Milk is unhealthy

I have been saying, "Milk is unhealthy", for many years; and now I believe strongly that milk and all dairy products, including cheese, ice creams, sweetmeats, etc. are detrimental for our health. Let me give you some evidence.

I stopped taking milk as a drink about 10 years ago, though I was still taking other milk products like cheese, sweets, etc. occasionally. Since last year, I removed all the dairy items from my meals. My overall health in terms of blood parameters, knee pain, gas formation and bloating, etc. has improved considerably, despite me being a vegetarian since birth. So now I am technically called 'vegan', though I still end up with some dairy products like yoghurt on rare occasions. And I took this decision of not taking milk after reading enough research in medical journals on this issue.

Yesterday I met one of my good friends over lunch who shared her experience about stopping taking milk in her diet. She is around 63 years old and had complained about gas and bloating in stomach, knee pain and frequent infections due to E.coli and H. pylori about 6 months ago. She was in town since last two weeks, and was eager to meet and share her recovery. So when we met yesterday, she explained how she is free of these infections for the last 3 months, and also her gas problems and knee pain almost gone. She sounded so happy and satisfied as if she had found a solution to her health issues!

Let me elaborate why I agree with the researchers that milk is unhealthy for us.

There is this belief that milk is a complete food and an important source of protein, iron and calcium. Not only does it have no iron, milk in fact blocks the absorption of iron. As far as calcium is concerned, the ability of the body to absorb calcium from milk is barely 32%, whereas it can absorb, say, 65% from cabbage and 69% from cauliflower. As far as protein is concerned, milk has lesser protein than any vegetable.

Even if it was a complete food, no one (we humans) can digest it. The reason is : we have no enzyme to digest it. Milk is produced in the mother for the newborn baby in mammals, including us. These babies have the milk digesting enzymes. Once the baby weans off mother's milk, those enzymes are no more produced in our body. If we cannot digest the milk, how do we get any of its ingredients effectively? Apart from this, milk has something called IGF-1. All cancer studies show that when IGF-1 rises in our body we get cancer. All the IGF-1 in milk stays in the body, making us prone to cancer. Milk also has a very strong role to play in causing asthma. In fact, asthma patients all over the world are told to avoid milk and milk products.

What is specifically harmful in milk? The calcium contained in milk actually becomes a health hazard as the undigested portions of it are deposited in the urinary system and become kidney stones. Another condition milk aggravates, rather than recover/alleviates is osteoporosis or bone loss. Studies have shown that it is excess protein rather than lack of calcium that causes it. So the more milk you drink, the more you are prone to osteoporosis. Countries like Sweden that have the highest milk consumption also have the highest incidence of osteoporosis.

Another misconception is that milk helps in peptic ulcers. Ulcers are caused by the corrosion of the stomach lining. When you drink milk it gives you immediate relief from pain. But that is only temporary. Milk actually causes acidity and further destroys the stomach lining. Besides, ulcer patients who are treated with dairy products are found to be 2-6 times more prone to heart attacks. This seems only logical because milk is designed to be the food on which a calf increases its body weight 4 times over in one month! It is so naturally high in fat that it leads to obesity, the cause of all modern diseases. Ayurveda actually lists milk as one of the 5 white poisons.

People say that we have been drinking milk for centuries, particularly in India, USA, Europe, etc., but all of us did not fall sick. Now, it depends on what you call illness. Most people regard arthritis, osteoporosis, asthma, headaches and indigestion as normal for the body and look on cancer as an 'act of God' or bad luck. Nowhere in our scriptures (Hindu shastras) is there any mention of milk being drunk. There is ghee mentioned and that too for havans. Unfortunately our memories are short and the things we are most adamant about are those we know the least about. Dr Spock is the Guru when it comes to child nutrition. Lately he has apologised for having advocated milk and says children must be kept away from it.

Let's see how is milk produced now? The cow is forced into yearly pregnancies. After giving birth, she is milked for 10 months but will be artificially inseminated during her third month so that she is milked even when she is pregnant! The expected production of milk (induced by hormonal injections) is more than her body can give. So she starts breaking down body tissues to produce milk. The result is an illness called ketosis. Most of the day she is tied up in a narrow stall, usually wallowing in her own excrement. She gets mastitis because the hands that milk her are rough and unclean. She gets rumen acidosis from bad food and lameness. She is kept alive with antibiotics and hormones. When they can't produce milk, they are sent to slaughterhouses.

