The 3 REASONS You Should AVOID MOST Dairy | Mark Hyman

There's no biological requirement for milk. There's no need to drink milk at all, zero. It may have not only a lack of health benefits, but a lot of potential harms.

What are the top three reasons why you say that we should avoid most dairy and most has an asterisk? We're gonna come back to that.

We're gonna come back to most. It's pretty simple, Drew. Uh, industrial dairy, modern dairy from modern cows raised in factory farms, we call CAFOs, is bad for human health. It's bad for the animals and it's terrible for the environment and climate. So basically it's not nature's perfect food unless you're a calf and then it's okay.

So, okay, what do you mean by industrial dairy? A lot of people wouldn't know what that means. They buy the milk from the grocery store and there's these beautiful pastures and these cows that are out in the wild. so what is industrial dairy and why, more importantly, is it so bad for us?

Okay, so I'm gonna take you all the way all back. So historically, humans just never drank milk. I mean, were you gonna milk a saber-toothed tiger or a buffalo? Probably not, right? So we just never consumed it until the advent of modern agriculture. And we're the only species, period, that consume milk after weaning. So what we eat now is milk is quite different and what we drink is quite different than the dairy even a hundred years ago or 500 years ago, because that was all from weird heirloom looking cows, which had a very different form of casein, which wasn't inflammatory called A2 casein. It wasn't fed antibiotics. It wasn't grown in CAFOs or confined animal feeding operations under horrible conditions and fed all kinds of horrible things, including ground up animal parts, Skittles and corn and all things that are not its natural diet. And they give them antibiotics, which gets in the milk, and they give them growth factors, literally growth hormones, to stimulate the production of milk, estrogens and so forth, like DES, which is actually banned in humans because it caused all kinds of cervical cancer and fetal abnormalities. And women who took it was supposed to be sort of helping prevent miscarriages, but it didn't do that. They give that still give that to cows. So when also having conventional, like even organic milk, they're often milking them when they're pregnant. So you get all this flood of hormones, you get inflammatory casein, you get animals that are living in horrible conditions, fed all kinds of weird stuff. And so basically it's not the dairy it used to be. So while maybe you could tolerate dairy if you're having it from some heirloom cow raised on grass and not fed all this weird stuff and antibiotics and hormones might be okay. And I think we kind of have to kick up big broad look at the whole history of dairy production and see how much has changed in the last 50 years and how dangerous that is for us, for the animals in the planet.

So you've talked about how our dairy has changed, but how does the dairy that is not grown in these great conditions and not produced in these great conditions, what impact and what mechanisms does it hijack in our body to create the whole list of things that you mentioned in the opening?

So first I want to say, look, this is not my opinion. There's a recent paper that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the most prestigious medical journal in the world, by doctors David Ludwig and Walter Willett, two of the most renowned nutrition scientists at Harvard. And it was called Milk and Health. And in that, they looked at over a hundred studies on dairy, and they basically blew apart all the myths that we've held so dearly to. All the myths that had been actually promulgated by the Dairy Council and the dairy industry and our own government. Remember those Got Milk ads?

Right?

