[Kevin] (0:00 - 0:03)
Welcome back to Nutrition for Noobs. Hey, Michelle, how are you doing?

[Michelle] (0:04 - 0:06)
I'm great, Kevin. You know, just once, I want to say hi first.

[Kevin] (0:07 - 0:07)
Oh.

[Michelle] (0:07 - 0:09)
Hi, everyone. Welcome to Nutrition for Noobs.

[Kevin] (0:09 - 0:12)
I'm so sorry. We can start that again.

[Michelle] (0:13 - 0:14)
No, it's okay.

[Kevin] (0:15 - 1:16)
I can edit you out. So a few episodes ago, we learned that milk and dairy products were officially removed from the Canadian Food Guide, which started me thinking about calcium and how to get enough of it. Because, you know, when I grew up, it was all about milk and cheese.

And I think somewhere along the way, I learned that almonds might have a lot of calcium. I don't know, but that's about it. So if someone is trying to adjust their diet to be more plant forward, it might actually be easier to cut out meat as a source of protein than for them to find calcium alternatives.

You know, often I hear questions of how can I get enough? And certainly, like, I'm getting older and I don't want to start breaking bones. So today, Michelle's going to help with a little bit of clarity on this topic.

So, Michelle, let's start by saying, like, what's the big deal about dairy? Like, haven't humans been drinking it since we started domesticating animals?

[Michelle] (1:17 - 2:02)
Well, you know what? There's actually... There's so many sources that have a great history of humans.

We've been around for, like, millions and millions of years longer than we've been, you know, the recent history of humans consuming some form of dairy. But the truth is we are just not biologically aligned with drinking the milk of any animal other than our mothers or any animal past weaning. So I'm going to...

I'm going to dive right in and just talk about, you know, the three main nutrients in milk first to start with.

[Kevin] (2:02 - 2:02)
OK.

[Michelle] (2:02 - 2:11)
So what do you... Let me ask you, actually, Kevin. Do you even know what the number one nutrient in milk even is?

The milk as we drink it today?

[Kevin] (2:12 - 2:20)
Nutrient or ingredient? I would assume the ingredient would be water. Number one nutrient, I would guess calcium.

I don't know.

[Michelle] (2:21 - 2:25)
Everyone thinks that it's calcium, but the number one nutrient in milk is sugar.

[Kevin] (2:26 - 2:27)
Oh.

[Michelle] (2:27 - 2:32)
The number two nutrient, do you have any guess what the number two nutrient is?

[Kevin] (2:33 - 2:34)
Protein?

[Michelle] (2:34 - 2:35)
It's fat.

[Kevin] (2:36 - 2:36)
Oh.

[Michelle] (2:37 - 3:01)
And not the good kind of fat. It's saturated fat, mostly, that is the fat that contributes to disease processes such as diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer's and certain cancers. So people think they're getting all of this source of calcium, they're getting all of this source of protein, but they're actually majority of what they're getting whenever they drink milk is sugar and fat.

[Kevin] (3:01 - 3:03)
A liquid donut, basically.

[Michelle] (3:04 - 3:39)
It's a sugary, fat-promoting beverage. And, you know, when we kind of step back a little bit away from the marketing influences and away from the social paradigms, what is cow's milk for? Cow's milk is the milk that a mother cow produces to feed its baby calf.

And its intention is to nourish a 65-pound baby calf so that it can grow and develop into a 700-pound cow.

[Kevin] (3:39 - 3:40)
Well, when you put it that way.

[Michelle] (3:41 - 6:39)
So Dr. Michael Clapper always calls it this. He calls it baby cow growth fluid. That's really what it is.

And it is also full of hormones in order to facilitate the growth of that baby cow. So it's got the sugars and the fats and the hormones to facilitate the growth of a cow. So it's not sufficient at all for our dietary needs as a tiny human.

