The dairy industry has spent billions of dollars convincing us that milk is healthy, all the while pumping chemicals into cows and the milk itself that makes it deadly.
Not only that, but now all dairy is cooked up to between 250 and 500 degrees. That means that all, if any, nutrients have been cooked out and you are left with liquid fat!
To think that drinking milk is a hype is a cause for lynching. Milk, it is said, is “the” source of calcium that helps kids grow up big and strong. Milk is alleged to contain vital nutrients and to help prevent osteoporosis. The U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, through its food dietary guidelines, says that everyone should get 2-3 servings of dairy everyday.
Milk is advocated by various government agencies, hoards of physicians, and a $200 million annual advertising budget of the dairy industry. Can we ever forget the mustachioed faces of countless numbers of celebrities decorating everything from newspaper ads to roadside billboards?
And yes, America has a love affair with milk. So much so that the average person consumes 600 pounds of dairy products every year, including about 420 pounds of fluid milk and cream, 70 pounds of various milk-based fats and oils, 30 pounds of cheese, and 17 pounds of ice cream (obesity epidemic anyone?). In total, the U.S. dairy farmers produce about 163 billion pounds of milk and milk products a year. It is udderly horrendous, if you’ll pardon the pun.
But what if the celebrities we love and trust were lying to us? What if milk doesn’t do a body good? Instead, what if milk is a major contributor to breast and prostate cancer, heart disease, asthma, diabetes, and more? What if the U.S. government and dairy industry are in bed together to hide the ill effects of dairy consumption? They wouldn’t do that, would they?
Well, according to Amy Lanou, Ph.D., the nutrition director of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), besides the above, “milk has been linked to anemia, allergies, obesity, ovarian cancer, breast cancer and juvenile-onset diabetes”.
So why, then, is milk regarded as wholesome, especially with the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, according to its mission statement, being charged with “enhancing the quality of life for the American people by supporting the production of agriculture”?
Created by the pro-business Lincoln administration in 1862, today’s USDA has the dual responsibility of assisting dairy farmers while promoting healthy dietary choices for Americans.
Would you think that this creates a conflict of interest that puts at risk the objectivity of government farm policy and the health of the dairy-consuming public? Duh! Six of the eleven members assigned to the U.S. Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee have financial ties to the meat, dairy, and egg interests. Prior to the PCRM winning a lawsuit against the USDA claiming that they “unfairly promoted the special interests of the meat and dairy industries through its official dietary guidelines and the Food Pyramid”, the USDA refused to disclose such conflicts of interest to the public.
Historically, the USDA’s dietary guidelines have consistently reflected the industry’s push for greater consumption of both flesh and dairy as evidenced by their concocting the Four Food Groups with milk, meat, fruits and vegetable, and breads and cereals as the “Big Four” and in that order.
Over the years, these dietary “guidelines” have consistently reflected the industry’s push for greater consumption of both meat and dairy, despite the testimony of numerous physicians’ groups and watchdog organizations criticizing the Food Pyramid as biased and unhealthy.
The USDA counters this by saying that the guidelines should be “reality-based”, arguing that what people should really be eating is moot because it doesn’t fit with the American lifestyle.
Whaaat? What they are saying is that the USDA doesn’t even think it is reasonable to aspire to what constitutes a healthy diet. Now (2010), the psychiatric industry has invented a disease called, orthorexia nervosa, which is Latin for Healthy Eating Disorder. It never ends!
May 13, 2002 marked the passage of the farm bill in which dairy farmers and processors received, over 3 1/2 years, an additional $2 billion in subsidies, largely realized through price supports that inflate costs for consumers. Understand that dairy subsidies are a carryover from the Depression era when survival of small dairy farmers was considered essential to maintaining a national food supply. By the way, most of that $2 billion went to larger dairy farms in 12 northeastern states, hanging small farmers out to dry and actually encouraging the demise of family farms.
Another assertion of the suit brought by the PCRM against the USDA is that milk, as a staple in school lunch programs unfairly discriminates against non-whites who have a high incidence of lactose intolerance. There are about 50 million lactose intolerant adults in the U.S., including 15% of the white population, 70% of the blacks, and 80 to 97% of Asian, Native Americans, and Jews of European descent. These 50 million people suffer from a variety of digestive symptoms resulting from milk consumption and other dairy products, including gas, bloating, diarrhea, constipation and indigestion.
