Dairy Ain’t What it Used to Be

25 Jan Dairy Ain’t What it Used to Be

In the health and fitness industry we are full of whey proteins. We’ve got them coming at us from every possible angle, and everyone’s telling us that they’re the best way to get our protein in. Now in this video I’m not going to talk about whey protein specifically, but I’m going to talk about milk, I’m going to talk about dairy, I’m going to talk about whether or not it is something that you should be consuming.

You see there’s a lot of conflicting science out there, and there’s a lot of things out there that we don’t know about dairy. There’s also a lot that we do know. We do know how it’s affecting us from a metabolism standpoint. We know how it’s affecting us when it comes to weight loss. I want to make sure that I touch on some of those topics that you know exactly what you’re getting yourself into when you pick up that glass of milk.

Before I dive in, I want to talk a little bit about the history of dairy. You’ve got to take a look at the dairy industry in general, and what’s happened over the last couple of decades. You see in 1991, things started to change for the dairy industry. In fact, a lot of the dairy farms that were out there started to go out of business. The dairy farms that had hundreds and hundreds of cows, those were the ones that succeeded and remained, so big business really started to take over.

Another thing that we have to look at is between 1950 and the year 2000. About half of the dairy industry was completely wiped out. We had fifty percent less of the actual dairy farms, but literally three times the amount of milk production. What that tells us is that we were trying to reduce costs, big business was coming in, and we had to reduce the amount of dairy farms but increase the amount of production from the cows.

This lead to a lot of things. I want to explain to you exactly what it did to the cows, how the cows were actually raised, and how it’s ultimately trickling down to us. In short, what this means is that cows are being fed diets that allow them to produce more milk, very unnatural things. They’re also being fed a lot of synthetic hormones that are encouraging them to produce a lot more milk. Now in addition to that, they’re eating a diet that isn’t making them healthy.

You see cows are used to being free-range, eating a lot of grass, having naturally high omega-3 levels. When they’re fed copious amounts of protein and copious amounts of grain to get their body fat levels up, and to get their production up so they can actually produce more milk, it’s skewing the result. It’s making them more omega-6 dominant, but it’s also making them flat-out unhealthier. When those cows are unhealthy, they have to be fed antibiotics. Now you also have to remember these cows are in confined areas so there’s a lot of susceptibility to disease, so the dairy farmers are giving these cattle a lot of antibiotics. Now that trickles down into the milk.

Now you think about a woman that’s breastfeeding. There’s all this evidence out there that says that what that woman eats is going to trickle down into the child. Well the same is happening with the cows. You see the cows are consuming a lot in the way of antibiotics, they’re consuming a lot in the way of synthetic hormones, and it’s all trickling down to us. But what does an excess of antibiotics have to do for us? It sounds like it’s kind of a good thing, but it’s not.

You see you may think of an antibiotic as being something that you take when you’re sick, and that’s true, but the thing is when you have excess antibiotics coming in regularly it’s making us antibiotic resistant. That means when you do really get sick and you do need any antibiotics, you’re not going to have the same effect from them, or worse, you might have no effect at all when you’re really, truly sick.

Now to add insult to injury if you’re having antibiotics constantly coming into your body, you are consistently damaging the healthy flora within your intestinal lining and within your stomach. This means that you don’t have the good bacteria in your gut that you ordinarily would. This can make it hard to digest, it can cause a lot of bloating, and it can cause a lot of other issues like inflammation within the intestinal tract.

Now let’s take a look at the hormone side of things. Okay. Cows producing a lot of natural growth hormones to begin with. You’ve got to remember this cattle milk is designed to grow a mammal, it’s designed to grow an eighty-five pound calf into a fifteen-hundred-pound animal. If you’re a fitness buff watching this, you’re probably thinking, “Hey, that doesn’t sound so bad. That means I’m getting the natural growth hormones that are going to help me put on muscle.” But it’s the wrong kind, and we’re talking copious amounts that your body doesn’t really know how to utilize.

Now in addition to the naturally occurring high levels of growth hormone, we’re also adding other synthetic growth hormones. The main particular one being insulin growth like factor, or IGF. That main hormone, that IGF, that insulin growth factor that they are pumping these cows full of to help them produce more milk, is directly linked to breast cancer and to prostate cancer. There’s a study by the “Journal of Nutrition” that found twenty-two-thousand people that consumed two-and-a-half servings or more per day of dairy had a markedly increased risk of developing prostate cancer. That’s not just one study; there’s a lot of other ones that have linked excess levels of insulin growth factor to prostate cancer, as well as breast cancer.