It is no secret that the slaughterhouses are usually made by dairy companies. No cow lives out her normal life span. She is milked, made sick and then killed. Even worse happens to her child. The male calves are tied up and starved to death, or sent to the slaughterhouses.

To get more milk continuously from the cows they are given 2 injections of oxytocin hormone every day to make the milk come faster. This gives her labour pains twice a day! Her uterus develops sores and makes her sterile prematurely. In human beings, oxytocin causes hormonal imbalances, weak eyesight, miscarriages, cancer, etc. So oxytocin is banned for use on animals, but it is still used in the dairy industry.

The question arises then, what is the substitute for milk? It can be soybean milk, almond milk, or rice milk, if we still wish to drink milk or prepare milk beverages. In terms of nutrition, a meal having vegetables, dal or lentils with rice or chapatis is a complete meal. There is absolutely no need to consume any milk for nutrition purposes!

The Sacred Art of Pausing

In our lives we often find ourselves in situations we can’t control, circumstances in which none of our strategies work. Helpless and distraught, we frantically try to manage what is happening. Our child takes a downward turn in academics and we issue one threat after another to get him in line. Someone says something hurtful to us and we strike back quickly or retreat. We make a mistake at work and we scramble to cover it up or go out of our way to make up for it. We head into emotionally charged confrontations nervously rehearsing and strategizing.

The more we fear failure the more frenetically our bodies and minds work. We fill our days with continual movement: mental planning and worrying, habitual talking, fixing, scratching, adjusting, phoning, snacking, discarding, buying, looking in the mirror.

What would it be like if, right in the midst of this busyness, we were to consciously take our hands off the controls? What if we were to intentionally stop our mental computations and our rushing around and, for a minute or two, simply pause and notice our inner experience?

Learning to pause is the first step in the practice of Radical Acceptance. A pause is a suspension of activity, a time of temporary disengagement when we are no longer moving towards any goal. The pause can occur in the midst of almost any activity and can last for an instant, for hours or for seasons of our life. We may take a pause from our ongoing responsibilities by sitting down to meditate. We may pause in the midst of meditation to let go of thoughts and reawaken our attention to the breath. We may pause by stepping out of daily life to go on a retreat or to spend time in nature or to take a sabbatical. We may pause in a conversation, letting go of what we’re about to say, in order to genuinely listen and be with the other person. We may pause when we feel suddenly moved or delighted or saddened, allowing the feelings to play through our heart. In a pause we simply discontinue whatever we are doing—thinking, talking, walking, writing, planning, worrying, eating—and become wholeheartedly present, attentive and, often, physically still.

A pause is, by nature, time limited. We resume our activities, but we do so with increased presence and more ability to make choices. In the pause before sinking our teeth into a chocolate bar, for instance, we might recognize the excited tingle of anticipation, and perhaps a background cloud of guilt and self-judgment. We may then choose to eat the chocolate, fully savoring the taste sensations, or we might decide to skip the chocolate and instead go out for a run. When we pause, we don’t know what will happen next. But by disrupting our habitual behaviors, we open to the possibility of new and creative ways of responding to our wants and fears.

Of course there are times when it is not appropriate to pause. If our child is running towards a busy street, we don’t pause. If someone is about to strike us, we don’t just stand there, resting in the moment—rather, we quickly find a way to defend ourselves. If we are about to miss a flight, we race toward the gate. But much of our driven pace and habitual controlling in daily life does not serve surviving, and certainly not thriving. It arises from a free-floating anxiety about something being wrong or not enough. Even when our fear arises in the face of actual failure, loss or even death, our instinctive tensing and striving are often ineffectual and unwise.

Taking our hands off the controls and pausing is an opportunity to clearly see the wants and fears that are driving us. During the moments of a pause, we become conscious of how the feeling that something is missing or wrong keeps us leaning into the future, on our way somewhere else. This gives us a fundamental choice in how we respond: We can continue our futile attempts at managing our experience, or we can meet our vulnerability with the wisdom of Radical Acceptance.

