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Milk...causes cancer?
Meister
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
A relative of mine just told me that milk and soy are carcinogens. Well, I don't mind not eating soy so much because I dislike that stuff, but milk? I don't see how I could go without milk. Can anyone chime in on this? I have an aunt and uncle who also don't eat anything cooked (they only eat raw food) because something about cooking the food takes away the nutrients. So basically my family is full of new age hippy whatever you call them people and I'm asking you guys if I should be worried about the stuff they're worried about, too.
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Think about it this way: if milk was carcinogenic, don't you think that people would be dropping dead on a massive scale from various cancers? Say what you will about the power of lobbies, but something tells me that if milk was a carcinogen we would have heard about it from a credible source by now and it would have been banned or something. I don't think that you have anything to worry about.
As for the whole raw food argument, your aunt and uncle are right. Cooking food does diminish some of its nutritional content. But this only occurs in certain vegetables and in many others the nutritional content is enhanced through cooking. In addition, cooking vegetables makes them easier for the body to digest. Have you ever attempted to eat a raw potato?
tl;dr: Don't let others dictate your own dietary behaviours unless you are eating in an unhealthy fashion. Some people have wacky food beliefs that they like to share because misery loves company.
The soy thing's been around a while, but blew up a few months back when some penis-obssessed wingnut wrote a column bleating about how phytoestrogens turn boys gay, which is total bollocks. There's a fair bit of hysteria surrounding those chemicals, originating from people who wouldn't know an endocrine system from a kick to the head.
Also, raw-food vegans are pretty nutty (haha, that's a joke, get it? I kill me). If they're clever enough to get all their nutrients that way, fine, but most people don't know enough about nutrition to manage it, and find themselves deficient in one thing or another quite rapidly. If they turn yellow, make them see a doctor
goat milk is easier to digest than cow milk although it has a gamier taste (some who cannot tolerate cow milk can tolerate goat milk)
i don't think either are more carcinogenic then say, water or air.
Sad but true. I think it's one of those cases where people love to publish scare stories because it makes people read. And when you're in the news buisness, you're not there to inform, you're there to sell.
Anyways here's the last thing I read on Milk = Cancer, and it's from the wonderful bbc
Milk link to ovarian cancer risk
I would stress highly that finding links are very much different to showing cause.
How do you know this stuff? I wanna know this stuff too!
-Robert E. Howard
Tower of the Elephant
read books, magazines, take a health class?
What's sad is that most people have no idea what a trans fat is. "zero trans fats! That's good!"
Foods shouldn't have any trans fats because it's an artificial fat to keep food on shelves longer. Damn marketing ploys king people think foods with 0g trans fats is super awesome. The whole "this causes cancer" is just as bad as a marketing ploy. People trying to get money for a study that no one even asked for.
So yeah, pretty much what The Cat said. You'll be fine.
Jesus god damned Christ, when the FUCK when people learn that words like "artificial" and "natural" are BULLSHIT words used by fucking morons who don't know shit about science. Guess what? Lots of things are artificial and are GOOD for you. For example, everything in modern medicine. Lots of things are natural and bad for you, for example, cyanide, anthrax, uranium, lead, etc.
Things are "good" or "bad" for you because of complicated biochemistry not because some hippy liberal douchebag labels it with catch phrases.
edit:
These idiots didn't get this idea from that stupid commercial, did they?
I sure didn't know that. It can't be good for you, but I thought that the reason why it was bad was because it wasn't processed in your system, it just.... stays and accumulates.
-Robert E. Howard
Tower of the Elephant
Even though it's super tasty, there's a lot of evidence to say that milk isn't as great for you as you think, simply because it's a very complex liquid designed for critters with four stomachs. Most of it passes through you unabsorbed. Goats milk, despite the godawful taste, is much better for you.
Are you family members over reacting? It depends.