Got Milk, it's gonna build strong bones, it's gonna do all these wonderful things to your body and it was propaganda. In fact, the Federal Trade Commission or the FCC, I think the Federal Communications Commission, outlawed those ads because they were like, Got proof! And they were like, no, there's no proof. In fact, the opposite is true. And so all the things we believe that it's important for building strong bones and growing tall and strong may help you grow tall and strong, but that's not necessarily a good thing. It helps you with nutrition in so many different ways. It's just a fallacy. So, it's not good for weight loss, it's not good for your bones, it's not bad for your heart, it may cause cancer, it causes allergies, autoimmunity, a whole host of problems that come from consuming conventional dairy. And we really have to come to grips with the fact that the science just is not there for humans consuming dairy. I mean, zero is fine. If you want to consume dairy, then we'll talk about what kinds to consume because there are ways to consume dairy that are probably okay. But for most of it, it should not be a staple food. It's not nature's perfect food. It's not something that actually helps prevent fractures. In fact, in the in the review paper that they did, basically they found that for looking at 100,000 people, particularly adults, that they follow them and the more milk they drank, the more fractures they had. So that for every glass of milk, they drank, they had a 9% increase in fracture rate. So not only did it not prevent fractures, but it increased fracture. And it also has adverse consequences around cancer, may increase prostate cancer, may increase endometrial cancer, uterine cancer. It affects people's digestion widely because it actually increases lactose intake and probably 75% of the world is lactose intolerant. What about heart disease and the saturated fat in milk? Well, it turns out that There's no correlation. And there was a paper review over six million person-years of data by Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian from Tufts, was published a few years ago called his Butter Back. I think it was called his Butter Back. And it looked at all the data on heart disease and both butter and heart disease and diabetes. And what they found was fascinating. There was actually an inverse correlation Correlation is not causation, so we have to understand that. But there was an inverse correlation, meaning the more dairy you drank, the less diabetes you had in terms of fat and looking at saturated fat. So it may actually not be causing any diabetes, may protect against diabetes, and it also can cause no change in the risk of heart disease. So there was zero effect on heart disease. So we think butter is bad for your heart, turns out it may not be. And of course it's very individual, but When you look at the data, you go, wait a minute, all the things we believed are just not true.

So in some senses, dairy is not exactly what they told us in terms of it being very likely linked to many of the things that you talked about earlier. And in other cases, having a certain amount of dairy could be beneficial?

Yes, well, we don't know for sure. And the question is what dairy? And I think what culture, where's the dairy from? And we're going to get into some interesting stories about dairy and how all dairy is not the same. Dairy is not dairy is not dairy. But there are some interesting correlations with diabetes and dairy. The more dairy fat you have in your blood, the more you're likely to be healthy and less risk you have of diabetes.

So that could be the most protective or food is information benefit from dairy is a saturated fat. Is that what you're talking about?

Yeah, it may be. It may be. Saturated fats seem to correlate with a positive benefit, which is kind of counterintuitive. which is contradicting everything we said or we thought we knew. And the other fascinating thing is that we eat dairy now in a homogenized pasteurized form, which is unlike we ever did before historically. And pasteurization is good because it reduces the risk of infection and terrible things you can get from raw milk. But the homogenization process actually changes the informational quality of the food. So if you look at consuming the identical amount of dairy from raw milk versus homogenized milk, or un-homogenized milk, let's say, there's homogenized milk. There are profoundly different effects on your cholesterol. The homogenized milk is terrible, whereas the un-homogenized milk is actually good for your lipids. So it's very subtle, but there are a lot of nuances around how to think about when you're choosing dairy or if you want to eat dairy, which.

Dairy to eat so you're not actually causing harm to your body. Why do so many functional medicine doctors, including yourself, include dairy on the elimination diet list when they're giving a patient a challenge test to say, hey, do this for 30 days, take out these foods. Usually top number one and two is going to be gluten and dairy. Why is it included on that?

I mean, we know from the literature that, you know, dairy can cause eczema and allergies and asthma and irritable bowel and all kinds of problems, sinus infections. We know that increases menstrual difficulties and hormonal dysregulation. It's got over 60 different hormones in milk. It may increase insulin. It could cause all kinds of issues. When I see patients. We do food sensitivity testing, we do allergy testing. And I've also seen what happens when you take these foods away, like dairy, from the diet. We see profound changes in people's health. So acne goes away, which is a hugely caused by dairy. People's digestive problems go away, their eczema goes away, their asthma goes away, their sinus problems goes away, their congestion goes away. A lot of clinical benefit you get from removing dairy. It's, it's, other than gluten, the most common food sensitivity. And it may not be a true allergy, but it just may be a sensitivity that is triggering immune response that creates all these side effects. So if you're trying to sort of see how your body is without all the inflammatory triggers, getting rid of dairy is key and getting rid of gluten is key. And then there's sort of a secondary list, you know, eggs or grains or beans or corn or soy or nuts or seeds or nitrates. Those are sort of down the list of the elimination diet. But Dairy and gluten are king and queen on the elimination diet.

