Life in MiniatureDon't Sweat the Small Stuff!

Looking For Milk Cans ? Then This is Where You Want to Be

MUGGED BY MILK

Is Milk Too much to swallow?

Once upon a time… opening my first grade reader cast a spell that never went away. Enthralled by the smooth seduction of words, I sat oblivious to a desk-and-chair contraption that confined me like a torture rack, absolutely stunned by the raw power, brazen clarity and heart-stopping eloquence of "See Dick run." 

Haltingly, I followed Jane, Dick and Spot "up the hill"... and saw a cow.

I knew what moo meant. "Moo" was the milk in the thermos in my lunchbox next to a cheese and lettuce sandwich. It was the milk in the big glass and the bowl of Cheerios I’d gulped for breakfast, the glass I’d have when I got home, the glass at dinner later, and maybe even a warmed-up cup of milk at bedtime. Best of all was the mid-morning chocolate milk break – which should not be long now. And if I was really lucky, ice cream for desert. If CNN had interviewed me on the spot, I would have blinked and said, "Milk? Everybody drinks milk. It tastes good, and my dad says it makes you healthy."

I drank lots of milk. Maybe you did too. Maybe you still believe all those mass-marketing mantras constantly telling us to drink milk so we "stay healthy" and our bones won’t melt. Or maybe you don’t drink it, but you give it to your own kids and their friends. 

I hope not. I pray that you gently take the glass away from every child you see drinking the stuff. Give the little whippersnappers almost anything else. But please… Not Milk!

DOWNERS
Click on notmilk.com and the next time little moonbeam in her highchair makes a face, tips her cereal bowl onto the floor and laughs - you will rush to praise her perspicacity and wit. Because by then you will know (if you’d dared follow the links) that instead of standing around chewing their cud like slow philosophers, almost all of America’s 96 million cattle are transported, penned and persecuted like inmates at Guantánamo.

Swollen by high-protein, soy-based feeds, cows immersed in crowding, confusion, pain and fear have become milk machines. With each nipple grasped by a mechanical tentacle as swollen pituitaries painfully pump three-times more milk than normal, cows produce like Chinese sweatshop girls until they wear out. Just as these young women are discarded as broken hulks - burned out by too many Wal-Mart shipments - broken-down cows are chopped up and fed to other cows. It’s not supposed to happen. But hardly anyone official is checking. So it’s more than very likely that the hamburger you’re chewing came from a cannibal cow fed the brains and other parts of sick cows, sheep and other four-leggeds. Along with their discarded offal. 

How gross is that? 

GERMS
To keep concentration camp cows alive in cramped, feces-filled stalls long enough to produce 155 billion pounds of milk a year in the United States requires constant doses of antibiotics. The consequences of steadily drinking milk - as well as eating farm fish laced with antibiotics - are already showing up in "Superbugs" that have rapidly evolved to thrive on the antibiotics they’ve adapted to. [mercola.com]

In addition, organophosphate pesticides derived from chemical warfare - such as Malathion and Phosmet - are sometimes poured directly over the spines of cows, where these poisons are absorbed into the meat and milk that end up accumulating in your own tissues – particularly in the lymph nodes of female breasts. [Minnesota Statutes 1998]

When it comes to regulations and corporate profits, everything makes a circle. The US government agencies that certify milk and meat "safe" without really looking have long been in violation of World Health Organization standards of beef production. [corpwatch.org; Green Party USA 12/03]

GROW UP
Banned in Canada and Europe, the Bovine Growth Hormone forced into American cows shows up in milk as an insulin growth factor (IGIF-1). Surviving pasteurization and human digestion, IGF-1 is absorbed directly into the human bloodstream – especially in infants, who are not calves meant to suckle udders. 

As Dr. Joseph Mercola, author of Total Health Program points out, it is "highly likely" that the same BGH that gives cows breast infections "promotes the transformation of human breast cells to cancerous forms." After all, he adds, IGF-1 is a known accelerator of breast and colon cancer cells, "promoting their progression and invasiveness."

Another big BGH bummer is that it also decreases the body fat in cows. Contaminated with an unappetizing stew of pesticides, dioxins, and antibiotic residues, the poisons accumulated in cow fat are passed into the cows’ milk – and the carton in your fridge. [Green Party USA 12/03]

Why are American and Japanese kids so much taller than their grandparents or parents? Follow the milk. Scientists who did found that "Milk intake was positively associated with IGF-I concentrations and height."