There is a link between the amount of milk people drink and their development of certain cancers. It's less than that of people eating meat and developing certain cancers. But the link is still there. I can't find the charts online, but the book 'Diet For A New America' has some great charts and diagrams in it, and if you're really interested in all this I highly recommend going to the library and at least flipping through it and looking at those charts.
As for someone's comments about vegans/raw food vegans getting all their necessary nutrients, it's not as hard as you would think. Most people think vegans would have an impossible time getting all the protein they need but thats really not the case. Most doctors only say that you need somewhere from 2% to 10% of your calories from protein. Most of the lowest vegetables still have around 5 or 6 percent. In Diet For A New America the author goes into it and basically concludes that as long as a vegan person is eating reasonably and eating healthy foods, it's difficult to not get the recommended amount of most vitamins and minerals. The exception being B12, which only comes from animal sources.
The myth that in order to be vegan you need to do all this research and calculations every time you have a sandwich mainly comes from the first edition of the book 'Silent Spring'. In it, the author wrote about being vegan and included something like 200 pages just on how to combine foods to get the recommended amount of vitamins and nutrients. Most people saw this and though, "Oh man, being vegan must suck, you have to do that every time you eat something."
There is a lot of evidence saying that milk isn't as great for you as you think, you just never hear about it because most people just automatically equate milk with strong bones and a healthy diet that it seems crazy to suggest anything else. Though I'll be the first to admit the site is not an unbiased source of information and they are a little crazy, this site (from PETA) has some good info on it. http://www.milksucks.com/pus.asp
I'm not saying milk is as bad for you as a cigarette I'm just saying that it's possible that it's not as wholesome a food as you think.
Also, (in case you couldn't tell) I'm vegan and have been so for three years, and was vegetarian a year before that. I'm also only 17 so I'm still growing, and I'm perfectly healthy. I'm 6'4, 180 pounds. I've also met a lot of doctors that were vegan or vegetarian, but thats just me, (most of them only told me they were vegan/vegetarian after it came up that I was. Usually it's not something you bring up because most people, even if they don't really know anything about nutrition, automatically want to tell you how unhealthy your diet is).
So yeah, I guess I'm rambling now. Real quick about your relatives that eat only raw food: They are correct in the sense that cooking food almost always takes away nutrients from it (it never adds them anyway), but I always thought it was a little too much for me.
I highly recommend that you go to your library and flip through a copy of Diet For A New America by John Robins. It isn't insanely pro-vegan or anything, in fact, in the beginning he says that he just wants to let people know that animal products aren't that good for you, and persuade them to maybe cut back on them, for their own health. The first 1/3 is all about animals of factory farms, so you can skip over that if it doesn't interest you. All the charts and graphs are in the other 2/3.
I've never heard of this and you've got me interested. Could you elaborate a little?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&TermToSearch=17638104&ordinalpos=3&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum
But fuck it. I'm still eating seared flesh.
Heat breaks down cell walls, releasing additional nutrients. it also causes a host of other things - watch more "Good Eats". :P
My guess is that it makes the nutrients more accessible to us. Can't exactly get all the benefits from a veggie if you can't digest it properly if it's too hard.
The only bad thing I've ever really heard against milk is arguments that "it's not natural" to be drinking it, which seems rather silly to me. Apparently, if you avoid all dairy products (milk, cheese, yogurt, even ice cream) for a month or so, you'll develop lactose intolerance. Personally, that just makes me want to keep drinking it, because a world where I couldn't eat anything with milk/dairy in it would leave me very
I can tell you personally that this is very not true. The only times I've ever heard it backed up was with anecdotal evidence.
Sometimes at this pizzaria my freinds and I go to, I used to accidentally order a couple of slices with cheese. I just ate them because I didnt want to throw them out and I was fine. Thats after two years of not eating dairy. Also every now and then if someone bakes something or offers me something that has dairy in it, I'll eat it just to not be rude, and I've never had any problems.
Also, about the cooking things taking away nutrients. In case you were wondering, what I've read is that microwaving is by far the worst (takes out the most nutrients) and steaming is the best (removes the least) in case you were wondering.