Currently, the USDA requires that every public school in the country serve milk with a push by some of our elected officials to offer financial incentives to schools that install milk vending machines. To add insult to injury, students cannot get free or subsidized alternatives to milk, like juice or soy milk, without a doctor’s note. So, for the 70% of the black kids and the 90% of the Asian kids, in public schools, a negative response to lactose intake is practically mandated by the U.S. Government. In essence, these huge dairy subsidies and broad-based promotion of milk by the government’s school lunch program is a form of economic racism that isolates minorities and encourages them to ingest something they are intolerant of or allergic to.
Girls in the U.S. are beginning to menstruate at younger and younger ages. According to the Cancer Prevention Coalition, some girls are now experiencing the effects of puberty as young as three years of age. Fifty years ago the incidence of breast cancer risk among U.S. women was one in twenty. As of 2001, that percentage has grown to one in eight women.
Why is that? Bovine Growth Hormone (BGH)! BGH is a naturally occurring hormone produced by milk cows. Closely resembling the natural growth hormones in human children, the presence of BGH in milk has been shown to significantly elevate hormone levels in people, creating many growth problems. And that’s not even accounting for the use of artificial hormones.
Enter Recombinant BGH (rBGH), an unnaturally occurring, genetically engineered hormone produced by Monsanto, which has been taken over by Bayer because of countless lawsuits now transferred to Bayer. As you know, Monsanto has made other fine humanitarian and ecological contributions such as Agent Orange, PCB’s and RoundUp laced soy, corn, cotton, canola, sugar beets and an attempt at alfalfa.
Through a series of research cover-ups and a network of conflicting interests with government policymakers, and we’ll get to that soon, Monsanto, in 1994, managed to get approval for Posilac, which is Monsanto’s commercial form of rBGH and increases cow’s milk production by 15-25%.
According to Monsanto, over a quarter of U.S. milk cows are now herds supplemented with Posilac. The majority of the country’s 1,500 dairy companies mix rBGH milk with non-rBGH milk during processing to such an extent that an estimated 80-90% of the U.S. dairy supply is contaminated.
What Monsanto never told consumers is that this supplementation of additional growth hormones is causing secondary sex characteristics to appear earlier in young children, especially girls.
Monsanto also never told consumers that rBGH injected cows produce extremely high levels of Insulin Growth Factor -1 (IGH-1), a cancer promoter that occurs naturally in the human bloodstream at levels that generally do not result in tumors.
Bayer/Monsanto and the FDA refuse to acknowledge research directly linking elevated levels of IGF-1 to increased risk of breast and prostate cancer. To make matters worse, Monsanto and the FDA colluded in ‘93 and ’94 to block labeling requirements for rBGH milk (even today Bayer, who Monsanto sold out to after accumulating over 3,000 lawsuits and the FDA block labeling of genetically engineered food). So, the average dairy consumer has no idea that they are increasing their own risk of getting cancer.
Since 1994, every industrialized country in the world, except the U.S., Canada, and Japan, and the 15 nations of the European nations, has banned rBGH milk. Yet, in the face of facts and the majority opinion of the global political and scientific community, Bayer/Monsanto and the U.S. continue to endorse rBGH milk for general consumption, at the same time try to figure out why there is an increase in breast cancer deaths and the continually declining age of puberty for girls.
It’s not rocket science to see that milk is bad for people and money is more important than concern for the welfare of the people, but what about the effect on the cows that produce that milk? The life expectancy of the average cow under natural conditions is about 25-30 years; on the typical factory farm, where well over half of U.S. milk cows live, they live only 4-5 years. Think about how you would feel if your life span was decreased by over 80%.
What happens, because of adding Monsanto’s Posilac to the cow’s feed, is that it causes them to suffer from mastitis, which is a bacterial infection of the udder, cystic ovaries, and uterus disorders. Aside from the harm to the cows, guess where these illnesses wind up? Yes, through discharges that go into the milk and ultimately to you.
By keeping dairy cows constantly pregnant, which is the only way the cow can produce milk, it creates baby calves. Enter the veal industry.
