Dairy part I

DAIRY  - PART I

Talking about whether to eat dairy is a contentious topic so I’m treading carefully now and addressing this purely from the angle of the effect it has in your body - my aim here is about providing information rather than prescribing, so that everyone can make their own decisions.

So is dairy as toxic for you as health evangelists would have you believe? As always, it’s complicated. If you know you are dairy intolerant, then yes, dairy is bad for you. Sometimes this is genetic and can’t be fixed, but I’m finding in my work that the majority of the time this is reversible, as it was for me. But aside from the more obvious issues of whether you are able to process the casein protein, or reacting to any of the other components of milk, that depends on a few things, but one of the issue comes down to the cows themselves.

We are what we eat - and when you feed a cow its natural food - grasses and plants - the cow converts that grass into lots of lovely omega 3 fats which are anti-inflammatory. Similarly oily fish only contain omega 3 fats due to the algae that they eat. However, if you feed the cow corn and other cereals that are not a natural part of their diet they produce omega 6 fats instead. So depending on what the cows are fed, the milk (and meat for that matter) is either anti-inflammatory in your body, or tipping you more towards inflammatory just because of this factor of their food.

This is the same when it comes to wild fish vs farmed fish which are also fed unnatural feed in their diet. Again putting all ethical issues around farmed fish aside, the very make up of their meat is very very different to wild-caught fish due to the provenance of their feed alone. So grass-fed dairy vs corn-fed dairy are really two totally different foodstuffs and if you are going to consume one, you ideally want it to be the former, and that also just so happens to require a gentler less intensive, form of production.