Most times that I've heard this argument brought up is for eating meat, but if you think about it, it is a little true. Human milk is for baby humans, cows milk is for baby cows. No mammal (as far as I know) goes on drinking milk their entire lives, much less another animals milk.
Isn't that page merely about how feeding growth hormones to cows is a bad thing to both the cow and the consumer? Which is something that every first world country (disclaimer: slight hyperbole may have just occurred) other than the United States seems to have realized and legislated accordingly.
I hate when people bandy around statements like "it's natural so it must be good for you!". It's nonsense propagated by idiots.
When evaluating claims like "x is bad", evaluate the source first, then the claim, and then check it against independent sources.
Load of crap spread by hippies distrusting things they don't understand, like the electromagnetic spectrum (which they associate with nuclear power plants, which they also don't understand, etc).
All a microwave does is vibrate (i.e. heat up) water molecules in whatever you're eating. Microwaving some frozen veggies and steaming them is pretty much exactly the same thing.
I tried organic milk. I went back when my last week's paycheck topped out at $126, after taxes.
Heh, fair enough.
Of course, once I have a steady job instead of this part-time bullshit I'll probably start getting it again. I love organic food and all-natural free-range grassfed beef and whatnot, not because it's better for you (which I don't completely believe in) but because it tastes a whole fuckton better.
I think the best summary for the thread is: Unless your parents can point to controlled, conclusive, peer reviewed study, and can properly interpret the results, they shouldn't be giving advice like that.
I have a hard time with these kinds of statements BECAUSE I don't worry about how healthy things are, I just evaluate them based on a few sources and then make the best decision I can. I don't stay up nights panicing over whether I made the right decision, or not. And equally so, I will eat pizza with my friends if we're hanging out watching football.
I agree that worrying incessantly over your health is not good, but paying moderate attention to your health and eating habits will give you the middle, better, ground from what you posited above: 80-100 enjoyable healthy years.
ADDITIONALLY, medical advances may make that figure significantly longer as we age, so there's even more reason to hang on as long as you can, provided you're enjoying the ride there.
It's really the best reason. I'd forgotten what bananas were supposed to taste like until I started buying them organic. Tomatoes are good, too.
This is the fucking truth! Organic foods taste so much better. Especially meats! Farm-raised grassfed beef is the most delicious meat on the planet. I'm not even sure why it tastes better, but I know it's not psychosomatic because when I discovered the taste difference, I had no idea it was organic. I thought my mother had just bought expensive meat (mignon maybe?), and when I asked her what she bought, she said she just bought it at the local organic farm instead of the supermarket. I was instantly hooked.
Lo-and-behold, almost all foods I have tasted have been better when organic. Sadly, organic is more expensive, but oh so worth it.
I've heard this too. I saw it on some show like Nova.
Are you always this stupid and angry? It's an artificial fat (not natural) only made to keep food on shelves longer. Not at any point did I say it was bad because it was artificial, nor did i say things are beter for you when they are natural. It's bad because it's added only to keep food on selves for an unnatural amount of time, which is bad. Do you want someone spraying random chemicals on your meat just so it won't rot quickly? I don't need random, unwanted things in my body. Your body isn't use to digesting such an unknown substance and it actually can't digest it correctly at all. It just gunks up your system.
Stop being so angry and retarded.
You know how horrible trans fats are for you, right? Being not encountered (in anything but trace quantities) in nature is bad, because your body cannot break them down. They stick around fucking forever, until they are broken down in a very slow process by enzymes. It can't even be "burned off" like "natural" fats.
Did I say anything like that? I didn't say being natural was good or bad, I just said I understand why people say that sometimes.
Also, theres lots of evidence that certain aspects of out bodies are not designed to process meat. Our teeth, our intestines, our bowels are all very similar to herbavores.
Does that mean that no one should eat meat? No. It's just something to think about.