Since the male calves are useless to the farmers and have no economic value, an economic value had to be created. “Hey, let’s figure out a way to sell ‘em and make money”. As the true caring and compassionate farmers that they are, these male calves are taken away from their mothers, immobilized in small wooden crates to keep their flesh tender, and fed fake food so people can “enjoy” their soft flesh after they are slaughtered. In 2001, over a million veal calves were slaughtered in the U.S.
The bottom line is that it boils down to an all familiar story: big business and the U.S. Government joining forces to dupe the American consumer.
The USDA tells us to drink more milk while subsidizing large dairy farms and federally mandating dairy consumption and flesh eating for school children.
The government spends billions to buy unused milk and dairy products, while the industry spends almost $200 million every year promoting dairy consumption.
Meanwhile, the FDA and Bayer conspire to pollute the already unhealthy dairy supply with a genetically engineered hormone banned virtually everywhere else in the world. Ain’t the road to profit at any cost, grand?
So while the American public can answer the absurd industry question, “Got Milk”? with a resounding, mustachioed “YES”, the better question might be whether people have gotten screwed in the process.
In 1990, the Monsanto Company commissioned scientists to inject a bunch of laboratory rats with an early variant of recombinant Bovine Somatotropin (rBST), aka rBGH. The 90-day study demonstrated that rBGH was linked to development of prostate and thyroid cancer in rats.
Monsanto, our friend who gave us Agent Orange and spent 40 years covering up the effects of PCB’s, was about to seek approval for Posilac, the company’s commercialized form of rBGH.
The study linking rBGH to cancer was submitted to the FDA , but somehow Posilac was still approved in 1994. With fingers pointing in both directions, those with opinions argue about who had the bigger part in the cover-up – Monsanto or the FDA. The results of the study, in fact, were not made available to the public until 1998, when a group of Canadian scientists obtained the full documentation and completed an independent analysis of the results.
Among other instances of neglect, the documents showed that the FDA had never even reviewed Monsanto’s original studies (on which the approval of Posilac had been based), so in the end the point had no bearing on whether or not the report had contained all of the original data.
The FDA’s complicity continued; Michael Taylor, a Monsanto lawyer for many years, left in 1976 to become a staff lawyer for the FDA (Taylor was appointed by President Obama as the Dept. of Agriculture head). In 1991, Taylor was appointed to the office of FDA’s Deputy Commissioner, serving in that capacity until 1994. The administration approved rBGH in 1993.
While at the FDA, Taylor also wrote the policy exempting rBGH and other biotech foods from special labeling, considered by most to be a major victory for Monsanto. Ten days after Taylor’s policy was finalized, his old law firm, still representing Monsanto, filed suit against two dairy farms that had labeled their milk rBGH free.
As soon as the Government Accounting Office released a report covering all of this, Taylor was removed to work for the USDA, as the Administrator of the Food safety and Inspection Service, a position he held from 1994 to 1996. After holding positions at both the FDA and the USDA, Taylor went back to working for Monsanto, this time directly as the corporation’s Vice President of Public Policy. P.S. Obama appointed the guy as Deputy Commissioner of the FDA, which is now affectionately and fittingly known as the Fraud and Drug Administration.
Michael Taylor wasn’t the only government employee with an obvious conflict of interest. At the same time that Taylor left Monsanto for the FDA, Dr. Margaret Miller, once Monsanto’s top scientist, was also hired by the FDA to review her own scientific research conducted during her tenure at Monsanto. This is worth repeating.
A woman who was once Monsanto’s top scientist was hired by the FDA to review her own scientific research while she was with Monsanto. So much for “…for the people”. In her role as FDA scientist, Miller made the official decision to increase the amount of permissible antibiotic residues in milk by a hundred-fold, in part to counter the increase of mastitis in cows due to overuse of artificial growth hormones.
These incestuous relationships between industry and the U.S. government are the norm rather than the exception. Decisions at the FDA are made primarily by advisory boards comprised of scientists and executives from the dairy and meat industries, with a few university academics thrown in for good measure.
A word of good advice to adhere to: If man made it and you can’t pronounce it, don’t eat it!
