The Truth About Milk, Part 11: Alternatives

So we've spent all this time dealing with not drinking milk or consuming milk-based products. Hopefully by now you're convinced, or you're at least doing your own research.

If not milk products, though, then what? So many things we eat revolve around milk, cheese, cream, etc. that cutting these items from our diet can be a daunting prospect. And while it certainly does take a little effort, it's not as hard as it sounds.

There are a number of dairy-free alternatives to common products on the market. Some are healthier than others and some even pose their own share of health risks. Let's take a look at a few.

As a disclaimer, we are talking about adult consumption. None of these products are acceptable for exclusive infant nutrition. Neither is cow's milk, for that matter. Infant formula is acceptable as a last resort, as we have discussed. None of the milk alternatives discussed here should be used as a breastmilk replacement for babies.

Milk Alternative: Soy Milk
Example product: Silk
Soy milk has been around for an extremely long time and was once considered the best non-dairy milk available. For a long time it was also the only easily obtainable alternative. But soy milk has its own problems and health risks. To start, soy contains high amounts of phytoestrogen, which can affect hormone levels in both men and women. Children and babies raised on soy formula are also affected by this hormone and some researchers have even pointed to the rising proliferation of soy in our diets as a reason why American teens are entering puberty earlier and earlier.

In addition to this, non-organic soy products are often processed at high temperatures, resulting in the formation of dangerous chemicals. Even some organic soy milks are being questioned.

The dangers of soy milk are beyond the scope of what I want to cover in this series. You can very easily research them yourself, however, with a simple Google search. Also, check out this nice summary of soy's risks and this compilation of soy articles.

Milk Alternative: Rice Milk
Example product: Rice Dream
Rice milk is a very simple product usually made from rice (or rice syrup), water, salt, etc. It is a fine choice health wise, having no risky ingredients like soy milk. However, rice milk is also lacking in beneficial ingredients. Milled rice, even brown rice, doesn't contain many nutrients. And if it's made with processed brown rice, it can end up being no better than white bread, which is another product that should be avoided.

There are also some dangers associated with rice milk. As several studies have shown, rice milk and other rice-based drinks contain trace amounts of arsenic. Arsenic is very toxic and is a known carcinogen. The amounts present in rice milk are extremely low, but over time can pose risks, especially to children.

At best, rice milk is fairly benign and if you like it, it's a fine substitute to cow's milk.

Milk Alternative: Almond Milk
Example product: Almond Breeze
This is my personal favorite. Almond milk is made from mostly almonds and water and can even be made easily at home. It's surprisingly nutritious, as almonds are one of the healthiest nuts available. Almonds provide ample amounts of calcium, magnesium, vitamin E, potasium, and mono-unsaturated fat. Some of the nutritional value is lost in processing, obviously, but almond milk is still a surprisingly healthy beverage. And since it's made with just almonds and water, there are no risks associated with it.

As always, be sure to check ingredients to ensure that the brand of almond milk you buy doesn't contain additives or chemicals.

Cream Alternative: MimicCream
Product website
I have not personally tried this product, but definitely intend to do so. It is made from mostly nuts, similar to almond milk, but is designed to not have a nutty flavor. It can be used for baking, recipes, or anywhere heavy cream is needed.

Ice Cream Alternatives
For the most part, the non-dairy ice creams available commercially are made with soy milk or rice milk. There are also some commercial ice cream products made with coconut milk. I didn't discuss coconut milk above because it's not really a viable alternative to cow's milk, mostly due to it's distinct coconut taste. There was some discussion several years ago that coconut milk and coconut oil were harmful due to the fact that they raise blood cholesterol. This is simply not the case, however. Natural coconut products do not contain cholesterol, nor do they raise blood cholesterol. Coconut milk is a healthy product, though, for some, it may act as a mild laxative. :-)

When buying a commercial non-dairy ice cream product, be sure to read the ingredients carefully to ensure that they don't contain any of the milk-derived substances we discussed previously. Many of these ingredients can be present in a product and yet still be labeled non-dairy.