And you may remember, actually, in our episode about Canada's Food Guide, how one of the reasons that milk was removed as a category was because of really the social inequity associated with that. Right, I remember. So another great doc that I follow and that I've gone to see lecture at conferences is Dr. Milton Mills. And he's actually a critical care and he's still an actually practicing critical care physician. He actually points out all of the social inequities about the digestibility of lactose, that really a majority of the planet doesn't have the enzyme to digest lactose beyond weaning. And this is actually how we are designed as humans.

It's like even breast milk, our mother's breast milk, we lose that ability to produce the lactose, to digest lactose, pardon me, the sugar. Yeah, beyond being weaned from our mother, we actually our body stop producing lactase, which is the enzyme that our body naturally produces in order to digest lactose. Some of us actually some of some races actually, you know, really have trouble with this.

Let me give you some data. This is NIH, National Institutes of Health. So they estimate in the United States, anyway, 30 million to 50 million adults don't have lactase.

So they don't have the ability to digest lactose. So 95% of Asians, probably why I don't digest it well, because I'm 50% Southeast Asian, 60 to 80% of African Americans, between 80 and 100% American Indians, 50 to 80% of Hispanics. So this is kind of what Canada was looking at when they said, so really, the only humans that are left that that may have some ability to still produce lactase as an adult and, and digest very well are all white.

And that's because of the migratory patterns that went to those European countries, and started as part of their culture because of food scarcity, and started to incorporate some of these foods as, you know, a survival necessity.

[Kevin] (6:39 - 6:53)
Because yeah, because cows can live throughout the winter. So you have a source of food during winter when nothing will grow, and you've only got potatoes and turnips from your autumn harvest. That makes a lot of sense that it's a more Northern European thing.

[Michelle] (6:53 - 7:16)
Yeah, and that took that took millions and millions and millions of years for that adaptation. But actually, what I found really interesting is from a scientific point of view, and this was pointed out by Dr. Neil Barnard, it's actually considered a genetic mutation. That European descended humans have that have that ability.

It's not it's a mutation. It's not normal, right?

[Kevin] (7:16 - 7:29)
Because it's one particular group of people who developed this mutation because of what where they were living, whereas the rest of the human population didn't need to because they stayed where it was warm, because they're smarter.

[Michelle] (7:30 - 8:07)
Our innate makeup was that we produce lactase, the enzyme to digest lactose as infants, while we are consuming our mother's breast milk, which is the perfect and ideal food for an infant. And then when we no longer need that beyond the age of weaning, we no longer produce that enzyme. And that's how that's one of the ways that a baby knows naturally that it doesn't need to breastfeed.

So after the age of weaning, it turns out all mammals, all mammals that consume a mother's milk lose the ability to digest lactose. So let's go back to the cow for a second.

[Kevin] (8:07 - 8:07)
Okay, back to the cow.

[Michelle] (8:07 - 8:13)
Because we have again this perception that what do we need dairy for? We need it for?

[Kevin] (8:14 - 8:14)
Calcium.

[Michelle] (8:15 - 8:20)
Calcium. So where does the calcium come from? May you ask?

[Kevin] (8:20 - 8:23)
Michelle, where does the calcium come from?

[Michelle] (8:23 - 8:36)
Kevin, I'm glad you asked that question because it turns out that cows do not have an ability within their biology to produce calcium. The cow gets the calcium from plants.

[Kevin] (8:36 - 8:36)
Oh.

[Michelle] (8:37 - 8:54)
So it's the cow grazing, eating grass that they're actually getting the calcium from the food that they're consuming. It really dispels this myth that we need to get calcium from milk because we can also just bypass the middle moo, as they say.

[Kevin] (8:56 - 8:59)
That's a joke worthy of me, that pun.

[Michelle] (9:01 - 9:43)
Oh, let me tell you, the whole nutrition community is on fire with that joke. Everyone uses it. So you can just get it from the same place the cow does and that you can actually just eat the plants and there's plenty.

Your leafy greens and your nuts and seeds and there's plenty of calcium in your food. So that's really a myth as well. Can I talk about another concern?

