Milk Madness

Book excerpt: Leaning heavily on scientific and medical language, this book is not for the faint of heart. In it the author makes a case for giving up milk and meat. He categorizes the use of milk in the diet as "udder nonsense," and quotes book after journal after scientific paper to back up his premise. "What exactly is milk? The white liquid that is often used for breakfast cereals is a smorgasbord of chemicals ranging from water to a plethora of hormones. Every drop of cow's milk contains any number of hormones. Specifically, cow's milk contains: Pituitary hormones-Growth Hormone (GH), Thyroid Stimulating Hormone (TSH), Follicle Stimulating Hormone (FSH), Luteinizing Hormone (LH), Adrencorticotropic Hormone (ACTH), PRL, and Oxytocin; Hypothalamic hormones:-Thyrotropin Releasing Hormone (TRH), Luteinizing Hormone-Releasing Hormone (LHRH), Somatostatin, PRL inhibiting factor, PRL releasing factor, GnRH, GRH; Steroid hormones:-Estradiol, Estriol, Progesterone, Testosterone, Ketosteroids, and Corticosterone." Milk is a hormone delivery system suited for the species from which the milk is derived. Human milk for babies and cow's milk for calves. With over 9,000,000 milk cows in the U.S. alone, each generating an average of 80 pounds of poop per day, the vast quantities of feed and water required to produce milk, millions of acres plowed over for large, monoculture crop fields dedicated to feeding livestock, deforestation for agriculture in South America, and the Midwest losing its native prairies and grasslands for farming create an inconvenient truth affecting the planet we can no longer ignore.