Often the moment when we most need to pause is exactly when it feels most intolerable to do so. Pausing in a fit of anger, or when overwhelmed by sorrow or filled with desire, may be the last thing we want to do. Pausing can feel like falling helplessly through space—we have no idea of what will happen. We fear we might be engulfed by the rawness of our rage or grief or desire. Yet without opening to the actual experience of the moment, Radical Acceptance is not possible.

Through the sacred art of pausing, we develop the capacity to stop hiding, to stop running away from our experience. We begin to trust in our natural intelligence, in our naturally wise heart, in our capacity to open to whatever arises. Like awakening from a dream, in the moment of pausing our trance recedes and Radical Acceptance becomes possible.

(This article is excerpted from Tara Brach’s books "Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha" (2003)).

Living Younger, Healthier, Longer:The Telomere Effect

My friend sent me an excerpt from the new book The Telomere Effect: A Revolutionary Approach to Living Younger, Healthier, Longer by Elizabeth Blackburn and Elissa Epel (2017). It was so thought-provoking and insightful that I decided to share it on my blog. More so when I am teaching Human Genetics this semester, where we talk of structure of genes, telomeres, their functions, etc. So here is the excerpt:

How can one person bask in the sunshine of good health, while another person looks old before her time? Humans have been asking this question for millennia, and recently, it’s becoming clearer and clearer to scientists that the differences between people’s rates of aging lie in the complex interactions among genes, social relationships, environments and lifestyles. Even though you are born with a particular set of genes, the way you live can influence how they express themselves. Some lifestyle factors may even turn genes on or shut them off.

Deep within the genetic heart of all our cells are telomeres, or repeating segments of noncoding DNA that live at the ends of the chromosomes. They form caps at the ends of the chromosomes and keep the genetic material from unraveling. Shortening with each cell division, they help determine how fast a cell ages. When they become too short, the cell stops dividing altogether. This isn’t the only reason a cell can become senescent — there are other stresses on cells we don’t yet understand very well — but short telomeres are one of the major reasons human cells grow old. We’ve devoted most of our careers to studying telomeres, and one extraordinary discovery from our labs (and seen at other labs) is that telomeres can actually lengthen.

HARMFUL THOUGHT PATTERNS

What this means: aging is a dynamic process that could possibly be accelerated or slowed — and, in some aspects, even reversed. To an extent, it has surprised us and the rest of the scientific community that telomeres do not simply carry out the commands issued by your genetic code. Your telomeres are listening to you. The foods you eat, your response to challenges, the amount of exercise you get, and many other factors appear to influence your telomeres and can prevent premature aging at the cellular level. One of the keys to enjoying good health is simply doing your part to foster healthy cell renewal.

Scientists have learned that several thought patterns appear to be unhealthy for telomeres, and one of them is cynical hostility. Cynical hostility is defined by high anger and frequent thoughts that other people cannot be trusted. Someone with hostility doesn’t just think, “I hate to stand in long lines at the grocery store”; they think, “That other shopper deliberately sped up and beat me to my rightful position in the line!” — and then seethe. People who score high on measures of cynical hostility tend to get more cardiovascular disease, metabolic disease and often die at younger ages. They also have shorter telomeres. In a study of British civil servants, men who scored high on measures of cynical hostility had shorter telomeres than men whose hostility scores were low. The most hostile men were 30 percent more likely to have a combination of short telomeres and high telomerase (an enzyme in cells that helps keep telomeres in good shape) — a profile that seems to reflect the unsuccessful attempts of telomerase to protect telomeres when they are too short.

These men had the opposite of a healthy response to stress. Ideally, your body responds to stress with a spike in cortisol and blood pressure, followed by a quick return to normal levels. Instead, when these men were exposed to stress, their diastolic blood pressure and cortisol levels were blunted, a sign their stress response was, basically, broken from overuse. Their systolic blood pressure increased, but instead of returning to normal levels, it stayed elevated for a long time afterward. The hostile men also had fewer social connections and less optimism. In terms of their physical and psycho-social health, they were highly vulnerable to an early disease-span, the years in a person’s life marked by the diseases of aging, which include cardiovascular disease, arthritis, a weakened immune system and more. Women tend to have lower hostility, and it’s less related to heart disease for them, but there are other psychological culprits affecting women’s health, such as depression.

