Dairy products are bad, bad, bad. My son is allergic to casein, the protien in cow's milk. I quote now from NotMilk.com:
Eighty percent of milk protein consists of casein, a tenacious glue. Casein is the glue that is used to hold a label to a bottle of beer. Try to scrape off one of those labels, then consider the effects of casein in your body. Casein is the glue that holds together wood in furniture. Behold the power of glue and behold the power of horrible bowel movements.
Casein is a foreign protein and your body reacts to its presence by creating an antibody. That antibody-antigen reaction creates histamines. Anti-histamines (like Benadryl) are used to counter the effects of histamines. Mucus and phlegm are produced as a result of cheese consumption.
Mucus congests internal body organs. Mucus creates phlegm. The average American lives his or her life with a gallon of mucus clogging the kidney, spleen, pancreas, tracheal-bronchial tree, lungs, thymus, etc.
Imagine not eating cheese or any other dairy product for just six days. An internal fog will lift from your body as the mucus leaves. Eat just one slice of pizza on day seven, and twelve to fifteen hours later, the mucus will return.
Pretty nasty, huh? Read on:
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) allows 750 million pus cells in every liter of milk (about two pounds). In Europe, regulators allow 400 million pus cells per liter. France and Italy are known for their magnificent cheeses. Perhaps that's their secret: Less pus!
Since it takes 10 pounds of milk to make one pound of cheese, a pound of cheese can contain up to 7.5 billion pus cells. If your American cheese is sliced so that there are 16 slices to a pound, that single slice of American or Swiss can contain over 468 million pus cells.
Gross, gross, gross!
Domenic's reaction to dairy was manifested in behavior. He was cranky, irritable, agressive, moody, mean and nasty. For the first two years of his life. He had ear infections for nine solid months, and we ended up with PE tubes in his ears. When he was not yet 2, I was complaining to his pediatrician (and a friend of mine) about how Dom wouldn't sleep, had temper problems, etc. She offered me some Ritalin. I was shocked.
Meanwhile, Katherine's preschool teacher mentioned to me that the Kindergarten teacher had a boy in her class who was off milk completely and his behavior had improved by leaps and bounds. I called back the pediatrician who pointed me in the direction of this child's mom.
She and I spent an hour on the phone, while she read to me from a book called Is This Your Child's World by Doris Rapp, MD. She asked me a list of 100 questions pertaining to Dom's behavior and I answered yes to 98 of them. Did his eyes water a lot? Did he have a wrinkle on his nose from rubbing it so hard? Did he have trouble keeping his legs from fidgeting? Were his earlobes ever red? All these things pointed to an allergy. We took him off the milk and lo and behold, a sweet, gentle, loving toddler emerged within 48 hours.
My husband remained unconvinced, until Domenic found and at a 6 ounce brick of parmesean cheese. Within 20 minutes, his earlobes were bright red, he was hyper, running all over the house, jumping on the bed, acting crazy. Twenty minutes after that he got irritable and moody, punched his sister in the face, bit his dad and hit me, too. Guess it was the dairy, huh?
We've been dairy free ever since. We drink soy milk... Silk is a wonderful brand. I still buy some cheese to make pizza with about once a month, but we no longer eat cheese as a snack. My allergies are greatly improved, and I no longer have a son who acts like a madman.
Milk has been implicated in the rising diagnosis of ADD/ADHD in children, particularly boys.
MILK HORMONE LINKED TO ATTENTION DEFICIT DISORDER
Robert Cade, the brilliant inventor of Gatorade (Department of Medicine and Physiology, University of Florida), financed and performed a study that may very well earn him next year's Nobel Prize in Medicine. Dr. Cade and co-author, Ahongjie Sun, identified a protein in cow's milk that caused violent and abnormal behavior when given to laboratory rats. That hormone, Beta-casomorphin-7, can be found in last week's column which contained a list of 59 different bioactive hormones in each sip of milk.
One minute after treating laboratory rats with this powerful milk hormone, the animals became restless and ran violently, with chattering teeth and rapid respiration. Seven minutes later, the rats became inactive with less walking, and just sat in the corners of their cages putting their heads against the side. These abnormal behaviors suggest that milk might play a role in behavioral disorders such as autism and schizophrenia.
The study (A Peptide Found in Schizophrenia and Autism Causes Behavioral Changes in Rats) was published in the journal AUTISM Vol. 3(1) 85-95; 007426 1362-3613 (199903)3:1
MILK HORMONE LINKED TO ADD
Cade and Sun also published a human study in the same journal (B-Casomorphin Induces Fos-like Immunoreactivity in Discrete Brain Regions Relevant to Schizophrenia and Autism, p 85-95). The researchers found Beta-casomorphin-7 in high concentrations in the blood and urine of patients with either schizophrenia or autism.
Dairy is bovine breast milk and was never, ever intended for human consumption. Go browse the site and see what you think.