So what is cheese? What is yogurt? A lot of people think, okay, well, yeah, I don't drink milk anymore.

I just have a little bit of cheese and I have my yogurt in the morning. Well, let's think about that for a second. What is yogurt?

What is cheese?

[Kevin] (9:43 - 9:44)
Well, they're made from milk.

[Michelle] (9:46 - 9:55)
Concentrated dairy. So extremely high in sugar, extremely high in fat.

[Kevin] (9:56 - 9:58)
Milk without the water, so it's everything that's left.

[Michelle] (9:58 - 11:01)
Extremely high in hormones. And then let's not forget the nugget that I dropped from that we learned about from T. Colin Cabell in the China study and the warnings about animal proteins and their links to higher instances of cancer and turning cancer gene expression on.

And we know casein in particular, since it was the foundational type of protein that was used for a lot of the China study. So we have concentrated amounts of that, you know, very problematic animal protein. People who think that they're avoiding some of the pitfalls of dairy because they have a little bit of cheese and a little bit, you know, what's a little bit too?

Like people always say, oh, everything in moderation, but moderation to me means nothing. Because when people say moderation, what they really mean is I'll eat it whenever I want to and however much I want to. That's really what moderation means.

[Kevin] (11:01 - 11:02)
I moderate myself.

[Michelle] (11:04 - 11:16)
Because moderation doesn't have a metric. It doesn't have a number. Why does cheese taste so damn good, right?

Why does ice cream taste so damn good? Ask me why, Kevin.

[Kevin] (11:17 - 11:22)
Michelle, why did cheese and ice cream taste so damn good?

[Michelle] (11:22 - 12:25)
So it's not, Kevin, it's not just the sugar. It's not just the fat, all because those two things alone taste exceptionally yummy. There is a particular hormone in dairy that is there to make the baby cow want to suckle on its mother.

And it's called casomorphine. And actually, we have casomorphine in breast milk of humans as well, for the same reason. It's there to make the infant want to suckle on its mother.

It's an evolutionary thing that is there for that reason, so that we, survival of our species, that we will want to thrive. And when you having it in the amounts that are for a 65 pound calf that you're trying to grow into a 700 pound cow, like if you want to become a 700 pound cow, Kevin, one of the best ways to do it is to eat lots of dairy, lots of cheese, lots of ice cream, lots of yogurt.

[Kevin] (12:26 - 12:28)
Because you're getting that hit.

[Michelle] (12:28 - 12:39)
Yeah. So this casomorphine goes into the brain, and it fits in the dopamine receptor site. And it just makes you feel so good about your decision.

[Kevin] (12:40 - 12:43)
That would explain why I like ice cream so much.

[Michelle] (12:44 - 12:52)
Yeah, you are literally being drugged. But when it comes to concentrated forms of dairy, you're being drugged that much more.

[Kevin] (12:53 - 12:54)
Right, right.

[Michelle] (12:55 - 14:01)
Yeah. So this is why it's really not your fault. When you have trouble letting go of those foods, cheese is usually the last thing to go.

It was the last thing to go for me. And I still maintain the data that says, you know, we don't have to as a species, we don't have to be 100% plant based in order to live long and healthy. Because the blue zones, the centenarian cultures have definitely had small amounts of this.

But notice they've their dairy is when they are incorporating it's fermented dairy, it's things like kefir, stuff like that. And some of those other compounds are broken down in the process of fermentation. So but that's why it's so hard, especially when you can't turn on the television or the radio or flip through a magazine or drive down the freeway and not see a billboard that isn't advertising double cheese, this stuffed cheese crust.

[Kevin] (14:01 - 14:02)
You name it. Yeah.

[Michelle] (14:03 - 14:17)
All of these things and the craze to put, you know, healthier things on menus, notice they really, really strain to put the vegan option. But vegetarian, there's tons of them because they're all slathered in cheese.

[Kevin] (14:17 - 14:18)
Cheese, yeah.