Another, far healthier alternative is to make your own ice cream. We started doing this ourselves recently. We bought an inexpensive ice cream maker (get one that doesn't require rock salt), then got ingredients. I use 2 cups of coconut milk, 1 cup of almond milk, 3/4 cup of sugar, and 1 tsp. of vanilla extract. I even mixed in some shredded coconut. The result is an awesome, yummy, and even healthy dessert.

Cheese Alternatives
There are a few alternatives to cheese out there, but they aren't perfect. For the most part, they're only available at health food stores and are usually quite expensive. The main dairy-free cheese products are also fairly processed and manufactured and occasionally contain hydrogenated oil. The three biggest dairy-free cheese products are Veggie, Vegan, and Sheeze. Veggie is the most commonly available product, but it is not entirely dairy-free. It is lactose-free, which is good for people with allergies, but it contains casein, which is a milk protein.

As with everything, be sure to check ingredients. Many non-dairy products are made using hydrogenated oil, which is another product to avoid. On the whole, my advice would be to just skip cheese entirely, be it dairy-free or not. If, however, you just can't live without it, then the dairy-free alternatives are your best bet.

Other Dairy Alternatives
Sour Cream: There are alternatives commercially available, but you'll have to go to a health food store to find them. Be sure to check the ingredients, as many are made with hydrogenated oil. As with cheese, they are usually a concoction of processed ingredients, so be aware of what you're buying. You can also try recipes for homemade sour cream, such as this one. I haven't tried it yet, but I intend to.

Cream Cheese: Similar to sour cream, there are dairy-free alternatives for sale, but you will only find them at health food stores. The most popular is Tofutti Better Than Cream Cheese. It's tofu based, however, which means it has a lot of soy ingredients. As with sour cream, it is also possible to make your own at home. See here for a discussion of various recipes, including some non-tofu based ones.

Yogurt: The only real yogurt replacements available are soy and tofu based, such as Silk or Whole Soy. Personally, I'm not entirely comfortable with soy products, so I'll be avoiding these, too.

Conclusion
This post ended up being longer than I planned, but I think I covered everything. As you can see, there are a lot of dairy-free alternatives to common milk-based products. Some are better and healthier than others, however, so tread carefully. Homemade options are always going to be the best, and likely cheapest, but they do require a bit of work. Going dairy-free isn't as daunting as it sounds and your body will certainly thank you for it!

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The Truth About Milk, Part 10: Other Dairy Products

As we've seen over the past 9 posts, there's a lot to dislike about milk. But it's not the only dairy product out there. In fact, the problem-causing proteins in milk can be found in a wide range of products from candy and chocolate, to flour and even skin care products.

For this post, we'll focus primarily on the well known dairy products found on store shelves. At the end of the post, I'll go over some of the milk-derived ingredients to watch out for on other products.

Cream
Cream is simply milk with some of the water removed. Normal milk is nearly 90 percent water, but heavy whipping cream is only about 60 percent water. Removing the water leaves the "solids" behind, the fats, proteins, etc. This means that cream is simply concentrated milk. All of the dangers of milk are increased when consuming cream. Other cream products, such as half-and-half, or light cream, simply have different amounts of water removed.

Sour cream is slightly different in that it is produced by actually souring regular cream by using bacteria. The resulting product is then enhanced with sweeteners or flavorings.

For a nice, official listing of the differences between various types of cream, click here (warning, PDF).

Cheese
Cheese is a product produced around the world, and for many thousands of years. It is also difficult to classify in a short paragraph like this because there are so many varieties of cheeses around the world. For this post, we are obviously discussing cheese made with cow's milk. There are many other cheeses available that use milk from goats, sheep, etc.

Cheese is made by taking milk and curdling it to separate the fat from the liquid. View a detailed explanation on cheese production at Wikipedia.

The important thing about cheese is that, like all dairy products, it still comes from milk. Anything in the milk fat is also present in cheese. Lactose is diminished in the cheese making process, but the milk proteins, growth hormones, etc. are all still present.