Consumption of milk and dairy products can raise IGF-I levels in children by a factor of 30%. In adolescents creaking from rapid growth, BHG acts like rocket fuel. It has a similar effect on cancer cells. Pointing to voluminous documentation on his Not Milk website, Robert Cohen observes that "IGF-I is also a key factor in the proliferation and growth of every human cancer." [American Journal of Clinical Nutrition Aug/04]

MAKING THINGS WORSE
Forget pasteurization. High heat destroys the lactase, calcium and dozens of other enzymes needed for milk’s digestion and assimilation. A stressed-out pancreas trying to produce these missing enzymes can lead to diabetes – currently at epidemic levels in sugar-and-milk consuming cultures. Milk is also hard on the heart. "Compelling research demonstrating clear associations with this absorbed enzyme and increased risks of heart disease," Dr. Mercola asserts.]

Drinking skim milk is disastrous. Without the missing butterfat, our bodies cannot absorb and use the vitamins and minerals found in watery skim milk. The vitamin D complex lost with the butterfat is replaced in skim milk with synthetic vitamin D known to be toxic to the liver. And according to Dr. Mercola, the cholesterol found in the non-fat dried milk used in 1% and 2% milk "is rancid and promotes heart disease." Like all spray-dried products, skim milk powder is also high in nitrite. [mercola.com]

A REALLY BIG MILK GROSS OUT
Robert Cohen helpfully reminds us that dairy cows filter blood through their udders all day. Dead white blood cells – pus, in other words – help them make all that milk. "Udders bleed discharges, including bacteria and blood drip into the milk," Cohen shares. 

It’s still legal to sell if the cup of milk you’re drinking contains less than 50 million pus cells. 

If you can stomach the medical evidence, MD Michael Greger cites nine single-spaced pages of medical references to show conclusively that the lifetime scourges of Paratuberculosis and Crohn’s Disease have "got milk." Awarded the equivalent of journalism’s Pulitzer Prize, Greger’s "Project Censored Award" for one of the most suppressed stories of 1999 resulted from his expose showing the connection between Crohn’s disease and the ParaTB gems swimming in your daughter’s glass of milk. 

"Described as a human scourge, over a half million Americans suffer from this devastating, lifelong condition with annual US medical costs in the billions," Doctor Greger says. For Crohn's contemplators, he invites non-sufferers to "think of the worst stomach flu they ever had and then try to imagine living with that every day."

Slurping from a nationwide epidemic of cattle diseases, milk-guzzling Americans are coming down with the highest rate of Crohn’s ever recorded anywhere, after ingesting the Paratuberculosis mycobacterium (MAP) from infected cows.

As you might expect from their living conditions, there are a lot of sick cows staggering from feedlots to dinner tables. Dr. Greger cites the USDA’s latest figures showing three quarters of a million US cattle infected with ParaTB. Up to 40% of US dairy herds are already infected, he says. "The infection rate is expected to reach 100%."

Since MAP bacteria live inside pus cells, in a nation with double the allowed limit of pus cells in milk as anywhere else, American milk drinkers are playing with pathogens. Right now, US federal laws protecting the Dairy Mafia allow Grade A milk to contain more than a drop of pus per glass of milk. 

TB MILK
When researchers in Ireland grew live Paratuberculosis bacteria from almost one in five tested cartons of retail pasteurized milk, they blew the whistle so loud, corporate spin specialists lamented "enormous" and "horrific" losses – not in human lives, but in diary profits! Milk Science International, an industry mouthpiece, worried that telling customers they were drinking cow pus and giving it to their children would prove "potentially catastrophic for the dairy industry."

"Despite headlines splashed throughout Europe, not a word crossed the Atlantic," Dr. Greger groans. Just like "the media blackout in the U.S. in the early years of the mad cow disease crisis."  

The USDA has rejected a proposal by a Crohn’s patient advocacy group to conduct a similar test for Paratuberculosis in U.S. dairy products. John Hermon-Taylor, chairman of a London medical school surgery, and an internationally recognized expert on Crohn’s and Paratuberculosis, says, "There is overwhelming evidence that we are sitting on a public health disaster of tragic proportions." 