[Michelle] (14:19 - 14:31)
Right. So and this is why because we know it sells. We know people love it.

We know people feel good when they eat it. And we know that it sells and unfortunately, it doesn't look good on our ass.

[Kevin] (14:31 - 14:47)
Right. So a question I had for you, and this might be a little out of the blue, but I have heard a bunch of comments and I'm really fuzzy about the connection between hormones and cow's milk. And can you help a little bit with that?

[Michelle] (14:47 - 17:04)
Yeah, that's that's a big one, actually. So there's tons and tons of estrogen that that you're you're drinking when you're drinking cow's milk or any of the animal based products. And it's not so much I worry a little bit about this milk is evil sort of mentality, because it's just that it's really there's no benefit to humans.

And in fact, there's only harm that comes from humans drinking this amount of milk that wasn't intended for our species. It was intended for a baby cow. So we get these high, high amounts of estrogens.

It's affecting our youth, Kevin, because when we are pumping this into milk programs in schools and cheese on everything, and the you know, the little string cheeses that you can pack in kids young lunches and the yogurts and everything. They now think that this is why one reason why we have girls at the ages of eight or nine that are getting their periods and puberty happening younger, even in boys as well. It's because of this high level of estrogen that we're taking in which so it's not just sometimes in some cases, it's hormones that's injected into the chicken and the other foods that we're eating as well.

But I think it largely has to do with the dairy because I think dairy is probably the thing that is most consistent whether you are a person that prefers hot dogs or whether you prefer chicken or whether you prefer beef or whatever. The dairy is kind of the constant and we know that it's very, very high and it's very particularly young meat. Okay, so hormones are like stored in our fat cells like one in our body, right?

So there's this enzyme or this aromatase like in stored in the fat cells that in men in particular will take testosterone and it will turn it into estradiol which is an estrogen like hormone. So we're getting, you know, this isn't necessarily, I'm talking about man moves now by the way in case you didn't see where I was going with this.

[Kevin] (17:04 - 17:07)
Yeah, I was putting two and two together.

[Michelle] (17:08 - 17:23)
Yeah, so there's always been this worry that and this sort of was something planted by industry actually against soy that you couldn't, you know, men couldn't have tofu because tofu was going to give you man boobs because tofu has these.

[Kevin] (17:23 - 17:25)
I have definitely heard that.

[Michelle] (17:25 - 18:26)
Yeah, those are plant estrogens but the plant estrogen is not the same at all as the estrogen from an animal source. So phytoestrogens meaning plant estrogen actually fits in the receptor site and blocks the absorption of the animal-based estrogens, the ones that start a precursor to estrogenic cancers and things like that. So if anything, soy is actually very, very protective.

But that worry, it should actually be applied to animal foods and particularly fat in general actually, Kevin, because we have adipose tissue, you know, whether it's on our buttocks or our arms or our belly or our man boobs, we start to, you know, no matter what the source of that fat, that adipose accumulation was from, this aromatase takes the testosterone from men, turns it into estradiol and this leads to the formation of moose.

[Kevin] (18:28 - 18:30)
Where you don't necessarily want them.

[Michelle] (18:30 - 18:58)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And this is the case in, you know, we have a certain amount of testosterone in balance in our hormone makeup as women too. So like it actually helps to promote this fat storage effect.

So excess body fat turns into more and more and more estrogen all by itself without us pouring more harmful estrogens into our body.

[Kevin] (18:59 - 20:29)
So if I want to dig into this a bit deeper, just because I guess I'm a little confused or I don't know what the adjective would be. I don't know what I am. But you say that and we've certainly seen that puberty is happening earlier in kids.

But I mean, we have been as a, you know, as a Northern European Caucasian society, at least, let's just sort of deal with the Northern European, you know, subset of, you know, people with this genetic abnormality that's developed. Like, we've been drinking this for, I would say hundreds, if not thousands of years. So why would, is it simply that we're drinking and eating more dairy products now?