Butter
The creation and use of butter dates back thousands of years. It is very easy to create and even easier to store. Butter is simply the fat from milk. Cream is agitated or churned, which causes the tiny fat globules to join together. The liquid portion is then drained off, leaving only the fat. By government regulations, butter must be at least 80% fat, though most butter is more.

By only keeping the fat content, butter is considerably healthier than straight milk. And since it is un-homogenized, the fat globules are large enough to not pass through the intestinal wall into the bloodstream. However, butter is still dangerous. Firstly due to its fat and cholesterol content, which can lead to atherosclerosis. But also because animals use fat cells for storage. Vitamin D, for example, is a fat soluble vitamin, meaning that animals (including humans) can store vitamin D in fat cells. But many other chemicals that  cows eat can be stored in fat. These include pesticides, growth hormones, etc. A number of milk proteins are also still present in butter.

On the whole, butter is far healthier than milk. And, for the time being, it is the healthiest option for what we use it for. Margarine, the number 1 butter substitute available, is a very scary product that should be avoided. Olive oil can often be substituted for butter, especially in cooking.

View a listing of various types of butter here (PDF).

Yogurt
Yogurt is similar to sour cream in production. A certain amount of the liquid is drained off of milk, leaving a thicker substance. This substance is then pasteurized at a higher temperature than pasteurized milk and held at that temperature for a longer period of time. This is to allow the substance to become as sterile as possible before the active bacteria cultures are added. (Remember, that IGF-1, as well as other contaminants, are not destroyed by pasteurization.)

Live bacteria cultures are then added and given time to ferment before packaging. The bacteria cultures in milk can be beneficial to the digestive tract of humans, but yogurt itself is still mostly milk and has many of the same risks as milk itself. For digestive health, it is much healthier to take the bacteria cultures such as acidophilus in supplement form.

Store-bought yogurt also has a number of chemicals and artificial ingredients, such as stabilizers, sweeteners, preservatives, etc. View a detailed article on how yogurt is produced here.

Ice Cream
As with cream itself, ice cream is basically concentrated milk that is frozen and mixed with sweeteners and flavorings. It is usually made from cow's milk cream, but can also be made from other creams as well, such as soy. We'll cover those in another post.

And, just as with straight cream, ice cream has all the same risks and ingredients.

Milk Derivatives
These are the milk derived ingredients that are found in a surprising variety of foods. These ingredients are made with milk and almost always contain traces of the dangerous milk proteins we've been discussing for so long. The derivatives are often in very small quantities, but for a person with a severe milk allergy (or someone who wants to avoid as much dairy as possible for health reasons), these derivatives should be noted and steered clear of.

View a listing of these ingredients here.

Conclusion
This is a very, very brief and incomplete list. There are, of course, many other dairy products that I didn't cover, such as powdered milk, evaporated milk, coffee creamer, etc. It is safe to assume that all of these products contain milk or milk derived ingredients and should be avoided if possible.

All of these dairy products can be researched separately, and I highly encourage you to do so. Wikipedia, for example has very detailed articles on each of these products, and while it's not a complete or definitive source, it's a good starting point.

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The Truth About Milk, Part 9: Raw Milk

Raw milk has been gaining popularity recently, especially by those that prefer natural and organic food products. The public in general still believes raw milk to be very dangerous and unhealthy compared to pasteurized milk. Let's look at some information.

Raw milk is simply milk that hasn't gone through the processing that regular milk is subjected to. Raw milk is not pasteurized, not homogenized, and is obtained from cows that haven't been given any chemical growth hormones or enhancements. By way of reminder, pasteurization is the process of heating milk to kill bacteria and homogenization is the process of breaking up milk fat into smaller particles to prevent separation in the carton.

As an interesting side note, the breakage of fat molecules by homogenization makes them small enough to pass through the intestinal wall and straight into the bloodstream. Un-homogenized milk has the normal size fat molecules, which are too big to pass into the blood, keeping the fat and cholesterol out of the arteries.

