It may come as a surprise that drinking milk isn’t necessary when you’re pregnant, breastfeeding or at any time of life. The only requirement for us humans is breast milk, ideally for the first year of life, and certainly the first six months. To be consuming dairy products – milk, cheese, yoghurt, butter – is akin to breast feeding as an adult from another species of animal. It’s certainly not part of our evolutionary design.

Let’s look at a few facts:

• Half the world don’t drink milk (and still have healthy babies and bones).
• Seven out of ten people don’t have the enzyme to digest milk and get digestive problems as a result.
• It’s Britain’s number one allergy-provoking food, linked to asthma, ear, sinus and throat infections.
• Our 100% Health Survey, due to be published in 2010 and involving over 55,000 people, found the more milk a person drinks the worse their overall health, their digestion, immune and hormonal health.

That’s the ‘big picture’ which certainly suggests that many of us are not well suited to drinking milk – and perhaps that means you too.

Many people believe that you have to have milk for calcium, vitamin D and protein. You do need these nutrients but you don’t need milk to get them. You can easily achieve all the protein, calcium and vitamin D you need from nuts, seeds, beans and fish – and getting enough sun exposure in the case of vitamin D. If you don’t, vitamin D can be supplemented.

Milk isn’t even that good a source for minerals or vitamin D. Seeds and oily fish, respectively, are much better. Sure, it’s high in calcium, but it’s low in magnesium, the other key bone-building mineral. Also, the common belief that drinking milk reduces bone mass loss is highly contentious. While some studies support this, others show the exact opposite – that high milk consumers have low bone mass density.

A moderate amount of calcium from a variety of plant sources seems to be best. There’s plenty of easily absorbed calcium in all kinds of greens, kale being one of the best, as well as broccoli, beans, seeds (especially sesame), nuts (especially almonds), calcium-fortified juices, and soyamilk and other non-dairy milks.

Links with cancer
But there’s a much more serious reason for me to discourage you from making dairy products a staple part of your diet – and that’s cancer.

There is now consistent and substantial evidence that the higher the milk consumption of a country, the greater is their breast and prostate cancer risk. To illustrate this, take a look at the graph below which shows the mortality rate from prostate cancer around the world compared to the average milk consumption. The highest risk of cancer death is found in Switzerland, Norway, Iceland and Iceland.

In stark contrast in most Asian countries the risk is minimal. In such countries, where the diet consists mainly of whole grains, vegetables, fruits, tofu, soya milk, and other soya products – and milk is not a normal part of the diet – people are generally healthier and breast and prostate cancers are much rarer than in the United States and Europe.

The connection between milk increasing risk of cancer has been known for sometime. Back in 1937, a group of five thousand children in the UK took part in a long-term study recording their dietary habits year on year. Some 65 years later a study has found that those with a high dairy intake during childhood had tripled their odds of having colorectal cancer. There was a weaker association with prostate cancer risk and no association, in this study, with increased breast cancer risk. Another study did find a trend to higher risk for premenopausal women partial to butter, and also in those with high intakes of processed meats.

Milk’s growth factors stimulate hormonal cancers
According to the National Cancer Institute (NCI), 19 out of 23 studies have shown a positive association between dairy intake and prostate cancer. “This is one of the most consistent dietary predictors for prostate cancer in the published literature,” reports NCI. “In these studies, men with the highest dairy intakes had approximately double the risk of total prostate cancer, and up to fourfold increase in risk of metastatic or fatal prostate cancer relative to low consumers.”

But why would milk increase risk? Milk contains 38 different hormones and growth promoters. After all, that’s its job – to make cells grow. But one in particular is attracting a lot of attention. It’s called Insulin-like Growth Factor, or IGF-1. It’s a naturally occurring hormone, found both in cow’s milk, breast milk and your blood. The more milk you drink the higher is your level. What this hormone does is stimulate growth.

Blood levels of IGF-1 peak during adolescence, stimulating development of breasts in girls or the prostate in boys, then levels rapidly drop off as you get older. Not so if you keep guzzling milk and cheese. Milk not only contains IGF-1, a small part of which is absorbed into your blood, it also stimulates the body to produce more of its own. It simply does what it’s meant to do – stimulate growth.

It also stops overgrowing cells from committing suicide, a process called apoptosis. When you are a rapid growing baby this is good news. But when the only overgrowing cells are cancer cells this is especially bad news, because IGF-1 has also been found to directly stimulate the growth of cancer cells, with high levels being linked to increased risk of breast, prostate, colon and lung cancer, as research has shown. Having a high IGF-1 level as a pre-menopausal woman just about doubles your risk of cancer overall.

A Harvard University study showed that men who had the highest levels of IGF-1 had more than four times the risk of prostate cancer compared with those who had the lowest levels.

Two other major Harvard studies have shown that milk-drinking men have 30 to 60% greater prostate cancer risk than men who generally avoid dairy products. In one of these, involving more than 20,000 male doctors (known as the Physicians’ Health Study), those who consumed more than two dairy servings daily had a 34% higher risk of developing prostate cancer than men who consumed little or no dairy products.

Dairy intake increases risk
According to Professor Jeff Holly from Bristol University’s Faculty of Medicine – one of the world’s leading experts in IGF – “Those in the top quarter for blood IGF-I levels have approximately a three to fourfold increase in risk of breast, prostate or colorectal cancer. This level of increased risk is in the same order as the risk of having cardiovascular disease from a high level of cholesterol.” His research, and that of others at Harvard and Montreal schools of medicine show that a non-milk drinking 30 year old might have an IGF level of 130ng/ml, while a high dairy consumer might have a level of 200ng/ml, and that’s more than enough to dramatically increase your risk.

The evidence is compelling and any scientist who denies this is simply not up to speed. Holly doesn’t drink milk and actively discourages anyone with a diagnosis of these cancers to have any dairy produce. While we do not know whether a high milk intake could initiate cancer we can be pretty confident that a high milk intake, by increasing IGF-1 and possibly other growth promoters, speeds up the growth of pre-existing cancer cells.

Dairy and ovarian cancer
A high dairy intake is also linked to increased ovarian cancer risk. This link, however, is thought to be more due to how the milk sugar – called lactose – breaks down in the body. Lactose breaks down into another sugar called galactose, which appears to be able to damage the ovary. A review in 2006 found that for every 10 grams of lactose consumed (the amount in one glass of milk), ovarian cancer risk increased by 13%.

Now, I don’t mean to scare you unnecessarily, unless it might save your life, and I don’t mean to put you off ever touching the white stuff. But I do recommend two things. Firstly, give yourself a dairy-free week. If you find your indigestion or bloating stops, you don’t have your usual headache, your energy increases or your sniffs and snuffles clear up, get yourself tested for dairy intolerance. There’s a simple home-test food intolerance test for this (see www.totallynourish.com). Secondly, add up all the milk you have in teas, coffees, cereals, yoghurt, plus cheese, and if it’s over half a pint a day, cut back. Try rice milk, oat milk or soya milk instead. Milk is a food designed for baby cows, but not for you.

In summary:
• If you have cancer, especially any hormone-related cancer such as breast or prostate cancer, as well as colorectal cancer, I recommend the complete avoidance of dairy products.
• If you don’t have cancer, my advice is to keep your intake of dairy products low, meaning below half a pint of milk a day and ideally less than 2 pints (1 litre) a week. If your aim is to minimise your chances of prostate or colorectal cancer it would make sense to be largely dairy free.

Source: http://www.patrickholford.com

Tags: breast cancer, cancer, colorectal cancer, dairy, diet, health, lactose, milk, national cancer institute, prostate cancer