And people can Google that and we'll have some links on your website for elimination diet. And the whole idea is not that you avoid these foods forever, but you do it for a period of time, see how your health changes, and then slowly reintroduce them to see if these foods fit you or don't fit you. Exactly. Are there broad strokes, some things that you look at on ethnicity, genetic background, where you give people big picture guidance when it comes to dairy? Does any of that stuff matter?

Sure. I mean, like I said earlier, about 75% of the world's population is lactose intolerant. And we actually can do genetic testing. We do that in our practice all the time and check through a cheek swab whether or not someone has the gene for lactose intolerance. That doesn't mean they're going to have lactose intolerance. It means they're predisposed to lactose intolerance. And then often, because of stress and life and antibiotics and leaky gut and all the things we've talked about on this podcast, you'll see patients who start to develop real lactose intolerance. And that means they can't digest the milk sugar. The enzymes aren't there. They get bloating, distension, gas. So, if people have any of those symptoms, it's that dairy is the first thing to go.

Let's talk about, and by the way.

The populations that are more at risk are African-Americans, Asians, pretty much indigenous people, anybody that's not Scandinavian, essentially.

Let's talk about your personal story with dairy. Do you consume dairy and what was your journey in history with dairy?

If I consume regular industrial modern dairy, it will give me terrible digestive issues, congestion, runny nose, and I'll get pimples. That is for sure. I've tried and tested it so many times. However, it doesn't mean all dairy does that. and the reason so I cut it out was because of my own symptoms, which I realized it was causing inflammation in my body. I didn't want that. But what when you start to understand food is information, then you understand that not all dairy is the same. So is is industrial dairy the same as that from an heirloom cow? Is dairy that's raw the same as pasteurized? Is goat and sheep dairy different? How is it different? is all goat and sheep dairy okay or only some versions of it okay? So you start to get in the nuances of the information in food. And I'll just sort of share a story of a recent trip to Sardinia where they are shepherds and they basically have goats and sheep.

And Sardinia is a blue zone.

Yes, Sardinia is a blue zone where people live to be very old and it has the longest lived males in the entire world. Well over 100, it's 20 times as many centenarians as there are in the United States. their diet is predominantly cheese, okay, and a lot of cheese. And they have this interesting approach to raising goats and sheep, which is they graze them in the wild and they're eating all kinds of different plants, all kinds of different bushes, wild foods, and they know to feed them different plants at different times of the year before they're going to milk them for making cheese. They don't make a ton of milk, by the way. So they have a lot of goats and sheep because they're not pumped full of hormones. So you're going to get small amounts, but they're they make this most extraordinary cheese. it turns out to have all these special phytochemicals because the goats and sheep are eating the plants. The plants contain these medicinal compounds we call phytochemicals or phytonutrients. They get into the milk, that gets into the cheese, and that gets into you. So you're not only what you're eating, you're eating, you're what you're eating has eaten. And that's so important to understand. And so these, the dairy that I ate when I was in Sardinia did not bother me at all. I didn't get any gas, I didn't get any pimples, I didn't get congestion, I didn't have any of those side effects. and it's not just that it has all these phytochemicals, but it also was raw when it was made into cheese, and also it is completely free of antibiotics, hormones, and it's got A2 casein, which is the form of casein that tends not to cause inflammation, digestive issues, and other problems. And it tastes good.

So now that we know that industrial dairy isn't optimal and really should be mostly avoided for folks. The next question that a lot of people have is that, what about the calcium and the vitamin D that I was getting from the grocery store that was added into the milk or that I was getting from milk?