Pessimism is the second thought pattern that has been shown to have negative effects on telomeres. When our research team conducted a study on pessimism and telomere length, we found that people who scored high on a pessimism inventory had shorter telomeres. This was a small study of about 35 women, but similar results have been found in other studies, including a study of over 1,000 men. It also fits with a large body of evidence that pessimism is a risk factor for poor health. When pessimists develop an aging-related illness, like cancer or heart disease, the illness tends to progress faster. Like cynically hostile people — and people with short telomeres, in general — they tend to die earlier.

Rumination — the act of rehashing problems over and over — is the third destructive thought pattern.How do you tell rumination from harmless reflection? Reflection is the natural, introspective analysis about why things happen a certain way. It may cause you some healthy discomfort, but rumination feels awful. And rumination never leads to a solution, only to more ruminating.

When you ruminate, stress sticks around in the body long after the reason for the stress is over, in the form of prolonged high blood pressure, elevated heart rate, and higher levels of cortisol. Your vagus nerve, which helps you feel calm and keeps your heart and digestive system steady, withdraws its activity — and remains withdrawn long after the stressor is over. In a study, we examined daily stress responses in healthy women who were family caregivers. The more the women ruminated after a stressful event, the lower the telomerase in their aging CD8 cells (the crucial immune cells that send out proinflammatory signals when they are damaged). People who ruminate experience more depression and anxiety, which are, in turn, associated with shorter telomeres.

The fourth thought pattern is thought suppression, the attempt to push away unwanted thoughts and feelings. The late Daniel Wegener, a Harvard social psychologist, once came across this line from the great nineteenth-century Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky: “Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.” Wegener put this idea to the test through a series of experiments and identified a phenomenon he called ironic error, meaning that the more forcefully you push your thoughts away, the louder they call out for your attention.

Ironic error may also be harmful to telomeres. If we try to manage stressful thoughts by sinking the bad thoughts into the deepest waters of our subconscious, it can backfire. The chronically stressed brain’s resources are already taxed — we call this cognitive load — making it even harder to successfully suppress thoughts. Instead of less stress, we get more. In a small study, greater avoidance of negative feelings and thoughts was associated with shorter telomeres. Avoidance alone is probably not enough to harm telomeres, but it can lead to chronic stress arousal and depression, both of which may shorten your telomeres.

The final thought pattern is mind wandering. Harvard psychologists Matthew Killingsworth (TED Talk:Want to be happier? Stay in the moment) and Daniel Gilbert (TED Talk: The surprising science of happiness) used a “track your happiness” iPhone app to ask thousands of people questions about what activity they are engaged in, what their minds are doing, and how happy they are. Killingsworth and Gilbert discovered we spend half of the day thinking about something other than what we’re doing. They also found that when people are not thinking about what they’re doing, they’re not as happy as when they’re engaged. In particular, negative mind wandering — thinking negative thoughts, or wishing you were somewhere else — was more likely to lead to unhappiness in their next moments.

Together with Eli Puterman, we studied close to 250 healthy, low-stress women who ranged from 55 to 65 years old and assessed their tendency to mind-wander. We asked them two questions: How often in the past week have you had moments when you felt totally focused or engaged in doing what you were doing at the moment? How often in the past week have you had any moments when you felt you didn’t want to be where you were, or doing what you were doing at the moment? Then we measured the women’s telomeres.

The women with the highest levels of self-reported mind-wandering had telomeres that were shorter by around 200 base pairs. (To put this in context, a typical 35-year-old has roughly 7,500 base pairs of telomeres; a 65-year-old, 4,800 base pairs.) This was regardless of how much stress they had in their lives. Some mind-wandering can be creative, of course. But when you are thinking negative thoughts about the past, you are more likely to be unhappy, and you may possibly even experience higher levels of resting stress hormones.

The negative thought patterns we’ve described are automatic, exaggerated and controlling. They take over your mind; it’s as if they tie a blindfold around your brain so you can’t see what is really going on around you. But when you become more aware of your thoughts, you take off the blindfold. You won’t necessarily stop the thoughts, but you have more clarity. Activities that promote better thought awareness include most types of meditation, along with most forms of mind-body exercises, including long-distance running.

Thought awareness can promote stress resilience. With time, you learn to encounter your own ruminations or problematic thoughts and say, “That’s just a thought. It’ll fade.” That is a secret about the human mind: We don’t need to believe everything our thoughts tell us. Or, as the bumper sticker says, “Don’t believe everything you think.”