And that's or are they injecting more hormones, like growth hormones into cattle to make them produce more milk? Or is the combination of all, or is it because you also just said people, if you have high body fats, there's also increased obesity. That's like, why now, just in this last generation or two, is it that we're seeing the increase or the increase in estrogen through advanced puberty and all that?

Whereas we haven't seen it in hundreds of years before. I guess I'm a bit confused on that.

[Michelle] (20:29 - 21:56)
Sure. All of the above is my understanding. I want to remind the listeners that, you know, I'm not a geneticist.

I'm not a doctor. I'm not an anthropologist. I'm just a nutrition nerd.

I'm a nutritionist who just loves to nerd out on the data and go to conferences and continue, further my education. But here's what I've learned. And it's really, really hard for me to answer that question without pointing out how horrible the industry has become.

But let's just suffice to say, you know, my grandparents were dairy farmers. And the way that my grandparents farmed is nowhere resembles the dairy farms of today. So even then, you know, in order for a cow to continuously produce, they had to continuously be impregnated.

Right. And, you know, they carry a baby the same as us for nine months, and then they have that calf and it's taken away. And then they, you know, normally, you would, they would start to lactate after they've given birth.

Right. Unfortunately, cows now are in order to increase production and profits. And they've actually genetically modified the cows so that they produce milk all the time, even while they're pregnant.

So it's multi, it's multifactorial.

[Kevin] (21:57 - 21:57)
Right.

[Michelle] (21:57 - 22:06)
So, so we're, and they're getting, they're, there's so much more being produced. There's so many more dairy foods on the market.

[Kevin] (22:07 - 22:13)
There's so many... Well, cheese is everywhere, in particular. I find cheese is like, there's nothing that's not stuffed with cheese or covered with cheese.

[Michelle] (22:13 - 22:42)
There's cheese in things that we never used to have cheese in. Like it's like, like when, when, when we were kids, did we ever go to a restaurant and order a salad and have someone ask us what protein we wanted in our salad? And where every single salad is sprinkled in cheddar cheese or sprinkled in goat cheese or sprinkled, you know, like a salad is no longer a salad.

Yeah. It's now another protein and dairy delivery mechanism.

[Kevin] (22:42 - 22:59)
And every pizza has double the cheese on the top and then cheese also stuffed in the crust and then sprinkled on top. And then you can get a dip of sauce too, or a dip of cheese sauce if you don't have enough cheese and it's like, enough's enough. How about some vegetables on the pizza?

[Michelle] (23:00 - 23:13)
Cheese used to be a treat. Cheese used to be um, something you had on a, on a plate with some fruit and then a coup de gras and a flavoring. And now it's like a food group.

[Kevin] (23:14 - 23:16)
Although not anymore, according to Canada.

[Michelle] (23:17 - 24:18)
So, so we, we've changed the nature of the industry that there is now far more volume of this being pumped out into the food supply and therefore being, it's subsidized. So it's incumbent upon those governments to make sure that, that the population consumes lots of it. So they get lots of bang for their buck.

We've also changed the nature of farming to be able to support this, these increased production. And we also are injecting everything, so many things with extra hormones in order to boost production in ways that, you know, it's not the cute picture that you used to see on the milk carton of the red barn and the cow out in the pasture. Even in Spain, Kevin, I have to tell you, when I walked Camino de Santiago with my, with one of my best friends, Kevin, Karen, not Kevin, you're one of my best friends.

[Kevin] (24:18 - 24:18)
You're fine.

[Michelle] (24:19 - 25:09)
But you know, I, I have an, my Camino wife, I call her, um, we couldn't believe like they don't have commercialized dairy production there. So every, we would walk through these fields and they were just the way they used to be like where there were fairly skinny cows wandering around, you know, behind a fence and minding their own business and eating grass. It was really quite interesting.

Um, and it was really, yeah. Like my eye opening that when, when you, you can't drive through Southwestern Ontario without, you, you don't see dairy cows wandering around like they're in confined animal feeding operations.