Well, first of all, vitamin D is not naturally in milk. It's added to milk as a way to deal with rickets. And that was a good public health intervention, but definitely it's not the place you should be getting your vitamin D. Calcium, it turns out, may not necessarily be a good thing to consume in large quantities because calcium is your body's band-aid. And when there's inflammation, the calcium gets laid down as plaque in your arteries, as calcifications, and all kinds of other harmful effects can come from having too much calcium. Turns out that the calcium that we eat is only part of the story of osteoporosis. It's not necessarily the total amount, it's how much you take in versus how much you excrete. So if you look at countries, for example, in Africa, very little osteoporosis and very low calcium consumption. So they might have 300-400 milligrams a day of calcium as opposed to what the government here recommends, which is 1,000 to 1,500 milligrams. So why don't they have osteoporosis? Well, they're not doing all the things that cause them to leak out calcium from their kidneys. For example, if you're drinking coffee, if you're having a lot of sugar, if you're having alcohol, if you're drinking sodas, particularly dark sodas like colas have phosphoric acid which just leeches out your bones. They're maybe not as much stress. So there's a lot of factors that drive bone loss. You want to stop those things and you don't maybe need as much calcium. And the second is that it turns out in all the large studies that calcium replacement hasn't really been a factor in preventing osteoporosis and bone fractures. That actually is the vitamin D that makes the most difference. so I'm much more focused on vitamin D, which helps with calcium absorption and utilization, and make sure people's levels are between 50 to 75. What's interesting to note is a recent paper came out about COVID that if your vitamin D level was over 50 nanograms per deciliter, your risk of death from COVID was zero. There's no treatment that does that. No drug, no vaccine, nothing. So it's important to have your vitamin D at the right level. but calcium is definitely not something we should be thinking about getting from milk.

Now, you mentioned coffee and I just want to have a caveat. It's not that you don't drink coffee, excess coffee consumption could support the leaching of calcium from your body, but you, for example, you have some coffee, is that right?

If you have a cup in the morning, that's fine, but if you're drinking coffee all day or having tons of.

Caffeine, it's going to cause a problem. So let's break that down a little bit more. how are you getting your vitamin D? And is it primarily through supplementation? Are you also relying on certain foods? And then also talk about calcium as well, too, for the moderate healthy quality of calcium that you need inside of your diet.

Where are you getting both of those from? So, first of all, dairy calcium may not be the best utilized and actually may not allow you to actually absorb it as well as plant-based calciums. For example, chia seeds, sesame seeds, chia seeds, you know, for a serving of chia seeds, you get as much calcium as a glass of milk, without all the problems. And you get Omega-3s and you get fiber and you get protein and you get all kinds of other benefits. Same thing with sesame seeds. Tahini, which is round up sesame seeds, is probably one of the best sources of calcium. You can get it from greens like arugula, which is very high in calcium. Or even if you like to have canned fish like sardines or salmon, if you have the bones, sometimes you can get without the bones, but if you get it with the bones and you eat the bones, you're gonna get calcium. So that's really important. As far as vitamin D goes, I mean, if you're living below Atlanta, in terms of the, you know, the latitude that you live in, and you're out in the sun 20 minutes naked from 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM every day, you might not need vitamin D. But unless that's you, you probably do need vitamin D, and that's most of us, and we're very low in vitamin D. So about 80 to 90% are either deficient or insufficient in vitamin D, and you should really get it from a supplement. And there are many of them out there, but vitamin D3 between 2,000 to 5,000 a day is safe and effective in keeping your vitamin D levels up, and everybody's a little different. more, less depending on their genetics, but really that's a good range. And it's important to just check your level so that you see that you're not too low or too high.

For the high quality dairy in limited amounts that you are consuming, what type of dairy specifically are you having and how do you have it?

