Getting Dairy Products Out of Schools
World School Milk Day Counter Celebration
The United States celebrates World School Milk Day each year to encourage children to think of milk as healthy and necessary for their growth. The reality is that the public is poorly informed about the real health risk associated with consuming dairy products and how the government’s promotion has been directly linked to accelerating many health crises, including cancer, obesity, and mental health disorders.
Dr. Payal Bhandari, M.D. spoke at a Seed the Commons event in San Francisco and explained why it is not advisable to have children drink milk and what other nutritious foods and beverages we can consume safely.
In school, nutrition education is fairly minuscule. We are informed that all sources of protein are good for us, and the primary source of protein must come from an animal or fish. The human body is not naturally designed to digest animal products and tends to reject them as toxic invaders. The rejection may present with symptoms, such as gastric reflux (a.k.a. heartburn), throat pain, nasal congestion, abdominal pain, headache, jaw clenching, trouble swallowing, and emotional distress. When we choose to ignore these signals of danger sent from our body, it will still continue to reject these toxic items and frequently signal a fight-or-flight stress response. Over time, the body and mind become overtired from send this signal and suffer dire consequences. This is when disease has permanently set in.
The food industry has been selling propaganda for over a century that drinking a glass of milk every day is good for the body. It has hired famous celebrities to promote milk consumption and spends billions of dollars every day to educate healthcare providers and school systems about the benefits of milk. By selling a strong public message from many sources that dairy should be an American staple, the food industry has been making tons of money at the cost of people getting sick. It has left many people confused, especially children as to what is the truth versus what’s a lie. Children often feel ill after consuming dairy products. They learn from a young age to stop listening to their body’s internal signals. It has led to a large majority of people no longer able to feel safe listening to their gut instincts and how what they eat has everything to do with how they feel, think and act.
What happens to your body when we drink milk?
When the body cannot digest dairy products properly and effectively absorb nutrients, the stomach struggles terribly and cannot function properly. As it becomes weaker, the small and large intestines also become compromised. This leads to toxic waste and pathogens leaking out of the historically tight-knit digestive tract and seeping into the blood stream. This triggers an immune reaction and causes inflammation to spread throughout the body. As the body becomes weaker and more malnourished, it struggles to repair the damage caused by a person continuing to consume dairy products. This leads to cross-reaction with other foods, such as animal protein, fish, grains (e.g., wheat, corn, soy, rice), sugar, alcohol, tomatoes, caffeine, and root vegetables — many of the items which define the American diet being misinterpreted by the body as toxic.
Most conventional Western medicine physicians are poorly versed in nutrition as it is not a topic taught in medical school training. They often misinterpret many symptoms and ailments directly caused by dairy consumption. For example, the #1 cause of asthma, allergies, sinus infections, colds, eczema, and iron deficiency is dairy products. Because the direct connection between diet and disease is not made, it often leads to patients being treated with medications loaded with side effects that increase the risk of illnesses quickly transcending from acute to chronic.
Extensive scientific studies have proven that many health issues would improve if most people stopped consuming dairy products. For example, since the mineral calcium in milk cannot be easily absorbable, it leads to excess calcium level in the blood and poor regulation of other electrolytes, minerals, and vitamins in the body. In the short term, dairy will cause bone lengthening (i.e., increase in height) and rapid bone growth, but in the long run, it cause bones to be brittle and increase the risk of non-traumatic fractures, ligament and tendon injuries. The excess calcium becomes deposited onto blood vessels, heart valves, and other tissues (e.g., gallbladder, kidneys), causing calcification. Dairy consumption is the #1 cause of cardiovascular disease, heart valve anomalies, kidney and gallstones, cancer, osteoporosis, and many other preventable chronic disease.
The other concern is the high level of arsenic poisoning and other heavy metal and pesticide exposure derived from consuming dairy products. High levels of air, water and soil pollution has led to animals in agriculture consuming harmful chemical from the grass and grains they eat, the water they drink, and the air they breathe. The toxin load is extremely high in farm animals today, and directly correlates to the exponential growth of tumors and other diseases in the animals. This pathology is then directly passed onto people consuming animal products. In the USA we do not properly regulate our food industry and have minimal safety measures on what is considered safe for human consumption. People are often left exposed and unprotected.
How can we clean our body from toxins?
Toxins most commonly ingested from the foods people eat remain in the can be in our body for at least eight and a half years, and cause disease to set in.
The most effective way to detoxify is to switch to a whole foods plant-based diet full of leafy green vegetables as the largest percentage of your meals. Shift away from toxin-infected items, such as animal products, fish, GMO grains (e.g., corn, soy, wheat, rice), processed foods, alcohol and caffeinated beverages and sweets.
Food is no longer what your great-grandmother would recognize as safe. Food is mostly made in factories which strip out the nutrients and replace them with chemicals and artificial sweeteners and preservatives. It is time to rethink what real foods are - those that come directly from the Earth.
Ask yourself why does the food industry advertise items which makes us sick? It may not be for our benefit.
AUTHOR
Dr. Payal Bhandari M.D. is one of U.S.'s top leading integrative functional medical physicians and the founder of SF Advanced Health. She combines the best in Eastern and Western Medicine to understand the root causes of diseases and provide patients with personalized treatment plans that quickly deliver effective results. Dr. Bhandari specializes in cell function to understand how the whole body works. Dr. Bhandari received her Bachelor of Arts degree in biology in 1997 and Doctor of Medicine degree in 2001 from West Virginia University. She the completed her Family Medicine residency in 2004 from the University of Massachusetts and joined a family medicine practice in 2005 which was eventually nationally recognized as San Francisco’s 1st patient-centered medical home. To learn more, go to www.sfadvancedhealth.com.