Every few seconds, some child or infant is hit with another dose of chemically treated cow’s milk. Every few hours, Dr. Greger points out, "another child in this country is diagnosed with Crohn’s disease and may be condemned to a life of chronic suffering."

As for the milk causing all this mayhem, his prescription is simple: "The consumer movement needs to move it to the front burner and turn up the heat."

JUST SAY YUK
"Don’t drink your milk," urges Dr. Joseph Mercola. "Milk and refined sugar make two of the largest contributions to food- induced ill health in our country." [mercola.com/artcle/milk/no_milk./htm] 

Specifically, moo juice has been shown to cause in diarrhea, cramps, bloating, gas, gastrointestinal bleeding, iron-deficiency anemia, skin rashes, arteriosclerosis, and acne. The journal Pediatrics has also found, "Babies who are fed whole cow’s milk during the second six months of life may experience a 30% increase in intestinal blood loss and a significant loss of iron."

HOW DICK AND JANE GOT SICK
In September 2004, DairyMAX hailed GW Bush’s "Child Nutrition Reauthorization Act", which prohibits schools from restricting sales of milk products at any time on school premises or at school-sponsored events. 

The National Dairy Council, which is funded by dairy producers, "provided information on milk’s nutritional importance to America’s children and youth," DairyMAX reported. Their lobbying was so powerful, "Congress rejected an aggressive effort by soy interests to make their beverages fully substitutable for milk in school meal programs." 

U.S. schools are now required to adopt "wellness policies" – in part by providing flavored milk and cheese through vending machines laden with antibiotics, ParaTB, Bovine Growth Hormone and Crohn’s disease. 

Aggressively pushed by the NFL and Wendy’s food chains – and widely promoted by celebrities and "healthy living" websites – milk drinking is also linked to insulin-dependent diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, infertility, and leukemia. [dairymax.org; notmilk.com]

Meanwhile, Dick and Jane have succumbed to the modern plague of asthma. "Cow’s milk is the number one allergic food in this country," Dr. Mercola maintains. "Cow’s milk allergy is one of the most common food allergies in young infants," agrees the September-October 1995 issue of W V Medical Journal.

Anemia is another legacy of milk. Robert Cohen reports that after more than 150,000 Vietnamese relocated in Australia, for the first time in their lives nearly every child became afflicted with asthma, diabetes, earaches and iron-deficient anemia. Though sugar and beef were strongly implicated, the primary assailant was cow’s milk. Daily drinking 650 milliliters of milk is a "risk factor for iron deficiency," according to another pediatric journal. [Pediatrics 1982, 1989; Journal of Pediatric Child Health Aug/04] 

STOP EAR INFECTIONS NOW
Dr. Mercola adds that milk is "the primary cause of recurrent ear infections in children." The $3,000 surgery that inserts tubes into the eardrums of infants to treat recurrent ear infections is now the leading surgical procedure in the USA. "Most children who have this procedure will suffer long term hearing losses," Dr. Mercola says. "Over 50% of these children will improve and have no further ear infections if they just stop drinking their milk." 

Like Big Tobacco, the Big Dairy Board spends hundreds of millions of dollars every year convincing Americans we will drop dead if we do not keep suckling like calves on a manufactured product our bodies cannot digest that makes many of us so chronically ill we think our constant aches and exhaustion are normal. The propaganda has worked so well, many adults believe they need to consume daily hits of milk to "stay healthy" and keep their bones from snapping like dried pretzels. 

"NOTHING could be further from the truth!" Cohen shouts. He’s right. If your fondest desire is to remove lots of calcium from your body, drink lots of milk. The high levels of phosphorous in each glass prevent your body from absorbing the calcium in the milk. And since milk does not contains comparable amounts of magnesium needed to utilize calcium, milk drinkers are twice out of luck. 

Even worse, the unfamiliar protein in cow’s milk leaches calcium from the bones you thought you were protecting by drinking all that milk. All that unusable cow calcium builds up on arterial walls, choking the blood supply to your heart and brain. It also contributes to arthritis, and can even be converted into kidney stones. 

So if you are a post-menopausal woman determined to experience Osteoporosis, drink milk. Its unusable protein will draw the calcium right out of your bones. We’re talking amounts massive enough "to trigger a 50% loss of calcium in the urine," Cohen has found. 

