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Thursday, May 13, 2010 at 9:55 AM Unless You're a Calf.....
Allison 
...you don't need milk.
That's my biggest takeaway from The Whole 9 nutrition workshop I attended on Saturday. I already knew the deal about grains (though lately I've been choosing to ignore it.) I even knew that there was a curse on milk. But I finally heard the milk schpiel in a way that connected with me. Not only connected, but made me want to stop buying milk, and stop feeding it to my kid. Cheese, too...a loss I'm still mourning.
So here's the message on dairy that finally convinced me: the sole purpose of (cow) milk is to grow calfs into cows. As Dallas pointed out, it's just weird. Most people would think it gross to sit down with a big glass of breast milk, but we'll buy milk from a lactating farm animal by the gallon without second thought? Well, when you put it that way.....
Additionally, milk does promote growth, because of it's nature intended purpose for fattening calves. You might be interested in fattening yourself up, but I'm not. And I'm also not interested in fattening up my kid. For those of you who are interested in the kind of growth you know comes from the "gallon of milk a day" plan, Melissa and Dallas cautioned that this growth is absolutely not worth it because of the bad things that milk does to your body. Wanting to be "big" should never come at the expense of good health. That's a priority mix-up.
Now, as far as the details about why milk is bad for your body, I'll direct you over to the Whole 9 site to read their Dairy Manifesto. In a nutshell, it causes the insulin spikes and gut inflammation just like grains. In the saddest news of the day, I learned that if milk is bad, cheese is even worse. The troublesome protein in milk, casein, is more concentrated in cheese. And while we're on the subject, all versions of dairy are bad. There's no get out of jail form that's okay. That includes all milk versions from full fat to skim, yogurt, greek yogurt, kefir, the little yogurt shots Travis likes, and goat products, too.
One bit of good news - heavy cream and butter are okay. Thank goodness! Why? They're almost all fat, no lactose or casein. As always, best to get these fats from grass fed cows.
I don't know about you, but now I'm wondering, "What about calcium?"
At this point Melissa explained that foods either have an acidic or alkaline effect on your body. Ideally you want to achieve a balance. The typical American diet is highly acidic (which makes it a breeding ground for cancer, bt the way). That's because meat, dairy, processed foods, grains and nuts have an acidic effect on our bodies. When our bodies are in an acidic state, our they don't keep and utilize minerals from our food, like calcium. Eating a paleo diet helps by cutting the dairy, processed food, and grain off that list. You're just left with meat and nuts creating an acidic state. Can you guess the only foods that have an alkaline effect on the body to offset the acid of meat and nuts? Fruits and veggies!
So back to calcium...eat meat and nuts, fruit and veggies and you'll restore the acid/alkaline balance in your body. At which point your body can utilize the natural minerals, like calcium, that are found in the real food that you eat. You don't need dairy for calcium, and actually dairy promotes that alkaline state that strips the minerals from your body in the first place. Vicious cycle.....
One final note on this topic, meat and nuts are much more acidic than fruits and veggies are alkaline. And as we've all heard, there's a limit to how much fruit you should eat because of the natural sugar in fruit. So everyone needs to eat way more veggies. Add them in at every meal and for snacks. When Elaina boasts at dinner, 'I don't have to drink milk anymore!" I say, "yes, but you have to finish all the veggies on your plate." She seems to think that's a fair trade.
I hope I've done justice to their materials and gotten all of my facts straight! Melissa and Dallas are totally cool, and so nice, and it was great to meet them. They actually stayed here with us over the weekend. One of the highlights of the weekend was Dallas ordering two burgers (no bun of course) and three salads at dinner. The next day he got three burgers at that new Farm Burger restaurant in Decatur. (I guess Dallas loves burgers.) They say they can judge the quality of a restaurant by how much of a reaction they get when Dallas orders.
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