So we simply have to ask ourselves, all aside from the manufacturing and the processing that’s happening with dairy: Is dairy really good for us to begin with? We do have to take into consideration that this is the breast milk of another mammal. I want you to look at it like this. We’ve got domestic animals, right? Well ten-thousand years ago is really when we just started domesticating animals. That means prior to that we weren’t drinking any cow milk, we weren’t drinking any bull milk, we weren’t drinking any horse milk, we weren’t drinking any other milk other than human mammal milk. Ten thousand years may sound like a lot of time but in the grand scheme of things, from an evolutionary standpoint, it’s not that much time. Our bodies truly haven’t gone through that evolutionary process to really be able to digest and break down milk. The fact of the matter is that most of us aren’t getting the benefit that we think we’re getting from milk.

Now that leads me into the next thing. We have to take a look at lactase, which is the enzyme that breaks down lactose, which is sugar in milk. You see we’re designed to break down lactose, but only until we’re about two to five-years-old. After that our body no longer creates that enzyme. Why? Because it’s inefficient. Why would we need an enzyme to help us break down milk that we really shouldn’t even be having. Therefore when we consume milk, most of us still don’t have that enzyme. You’ve probably heard of people that are lactose intolerant. Obviously, those are people that have to really watch it. Most of us have at least a slight intolerance. I can almost guarantee if you have a copious amount of dairy, you’re going to have an upset stomach. You just may not realize it because you’re living with it all the time.

Lastly we have to look at the protein structures. Within dairy we’ve got two different kinds of protein structures. We’ve got whey protein, which you’re probably familiar with in all the grocery stores and all the protein powders; and then we’ve got casein protein, which is more of a globulin. It’s like a slower digesting protein. Now that casein protein has a very similar molecular structure to that of gluten. I don’t care if you’re a gluten-free person or not, or if you have celiac disease or not, the fact is there’s a lot of science coming out there right now that people react strangely to gluten. When you have a molecular structure that is very similar to gluten, people that have a gluten intolerance are going to respond similarly to the casein proteins in dairy than they would to gluten. If you are gluten intolerant, and you feel like you might have a slight upset stomach, you might start getting a little bit nauseous after you have some dairy, there’s a good chance that it’s triggering your gluten intolerance just by having that dairy.

At the end of the day, all these intolerances, all these issues, all these lacks of enzymes, they result in one thing: Inflammation. You know me as the inflammation guy because I’m talking about it all the time. Inflammation is not getting enough attention these days, and it’s causing a lot of problems for us. So when we’re taking in something that our body doesn’t break down, it wreaks havoc on our system. Now inflammation is a natural healing process, it’s great, but when your body is having to kick it into overdrive all the time, driving in that inflammatory response to heal the body when it’s not really having to be healed, it cause all kinds of things: Like swelling of the intestinal tract, it causes a leaky gut, it can lead to cancer, it can lead to diabetes, it can lead to brain fog. There’s a myriad of other things and when it comes down to trying to get in the best shape of your life, and trying to feel your best, the last thing you really need is inflammation holding you back.

Now I go into detail on inflammation in a lot of other videos, so I’m going to spare you the time there. But let’s talk about what you can do before I let you go.

If you remove dairy from the diet, you will start to see that you probably have a little less bloating, you might have a little more energy, you might just feel all around better. So here’s what I propose you do: Take thirty days completely off of dairy, wipe the slate clean, and see how you feel. Okay? Start monitoring if you feel better. Then what I want you to do is I want you to reintroduce dairy after thirty days. What this is going to do is it’s going to reset your tolerance a little bit, so you’re going to become more sensitive to it. Then when you do consume the dairy, you’re going to really feel the effects; they’re going to be much more profound. That right there is going to tell you what kind of intolerance you have to dairy. You don’t want to build your system up so that you can handle something that you really shouldn’t be having in the first place.

At the end of all this I’m not saying that dairy is the enemy, I’m just saying you need to look at the sources, you need to look at where it comes from. Your body is truly a temple. It’s the one thing that you have to carry you through your life, so take care of it. When you can choose raw, choose organic, but more importantly, eat right for you and see what works with your body and what doesn’t cause a reaction.

As always, thanks for keeping it locked in here on my channel. I’ll see you in the next video.