Well, I don't have dairy that often, but when I do, it's generally sheep or goat cheese. And I don't really drink milk, but sheep or goat cheese from grass-fed or pasture-raised goat and sheep are great. And you have to be careful because what are they feeding them? And is it just hay or are they foraging out in the wild and eating all kinds of plants? So I try to get things that I know are having more exposure to a wide variety of plants with different phytochemicals will end up in the milk. The work of Dr. Fred Provenza is fascinating in this area. He's someone we've had on the podcast a few times. and he's a scientist from Utah State University who spent his whole life studying the behavior of goats and animals and what they forage on and the plants they eat and what that does to them, what that does to their health and to the milk and to the quality and the phytochemicals. It's fascinating. So, this isn't just some abstract idea. There's tremendous work being done in this by Fred Provenza and Steven Van Vuuren who was at Duke and now he's going to be at Utah State and he's got a lot more funding to look at the ways in which what the animals eat determines the quality of the milk and meat and how there are phytochemicals that are in meaningful levels, sometimes even greater than the plants that are concentrated in the animal products. So we don't think of getting our phytochemicals, which means phyto means plant, from animals, but actually we can.

Now, talk to us about the raw in raw milk, regardless of whether it's cows, sheeps, goats, or anything else that might be out there. A lot of people see that word and they get afraid, and I think the government has done a lot well-intentioned again to make people very scared about consuming any kind of raw milk products, whether that be straight milk or potentially cheeses. How worried or not worried should people be when it comes to consuming a type of raw milk in their diet?

I mean, you know, it depends how it's all taken care of and where the animals are raised and how they're raised and the cleanliness. But there is a risk of infection, things like brucellosis, campylobacter, cryptosporidium, E. coli, listeria, salmonella. These are various bugs that that can occur in milk that can make people pretty sick. So, I think raw milk can be obtained in America, but it's highly regulated and you kind of have to get it off the grid and some people just swear by it, but I think there is a risk to it. So, I think be careful, know where you're getting it from and make sure that you're smart about it.

Is it kind of like raw fish? I mean, so many people have sushi and there's so many sushi restaurants around there. Of course, you can still get sick from having raw fish. Is it like that, that you just have to be smart, make sure you go to a trusted place?

Yeah, I mean, if the fish has to be prepared a certain way, they have to be freezing at first and then thawing it, there's all kinds of tricks to get rid of the parasites and stuff in the fish. I think the same thing is true, but if it's a really good place, if there's really good cleanliness in the milk production system, if feces aren't coming into contact with the milk, if there's making sure they check the animals for infection, making sure that there's no tuberculosis in the animal, making sure that there's There's no not kind of unsanitary conditions in the milk processing plant or cross-contamination from workers. It's a lot of sort of food safety and hygiene that's required if you're gonna make sure you're safe while you're drinking raw milk.

Do you have a case study of a patient or somebody in your practice that dairy and removing dairy from their diet was a key component of them restoring their health? I know you have yours. You shared yours a little earlier. Is there anybody that you can think of where dairy seemed to be something that was very influential in terms of them restoring some of their function?

I mean, actually, you know, this was even before I was a functional medicine doctor when I was an ER doctor. And I was, I just remember this patient I had come in who was a little kid, was a toddler, probably three years old, two, three years old, and just one ear infection after the other, one sinus infection after the other. And I, you know, interviewed the mother, and I said, well, what? what's the story here? Did this was going on since birth? Did it happen a particular time? When did it start to occur? As well, when I stopped breastfeeding and I introduced milk into his diet, I'm like, oh, that's interesting. You know, so getting these kids off of dairy often gets rid of sinus infections, ear infections, the congestion that causes in these kids. So I think, you know, that's a sort of a really simple case. I've had people with cystic acne. I've had people with all kinds of inflammatory skin issues like eczema, psoriasis. So Really when you start to look at it, the common inflammatory diseases that people suffer from in terms of respiratory illnesses, in terms of asthma, in terms of eczema, those are hugely responsive to elimination of dairy. And other patients, I remember, you know, severe irritable bowel syndrome, you get rid of dairy and they're good. So it depends on this case and the patient. I mean, sometimes it may be more subtle. There may be other factors that you don't maybe see you have a reaction, but is a 60 hormones in milk causing some type of hormonal response that's increasing your risk of cancer such as prostate or uterine cancer. So, I'm very cautious about having consumed, people consume a lot of dairy. But, I'm okay with people trying especially European sheep or goat dairy, which you can get in most stores. Like Manchego cheese, a sheep cheese from Spain, not that expensive. So, you can get some of the products that are available on the market now from Europe and other places where it's either raw or it's, you know, you know how they've been doing this for thousands of years in the same way and the shepherds are taking the goats and sheep up in the mountains.