We live in a world governed by greed, dishonesty, and lack of compassion. To survive we must rely on our innate intelligence and to what our bodies tell us. We must shake ourselves free from the pharmaceutical-medical-insurance cartel and put the control of our health back into our hands. We, in order to achieve good health and a good quality of life, must transcend the endless messages we are bombarded with through the various media outlets and be sensible.
To get on the road to recovery, to lose our dependence on prescription meds, to cure our ills and not just relieve symptoms, we must eliminate the causes from touching our lips. Flesh foods, found in anything that walks, runs, flies, crawls, or swims and dairy products, are loaded with artery clogging saturated fat.
Processed foods, refined grains (white, in this case is not right), sugary foods like sodas, cookies, cakes, etc., and eggs, have to go. The yolks are high in cholesterol and the whites because of their hardening effect, are used as a base in aircraft paint because they can withstand the effects of extreme weather conditions.
If you don’t believe me and you still eat eggs, the next time you eat eggs, don’t wash your dish for a day or two and see what happens. Then decide if you want to continue putting this in your body.
Take the time to prepare you own meals, slow down, and try to relax. Even get involved in a meditation process. There are so many avenues of education available to you.
Life is too short to not make the most of it. Only you can make you truly well. You are your own best investment.
Let today be the day you take the first step in reversing one of the worst bullshits of life.
Aloha!
Sources:
www.peta.org
Just to put things in perspective, after I graduated from Weequahic High School and before going to Seton Hall University, I had a part-time job working for a butcher. I was the delivery guy and occasionally had to go to the slaughterhouse to pick up products for the store. Needless to say, I had no consciousness nor awareness, as change never came then despite the horrors I witnessed on an almost daily basis.
After graduating with a degree in accounting from Seton Hall, I eventually got married and moved to a town called Livingston. Livingston was basically a yuppie community where everyone was judged by the neighborhood they lived in and their income. To say it was a "plastic" community would be an understatement.
Livingston and the shallowness finally got to me. I told my wife I was fed up and wanted to move. She made it clear she had to be near her friends and New York City. I finally got my act together and split for Colorado.
I was living with a lady in Aspen at the end of 1974, when one day she said, " let's become vegetarians". I have no idea what possessed me to say it, but I said, "okay"! At that point I went to the freezer and took out about $100 worth of frozen, dead body parts and gave them to a welfare mother who lived behind us. Well, everything was great for about a week or so, and then the chick split with another guy.
So here I was, a vegetarian for a couple weeks, not really knowing what to do, how to cook, or basically how to prepare anything. For about a month, I was getting by on carrot sticks, celery sticks, and yogurt. Fortunately, when I went vegan in 1990, it was a simple and natural progression. Anyway, as I walked around Aspen town, I noticed a little vegetarian restaurant called, "The Little Kitchen".
Let me back up just a little bit. It was April of 1975, the snow was melting and the runoff of Ajax Mountain filled the streets full of knee-deep mud. Now, Aspen was great to ski in, but was a bummer to walk in when the snow was melting.
I was ready to call it quits and I needed a warmer place. I'll elaborate on that in a minute.
But right now, back to "The Little Kitchen". Knowing that I was going to leave Aspen and basically a new vegetarian, I needed help. So, I cruised into the restaurant and told them my plight and asked them if they would teach me how to cook. I told them in return I would wash dishes and empty their trash. They then asked me what I did for a living and I told them I was an accountant.
The owner said to me, "Let's make a deal. You do our tax return and we'll feed you as well". So for the next couple of weeks I was doing their tax return, washing their dishes, emptying the trash, and learning as much as I could.
But, like I said, the mud was getting to me. So I picked up a travel book written by a guy named Foder. The name of the book was, "Hawaii". Looking through the book I noticed that in Lahaina, on Maui, there was a little vegetarian restaurant called," Mr. Natural's". I decided right then and there that I would go to Lahaina and work at "Mr. Natural's." To make a long story short, that's exactly what happened.
So, I'm working at "Mr. Natural's" and learning everything I can about my new dietary lifestyle - it was great. Every afternoon we would close for lunch at about 1 PM and go to the Sheraton Hotel in Ka'anapali and play volleyball, while somebody stayed behind to prepare dinner.