As we covered in the last post, pasteurization is only somewhat helpful in destroying harmful components in the milk. In addition, the FDA's health and cleanliness requirements for dairies that produce raw milk are considerably more strict than dairies that produce pasteurized milk. So, arguably, raw milk is cleaner to begin with, so the lack of pasteurization is less of a concern.

A number of vitamins present in raw milk are destroyed or damaged by pasteurization. Vitamin A is completely destroyed, vitamin B is weakened, and vitamin C is severely diminished. In fact, infants fed exclusively on pasteurized milk will develop scurvy.

Raw milk is not without its share of downsides, though. It is still plagued by the same problems we've discussed in previous posts, such as unusable calcium, diseases, and yucky stuff. In addition, as proponents of raw milk will tell you, since the milk is not pasteurized, it carries higher risk of containing dangerous bacteria. Generally, this is not a very large risk, since the cows are generally cleaner and healthier in general. This, in addition to the stricter cleanliness standards, means that raw milk isn't all that dangerous.

The bottom line is that while raw milk is considerably healthier than standard, pasteurized milk, it's still milk from another species that humans were never intended to consume. It is just as dangerous as pasteurized milk when it comes to things like heart disease, osteoporosis, allergies, etc. However, if you're someone who simply can't live without milk, I encourage you to research raw milk as an alternative.

Further reading:
http://www.realmilk.com/whichchoose.html
http://www.midvalleyvu.com/About_Milk.html

The Truth About Milk, Part 8: Nasy Stuff

Let's step back from the health risks of milk for a moment and examine what else is lurking in that white beverage. There are so many really nasty things in cow's milk that this post alone may convince you to stop drinking it, even if the other posts thus far haven't.

For this post, we will be looking at normal, run-of-the-mill, pasteurized milk from the grocery store. This post will not discuss raw milk, which has an entirely different makeup. Raw milk will get its own dedicated post on Monday.

Since it comes from a living creature, milk can contain any number of substances that were present in the cow. Pasteurization does destroy some of these substances, but not all. This might get a little gross.

Pus
Yes, milk contains a rather unsettling amount of somatic cells (commonly known as pus). These are most commonly white blood cells from the cow and the FDA has specific regulations about how many are allowed to be in each liter of milk. The current limit stands at 200 million somatic cells per liter. However, almost every state in the US routinely sells milk that is considerably over the limit. (read more here and here)

What does pus do in the milk? Opinions on that vary. The FDA regulates it because excess amounts of somatic cells can decrease shelf life of milk and also degrade the flavor. Others site the fact that bacteria can use the somatic cells as a growth medium, pointing out that the pus makes bacteria grow faster. Pasteurization does not destroy somatic cells.

So while the pus itself doesn't pose any specific health risks...do you really want to drink it?

Bacteria
Milk is one of the best bacteria-growing mediums available. In a perfectly healthy cow, milk is sterile as it leaves the udder, but bacteria begins to grow as soon as it touches the air. Even after pasteurization, which kills most bacteria, the milk still has a long way to go before it reaches the grocery store. Plenty of time for new bacteria to flourish, even at refrigerated temperatures.

Typical pasteurization involves heating the milk to 160 degrees for only 15 seconds. Ultra-pasteurization heats the milk to 280 degrees for a mere 2 seconds. But consider how we are told to sanitize water: boil at 212 degrees for several minutes. Pasteurization destroys most, but not all harmful bacteria present in milk.

At room temperature, the bacterial content of milk doubles every 20 minutes. As this article explains, the bacterial content of milk, at room temperature, explodes and reaches maximum in about 20 hours. Certain bacteria present in a number of milk samples have been linked to Chron's Disease and a form of meningitis. Consider all this the next time you give your toddler a bottle of milk.

IGF-1
This is a very commonly used growth hormone given to cows. It is called Insulin-like Growth Factor One. This hormone is given to cows to increase their milk supply, but it very easily passes through cows to their milk and is not destroyed by pasteurization. In fact, many studies indicate that IGF-1 content is actually increased by pasteurization.