That's okay. So one of the challenges in the United States is that we have a lot of our dairy consumption that is associated with sugar consumption because it's very rarely that just people are having straight up a glass of milk. It's often milk and cereal, which are sugary cereals. It's often in the form of ice creams and different creams that are out there or they're adding milk to their coffee. So talk about the combination of sugar and dairy together and just any kind of thoughts you want to share about that.

Sure, I mean, well, you know, acne is a huge problem. It affects so many people. I know you've struggled with that and you got rid of it by cutting out dairy.

I did, absolutely.

And sugar is the other big driver of acne. So that combo sugar and dairy, It's pretty bad for your microbiome. It tends to cause disruptions that lead to inflammation and acne. It can cause more dysbiosis or yeast overgrowth. So it can create a lot more problems if you're combining sugar. And what's really concerning me is that the government says that we should be having three servings of milk a day for adults and two servings for kids. There is just no data to support that. It's not my opinion. It's not some crazy idea that came up out of with a hat. This is based on extensive literature reviews in major journals like the New England Journal of Medicine by top scientists. And the reason that those guidelines are in there is because the Dairy Council is essentially promoting with the government the use of dairy and it's hugely influential. So unfortunately, the whole idea that it's nature's perfect food, that it's a great sports drink, that it helps you lose weight, that it's better for your bones, that is important for kids to grow is just pure nonsense. I mean, I'm six foot three. I never drank milk as a kid. I mean, I hated milk. I don't know why, but I just didn't like it. It tastes like snot to me. So, I just didn't drink it. My mother would force me to have milk. So, the only way she'd get me was to have coffee and sugar and milk together. But, I really think that we have to be very careful about assuming that that the propaganda that we hear from the government is true and do our own homework and check out this article. Just Google Milk and Health, Walter Willett. There's also an article on Medium by Dr. Ludwig that we can link to that's quite good that is actually about exactly this topic. And, I think you should sort of look at that and we'll link to it in the show notes. But, it's sort of more less academic, more consumer friendly description of the summary of the findings, but it'll open your eyes pretty big.

Now, there's been a lot of education on dairy. You've been a big part of that over the last decade or more. And dairy sales have gone down in terms of total amounts of sales by millions and millions of dollars. And a lot of that is the education and some of that is also dairy alternatives. Now, dairy alternatives have their own story that we have to be mindful of. When it comes to dairy alternatives and plant milks like almond almond milks and other options that are out there, oat milks, where can they be beneficial and where do we also have to be mindful about their consumption?

I think there are problems because almonds, for example, require huge amounts of water. Many of these are not necessarily grown in ways that are regenerative or restore the soil and the earth. often they're mixed with sugar and thickeners that are not necessarily good for you. So you have to be very careful about where you're getting your product from, what's in it. Some of the thickeners like the carrageenan is terrible for a leaky gut and causes disruption in your gut and leads to all kinds of secondary inflammatory problems. So I think there's a real importance to understanding how we can choose the right alternatives. But again, you don't have to think about having to have milk. It's not like if you get rid of dairy, it means you have to replace it with something else. Like parents go, well, if I don't feed my kids dairy, what am I gonna give them? Soy milk or almond milk? No, you don't have to give them any of that. Just give them food. I mean, kids in Japan don't have milk. Kids in most of the world never don't have milk. They just have whatever they eat. Like it's not special kids food. It's not some kind of dairy alternative. It's just food. Now, there's foods, for example, that have a lot of calcium like soy, which tofu has a lot of calcium in it. They can really help, but we need to break out of this whole idea that we should be consuming dairy every day for our health because it's false and especially for kids, it can be quite problematic.