Since I was the new guy, and didn't really know how to cook, I never thought that I would be asked to stay behind to cook dinner. Well, one afternoon, that's exactly what happened; it was my turn. That posed a problem for me because I was at the point where I finally knew how to boil water.
I was desperate, clueless and basically up the creek without a paddle. Fortunately, there was a friend of mine sitting in the gazebo at the restaurant and I asked him if he knew how to cook. He said the only thing he knew how to cook was enchiladas. He said that his enchiladas were bean-less and dairy-less. I told him that I had no idea what an enchilada was or what he was talking about, but I needed him to show me because it was my turn to do the evening meal.
Well, the guys came back from playing volleyball and I'm asked what was for dinner. I told them enchiladas; the owner wasn't thrilled. I told him that mine were bean-less and dairy-less. When he tried the enchilada he said it was incredible. Being the humble guy that I was, I smiled and said, "You expected anything less"? It apparently was so good that it was the only item on the menu that we served twice a week. In fact, after about a week, we were selling five dozen every night we had them on the menu and people would walk around Lahaina broadcasting, 'enchilada's at "Natural's" tonight'. I never had to cook anything else.
A year later the restaurant closed, and somehow I gravitated to a little health food store in Wailuku. I never told anyone I was an accountant and basically relegated myself to being the truck driver. The guys who were running the health food store had friends in similar businesses and farms on many of the islands. I told them that if they could organize and form one company they could probably lock in the State. That's when they found out I was an accountant and "Down to Earth" was born. "Down to Earth" became the largest natural food store chain in the islands, and I was their Chief Financial Officer and co-manager of their biggest store for 13 years.
In 1981, I started to do a weekly radio show to try and expose people to a vegetarian diet and get them away from killing innocent creatures. I still do that show today. I pay for my own airtime and have no sponsors to not compromise my honesty. One bit of a hassle was the fact that I was forced to get a Masters Degree in Nutrition to shut up all the MD's that would call in asking for my credentials.
My doing this radio show enabled me, through endless research, to see the corruption that existed within the big food industries, the big pharmaceutical companies, the biotech industries and the government agencies. This information, unconscionable as it is, enabled me to realize how broken our health system is. This will be covered more in depth in the Introduction and throughout the book and when you finish the book you will see this clearly and it will hopefully inspire you to make changes.
I left Down to Earth in 1989, got nationally certified as a sports injury massage therapist and started traveling the world with a bunch of guys that were making a martial arts movie. After doing that for about four years I finally made it back to Honolulu and got a job as a massage therapist at the Honolulu Club, one of Hawaii's premier fitness clubs. It was there I met the love of my life who I have been with since 1998. She made me an offer I couldn't refuse. She said," If you want to be with me you've got to stop working on naked women". So, I went back into accounting and was the Chief Financial Officer of a large construction company for many years.
Going back to my Newark days when I was an infant, I had no idea what a "chicken" or "egg" or "fish" or "pig" or "cow" was. My dietary blueprint was thrust upon me by my parents as theirs was thrust upon them by their parents. It was by the grace of God that I was able to put things in their proper perspective and improve my health and elevate my consciousness.
The road that I started walking down in 1975 has finally led me to the point of writing my book, “A Sane Diet For An Insane World”. Hopefully, the information contained herein will be enlightening, motivating, and inspiring to encourage you to make different choices. Doing what we do out of conditioning is not always the best course to follow. I am hoping that by the grace of the many friends and personalities I have encountered along my path, you will have a better perspective of what road is the best road for you to travel on, not only for your health but your consciousness as well.
Last but not least: after being vaccinated as a kid I developed asthma, which plagued me all of my life. In 2007 I got exposed to the organic sulfur crystals, which got rid of my asthma in 3 days and has not come back in over 10 years. That, being the tip of the iceberg, has helped people reverse stage 4 cancers, autism, joint pain, blood pressure problems, migraine headaches, erectile dysfunction, gingivitis, and more. Also, because of the detoxification effects by the release of oxygen that permeates and heals all the cells in the body, it removes parasites, radiation, fluoride, free radicals, and all the other crap that is thrust upon us in the environment by Big Business.
For more, please view www.healthtalkhawaii.com and www.asanediet.com.
Namaste!
