruins Your Health. In it we make simple declarative statements about many of sugar’s ill effects:

Sugar can increase fasting levels of glucose.iv
Sugar can cause hypoglycemia.viii
Sugar can lead to obesity.v
Sugar can cause heart disease.vii
Sugar can cause metabolic
syndrome.viii

One way sugar lowers testosterone is through its effect on the adrenal glands.ix
Sugar taxes the adrenal glands and these glands interrelate with the sex hormone glands (testes and ovaries) that produce testosterone and estrogen.^x

These ailments listed above are elements of and highly associated with the metabolic syndrome, which we have linked to the excessive intake of sugar. The research in Massachusetts says that sugar causes low testosterone. Similar research around the world says that low testosterone is highly associated with the various elements of the metabolic syndrome. So how many times do we have to enjoy the circular logic before we simply say that sugar causes both the low testosterone and the ailments in the metabolic syndrome? Put more simply, sugar kills in a multitude of ways and this one affects men where they really live, in the bedroom.

Salt is Good For You

Like fat, cholesterol, and sugar, many people believe salt is bad for us. It’s not. Salt is essential for body functions such as nerve cell communication, food absorption, and balancing sugar levels. What may surprise you is that most people in America (and in many other countries as well) do not eat enough salt. But we’re not talking about refined table salt. Like processed sugar, refined salt is void of nutrition, its minerals stripped away. Refined salt is an unhealthy nutrient-robbing, addictive, toxic substance. But the right kind of salt, unrefined sea salt, is an important source of minerals. The next time you purchase salt, buy unrefined, colorful sea salt and enjoy it guilt free.

Is Milk Good For You?

Editor’s Note:

Is Chocolate Good For You?

Editor’s Note

Is Red Wine Good For You?

Editor’s Note

Is Coffee Good For You?

References:

Editor’s Note

Eat Less, Live Longer

Restricted Calorie Diet

Sources:

Sugar and Testosterone

Related Reading:

Salt is Good For You