In humans, IGF-1 is known to cause a wide range of problems, from increased diabetes risk, hormonal imbalances, early puberty, immune system damage, and cancer. Believe it or not, American milk is banned in Europe unless it does not contain these growth hormones.

It has been shown to promote breast cancer, increased liver weight, general weight gain, and many other problems. Milk without this hormone can be found in some places, however. It is usually sold at health food stores and will be labeled "NO rGBH."

IGF-1 can also remain in the milk even after it's processed into cheese or other dairy products. We'll cover other dairy products in a future post.

Other Stuff
There could very well be other random stuff in the milk you buy at the grocery store. The thing to remember is that everything the cow eats ends up in the milk. Sometimes it's destroyed by pasteurization, sometimes it's not. Everything from feces, to pesticides, to whatever else might be on the ground.

Conclusion
The clear message here is that milk contains a scary number of nasty little extras. From pus, which is very gross, but not very dangerous, to growth hormones which are very dangerous and cause cancer. These are things that you won't find on the ingredients list and yet are not to be taken lightly. The real conclusion is simple: milk is disgusting.

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The Truth About Milk, Part 7: Children

Milk consumption among children is one of the most strongly pushed ideas in modern pediatrics. Their reasoning for pushing it so hard is that they believe it to be rich in calcium and other nutrients. As we've already covered, the calcium in milk is largely unusable by the human body, so that point needs no further explanation. But the fact that milk drinking is so strongly encouraged by pediatricians as well as schools and teachers remains.

One of the surprising aspects of this is that so many parents don't question it. When any product (food, medicine, vitamin, drink, etc.) is pushed so strongly, the motives behind that need to be questioned. As I said in my introduction post, as much as I would like everyone who reads this to stop drinking cow's milk, above all, I simply want you to ask questions.

While there are literally thousands of research studies, each revealing at least one of milk's hazards, the dairy industry goes to great lengths to stifle any damaging rumors. Blanket statements, such as, "There is simply no scientific research to back up these claims," are easily made. With a long and successful history of dairy promotion, these are readily accepted by the public. More people need to go to the real research and learn the truth for themselves.

                          - Dr. Linda Folden Palmer

The truth of the matter is that young children are at risk for the same types of problems as adults when it comes to milk. But there are several things that parents of young children should keep in mind. One is calcium. Remember that the calcium in milk is fairly useless and may even lead to a net loss of calcium in the body. Children are still developing and therefore need more calcium than adults. Numerous studies have shown that after adolescence, bone development stops. Why, then, would we feed our young children another species' milk that can be detrimental to bone development?

Growing children should be receiving their calcium from other sources, such as green vegetables and nuts. Not from dairy.

Another danger to children who consume milk is type 1 diabetes. A number of studies have suggested that early exposure to cow's milk proteins, both in formula and in drinking straight milk after age 1, increases the chances of developing type 1 diabetes.

...infants fed cow's milk formula had a significantly higher immune response to cow insulin than infants who received the other formula or were breast-fed.

- Dr. Mercola (link to article)

Finally, a big risk factor for children is that of allergies. Milk allergies are well researched and known to occur in a large number of children. It's often diagnosed as lactose intolerance, but the problem may be deeper than that. Milk contains at least 30 antigenic proteins (those that excite the body's immune system). These immune reactive proteins can cause problems and damage the immune system, allowing further problems to occur. Some studies have even suggested that early exposure to the allergic proteins in milk can lead to other allergies and respiratory problems.

A study in the New England Journal of Medicine demonstrated a very clear link between chronic constipation in young children and milk consumption (link to article).

The conclusion here is that milk is far from the perfect food for children. In fact, it is one of the worst things to give a growing child.

Further reading
http://www.nutramed.com/children/kidsmilk.htm
http://www.naturalchild.org/guest/linda_folden_palmer.html
http://www.greenourkids.com/natural-living/health/the-dangers-of-cows-milk-should-children-drink-cows-milk/