Milk: White Gold

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Milk: White Gold

 

You may be interested to know that after I stopped eating chicken and fish, for

the first six months I felt like I wasn't getting enough protein. I felt tired

and out of gas. How can one feel protein-deficient?

 

Weight loss that isn't caused by starvation is basically a loss of water and

fat. Muscle deterioration comes with disuse, not protein deficiency--anyone

who's ever worn a cast knows that. Feeling tired has to do with fuel, not parts.

 

If your car is out of gas, do you drive to an auto parts store?

 

This feeling of not getting enough protein shows how strongly I was brainwashed

into thinking protein was fuel.

 

My mother, my school, and everybody else had always told me to get enough

protein. But now I know why I felt so run-down. I had become the dreaded

lacto-ovo vegetarian: one of the most misinformed groups in town. I was trying

to eat complete proteins to replace those I thought I was missing.

 

I was concocting meat-substitutes to get that all-important protein the

government said I needed. So I was drinking milk and eating cheese. Lots of

cheese

 

Have you noticed how many vegetarian cookbooks rely on dairy products to make

their recipes taste good?

 

Even more important, I wasn't getting the carbohydrates I needed, so my muscles

were starved.

 

I was drinking two or three glasses of milk a day.

 

Sorry, Rudy, but milk is a concentrated source of protein, fat, and sugar,

designed to help babies grow at the time in their lives when they need the most

protein.

 

Can you think of one other species on the planet that drinks milk after infancy?

 

Cow's milk is great, if you are a calf. In humans, even skim milk does more harm

than good. Of course, the more saturated fat a dairy product has, the worse it

is.

 

A woman's risk of getting breast cancer rises with her intake of saturated fats.

Breast cancer affects 2.8 million women in this country, accounting for $6

billion in health-care bills.

 

According to the Physicians' Committee for Responsible Medicine, milk has no

place in anyone's diet, especially pregnant and nursing mothers.

 

I gave up dairy about five years ago. At first, it was " difficult. " Then I

realized it was all in my head. I could just let go of all that protein

brainwashing. After a few months, I stopped craving cheese and my face stopped

looking puffy. Your face will look less puffy, too, after you give up dairy

products completely.

 

Milk is only good for one group of people.

Dairy farmers and their families.

To them, milk is white gold.

 

The Calcium Connection

 

We all need calcium. Every cell in our bodies needs calcium. Would you be

surprised to learn that this goes for all mammals? Where do you think elephants,

especially pregnant or nursing elephants, get enough calcium? Calcium is an

element, like iron.

 

You can't turn it into anything,and you can't destroy it. The amount of calcium

going out always equals the amount coming in, unless there is a deficit or a

surplus.

 

There's more than enough calcium in the grasslands of the African savannah to

support all the animals living there. All animals need calcium, because we

naturally lose it, but humans on high-protein diets are especially good at

losing calcium, which is why they have to consume so much just to stay even.

 

At the Mayo Clinic, a four year study conducted by Dr. B. Lawrence Riggs

concluded:

 

" There is a large body of evidence indicating no relationship between calcium

intake and bone density;

 

We found no correlation at all between calcium intake levels and bone loss, not

even a trend. "

 

Any diet with more than ten percent of its calories as protein will contribute

to calcium and bone loss, leading to osteoporosis in older people.

 

The more dairy in your diet, the more calcium comes in, and the more calcium

goes out. Drink as much milk as you want-you'll lose calcium. Osteoporosis is a

rich-person's disease.

 

Osteoporosis and consumption of dairy products go hand-in-hand.

 

What is it about excess protein that causes loss of calcium?

 

Your kidneys, which did not evolve to handle more than ten percent of your

calories as protein, especially after you are weaned, get rid of calcium as a

reaction to excess protein in a process called " buffering " .

 

Your kidneys 'eliminate' calcium through the urine.

Too much protein also triggers the release of iron, magnesium, zinc, potassium,

and many other minerals.

 

By now you won't be surprised to learn that people with high-protein diets get

kidney stones, and vegetarians rarely do.

 

The trick is to use what you get,

 

not pour more in just because you've found a leak.

 

When you think of calcium, think of elephants and cows.

 

There is plenty of calcium available in a fresh, green, low-protein diet. Dr.

John McDougall-a doctor who's written several books I think are helpful-writes:

 

" Calcium deficiency, caused by an insufficient amount of calcium in the diet, is

not known to occur in humans. "

 

The minimum daily requirement (thanks to our pals at the NRC) is completely

skewed from data presented in the '50s and '60s.

 

Osteoporosis

 

Nathan Pritikin studied Bantu women in Africa and found that they bear nine

children and breastfeed them for an average of two years on a strictly

vegetarian diet with

 

about one-third of our Recommended Daily Allowance of calcium.

 

They are not calcium deficient, never lose a tooth, and rarely break a bone.

 

Bantus who move to affluent countries develop osteoporosis just as the local

populations do. Pritikin studied the Bantus to come up with his low-protein,

no-fat diet.

 

Eskimos, on the other hand, get almost twice the recommended daily requirement

of calcium (over 2 grams per day) and have one of the highest-protein diets in

the world.

 

Eskimos also have one of the highest rates of osteoporosis in the world.

 

Don't we need calcium supplements?

 

Do cows or gorillas need calcium supplements?

 

Where do cows and elephants get all their calcium?

 

You think it's different in cows and elephants than in people?

 

How would you know? It's not.

 

The calcium mechanism is common to all animals, some are just better at getting

rid of excess calcium than we are.If we take the blinders off,

 

the Dairy Council and the Tobacco Institute are about the same,

 

only the Dairy Council is doing a better job.

 

The most recent studies on osteoporosis, show that calcium loss and osteoporosis

are due to

1) a high-protein diet,

2) inactivity,

3) smoking, and

4) excess salt.

 

Most books on osteoporosis are based on outdated studies. Those authors never

suspected a protein connection.

 

The keys to having strong bones all your life are to eat a low-protein diet with

lots of green leaves and get daily weight-bearing exercise.

 

If you want to avoid osteoporosis, you will have to learn to

reduce your calcium intake, not increase it.

 

Last year I had a neck operation. I had a diskectomy, which is removal of a

disk. This is also called a fusion, because the two vertebral bodies rest on

each other and fuse bone-to-bone.

 

I took no supplements, ate a starch-and-salad diet, and my surgeon said, and I

quote: " I've never had a patient heal this fast. " I was skiing six weeks after

the operation. No joke.

 

Bones and muscles respond to mechanical stress. Normal walking isn't strenuous

enough to build bones. If housework did the trick, we'd know about it.

Strenuous, weight-bearing exercise--the equivalent of a short hike or an

aggressive, vigorous walk every day--adds bones and muscle.

 

Not exercising loses bone mass. Bones are built the same way callouses are built

up. One of the biggest problems astronauts have is bone and muscle loss.

 

Vegetarians who run and hike into their eighties generally do not get shorter or

break hips-they hardly lose any bone. People who take hormones and calcium

tablets still have problems.

 

Where do you get your calcium?

 

I get maybe 300-500mg per day (who's counting?) from leafy greens, preferably

raw. Salad. Dark green and dark yellow vegetables are loaded with calcium.

If you don't lose much, you don't need much.

 

Contrary to what you may have heard, spinach has tons of available, absorbable

calcium. Go for the dark greens and chalk up on calcium.

 

http://www.dsiegel.com/wiwd/diet/calcium.html

 

 

_________________

 

JoAnn Guest

mrsjoguest

DietaryTipsForHBP

http://www.geocities.com/mrsjoguest

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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