One option is to take properly balanced, high-quality calcium-magnesium supplements. And eat your veggies. "It is possible to obtain all your calcium from dark green vegetables," says Dr. Mercola. "Where do you think the cows get their’s from?" 

The darker the veg, the better. 

MAD COWBOY AT THE OPRAH 
Oprah Winfrey will no longer touch burgers or beef. Not after interviewing ex-cattle rancher Howard Lyman "live" on one of the most popular shows in the galaxy. 

"Being from Montana, I would have rather been caught riding a stolen horse than be called a vegetarian," Lyman told Oprah’s audience. Instead of selling hamburgers, Lyman talked about E. coli, salmonella and mad cow disease. As Ellen White explains in Ministry of Healing, "People are continually eating flesh that is filled with tuberculosis and cancerous germs." 

And as Ans Gail Eisnitz elaborates in Slaughterhouse: "Federal records show that major meat packers smoked rancid meat to cover foul odor, or marinated it to disguise slime and smell...hams were soaked in chlorine baths to remove slime and odor, and red dye was added to beef to make it appear fresh. Plant managers repeatedly fought to allow ‘some contamination’ such as feces, grease, hydraulic oil, maggots, metal, floor residue and rancid meat..."

After hearing Lyman lasso facts like these, Oprah stunned tens of millions of viewers by declaring, "I’ve eaten my last hamburger." 

As that magic moment, cow futures – even the future of cows – plopped. Moments later, the panicked purveyors of mountains of rotten meat, along with their milk-mustachioed cohorts, sued the famous TV host and her ex-steak eating guest for damages exceeding the budgets of entire nations as viewers recoiled in horror and revulsion from Lyman’s revelations and Oprah’s advice.

As Cohn comments: "You consume those diseased animals that no longer produce enough milk to guarantee a profit to the dairy farmer. Every cow milked in America ends her life in a slaughterhouse, her broken and diseased body contaminated with virus and bacteria. Such is the nature of the stressed life she lives. When cows are diseased with cancer or Paratuberculosis, leukemia or other sicknesses, that’s when they are sent to their final fate. Your dinner plate. The living tumors are cut from the dying animal and reserved for food which you feed your cats and dogs."

It is still illegal in 13 states to criticize an agricultural product. 

HURRICANE WINDS OF CHANGE
Can we afford to keep swallowing such lethal lies as factory meat eating and milk drinking? Look around. See how fast climate change is drying up and washing away the croplands that manage to survive new pests bulking up on genetically-modified plants hit with ever-stronger applications of pesticides. 

Now do the math: It takes 70 calories of energy to produce one calorie of meat. It also takes 16 pounds of grain – enough to feed 32 people – to produce one pound of meat. Since there are currently more cows on Earth than people, it stands to reason that if there were no cows, everyone could eat well. I’m not suggesting an immediate cull of what Ed abbey termed, "slow elk." I am proposing we stop eating cows. And cellblock chickens.

About the Author

WHO IS WILLIAM THOMAS?

I am an award-winning Canadian author, reporter, photographer and filmmaker. A former Vancouver Sun “photog” – his feature writing and accompanying photographs subsequently appeared in more than 50 publications in eight countries, including translations into French, Dutch and Japanese.

My 30-minute video documentary Eco War won the 1991 US Environmental Film Festival award for “Best Documentary Short”. Excerpts from this “front-lines” chronicle of a three-man environmental emergency response team in Kuwait aired in an eight-part CBC Gulf War mini-series, and have been shown on CNN and NBC television, as well as Noam Chomsky’s feature film, “The Corporation”.

During and immediately after the Gulf War, I served five months in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait as a member of a three-man environmental emergency response team.

Winner of four Canadian feature-writing awards, I am the author of Days Of Deception: Ground Zero and Beyond; All Fall Down: The Politics of Terror and Mass Persuasion, Scorched Earth, Bringing The War Home, Alt Health, Stand Down, Dialing Our Cells: Cell Phone Health Hazards and the recently updated Chemtrails Confirmed.

A former pilot, ocean sailing master and frequent radio talk-show guest, I currently live and work in the Gulf Islands off Canada’s west coast.

Visit my investigative reporting website: willthomasonline.net

Visit my photography website: willthomasphotography.com