[Kevin] (25:09 - 25:11)
Right. Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

[Michelle] (25:12 - 25:22)
And they're connected to a milking machine, like all the time. I know you want to cut that out. Don't you?

[Kevin] (25:23 - 26:15)
It's just, it's just, we're getting into the ethics a little bit and I, I, I just have, I just want to, I know you don't want to, but it's, it is, I think highly, highly unethical. I understand that it's more, it's more like I've, you know, as I said, like I want to stick to the science and I just, I don't want to, you, you've had, you've, you've made so many good factual points that I don't want people being turned off if you, if they hear something like that and they say, oh, well, she has an ax to grind or, or she's judging the industry now. Like I, I just, I don't want to undercut your, I, I don't want to sound the wrong way, but like your rational arguments with what might be a little bit more opinion.

[Michelle] (26:15 - 26:19)
Ethics is not, it's not opinion based, it's very factual.

[Kevin] (26:20 - 26:25)
Yeah. But it's like I said at the protein one, like we don't want to judge. And if you want to.

[Michelle] (26:26 - 26:30)
Okay. So let me, let me, let me bring myself back onto a different tangent. Okay.

[Kevin] (26:30 - 26:34)
So then the other thing is just in terms of.

[Michelle] (26:34 - 26:36)
I didn't talk about inflammation yet.

[Kevin] (26:36 - 26:47)
Okay. And then after that, do we wrap up and I can basically set the pace for a second, a part two episode when we talk about alternatives. Does that make sense?

Sure.

[Michelle] (26:47 - 26:47)
Sure.

[Kevin] (26:48 - 26:49)
Sounds good. Okay.

[Michelle] (26:49 - 26:49)
Okay.

[Kevin] (26:49 - 26:50)
Go ahead.

[Michelle] (26:51 - 29:20)
Okay. Yeah. So let me get my bearings here, Kevin.

So we talked about, we talked about we talked about the moobs, which I think is of concern to, to many listeners. Oh yeah. You know, and another thing about this, what we see with high dairy consumption as a part of a, of a standard American diet, it tends to be one of the contributors, the science says now to reduced sperm counts in men and in women in particular.

Oh, it's also linked to prostate cancer, highly, highly linked to prostate cancer in men in women's ovarian cancer. Ovarian cancer is a serious one because usually it's one of the cancers that's detected too late for us to be able to ever do anything about it and very heavily linked to ovarian cancer and also breast cancer. And in the study, especially cheese consumption, really just to round that out.

So there's significant risk. There's a whole lot of reasons why it's the case. We know that it's quite acidic to the body when, when we consume it.

That also kind of lays down some building blocks for disease states to take hold as well as the problematic animal protein. And then we have the rise of inflammation. It can trigger inflammation.

I know that in helping people that have any type of skin conditions or acne, things like that, usually removing dairy is like the usually the first indicator that you do that, that we see significant improvement. So it's highly linked to asthma because of these inflammatory triggers, etc. There's just so many things.

And I think the long and the short of it for me is that there's so many health risks associated with dairy consumption in any form. There's absolutely no benefit. It's basically at the end of the day, when we look at its constitution, it's basically a high fat sugary beverage.

And it's it doesn't serve as as a healthy drink alternative in any way, shape and form. And I'm sure that all of this, all of this body of evidence is, is a major reason why it was removed from Canada's food guide in the first place. As well as like we talked about the the whole enzyme issue that really doesn't make it a tolerable food, even for a majority of our population makeup.

[Kevin] (29:20 - 29:59)
Right. And honestly, I think the Canada food guide removing it outright was really what opened my eyes to it. Because rightly or wrongly, for the average person, you know, you trust these food guides.

So for them to take it's not just a reduction. It's not just them saying, okay, just have a little bit of milk. Like the categories removed 100%, which to me was a very bold and to a degree, a brave statement for them to say, very brave.

No, you you can incorporate it. It's in the protein section, I think, as one of the many, many, many options. That's a very strong message.