And if people are going to look for plant milks that they want to use in making a smoothie or they want to add to their coffee, what are the big picture things that they should be looking for when it comes to a brand that they choose?

One, it should try to be organic or regenerative, which is hard to find, although organic is easier. Two, it shouldn't be having any added sugars. Three, it shouldn't have these weird thickeners like carrageenan and xanthan gum and other things, which can be really damaging to the gut. And before you probably want to pick things that are more ecologically friendly. Almond milk is great, but it's also a challenge in terms of the amount of water that's used. Most of the almonds are grown in California, and it's It's a big environmental issue. So, you know, a little bit of soy milk can be okay, although I would be careful with that because when you have concentrated soy milk, it can create hormonal disruption. You can use coconut milk, you can use, in fact, macadamia milk, cashew milk, hemp milk. There's a lot of milk. You can even make your own. And in my cookbook, Food, What the Heck Should I Cook, there's a bunch.

Of recipes for how to make your own nut milks at home. Yeah, one simple hack for people, even though it is very simple to make these milks, you can make seed milks. So you could take things like, sesame seed butter, and if you throw that in a blender, turn it on high, blend it really quickly with some water, that's a little hack to create your own milks at home. I personally, I tend to go for unsweetened almond milk. There's some good brands that are at Whole Foods that you can find that are out there, because it's hard to find unsweetened milks in general, so it's a little easier to find. My favorite is milkadamia. Milkadamia, right, that's a macadamia nut milk that's out there. You might have to dig a little bit, but again, we don't have to replace the dairy in our diet with milk, but it is nice to have some plant milks to make smoothie out of or to add to your coffee. So great recommendations that over there. If somebody was gonna be in a situation where they had dairy and they know that they're typically don't do well with dairy or the things that they could take supplements or anything else to mitigate the impact of dairy on their body.

Well, people get confused because there's the effects of lactose, which is essentially digestive, where you drink milk and you get bloating, distension, gas, fermentation, and you just feel like you got a food baby. That's from lactose intolerance, which is an enzyme deficiency. So, you can actually take a replacement enzyme with your meal if you tend to get that and you want to have dairy or you're gonna maybe accidentally ingest dairy. So, that's available and it's called Lactase. There's Lactaid, there's Lactaid milk. So, you can actually buy these products in the drugstore. They're available. That's different than the effects of casein, which is the protein in milk. So that often causes more systemic inflammation, more allergies, autoimmunity, cancer, and acne, and all sorts of other issues that are from A1 casein. So you really want to focus on A2 casein. Now you can go a2milk.com and there's a website where you can find sources of even cow milk that are from heirloom cows or, for example, Guernsey or Jersey cows tend to have less or very little of the A1 casein, mostly A2 casein. So it's really available to you. Plus, you can source sheep and goat milk or cheese, which has A2 casein, and typically people can tolerate that better. So I encourage people to shift over to sheep and goat milk when they can, or sheep and goat yogurt or sheep and goat cheese because it tends to be less inflammatory, tends to be better tolerated, tends to even be easier to digest than traditional milk, even with lactose intolerance. but you really want to sort of understand that there's really three big areas for milk. One is lactose, one is casein, and what kind of casein? Now, the third of the hormones in milk. So, you know, what kind of environment was the animal raised in? Were they milked while they were pregnant? Were they given extra growth hormones? What was going on? So, all those hormones, those 60 different hormones, they can cause cancer, they can cause various kinds of disruptions in metabolism and increases insulin production in the body. So, you want to be very careful about these three categories, lactose, casein, and hormones. And make sure you're minimizing the effects from lactose, minimizing the A1 casein, and minimizing all the hormones. You want to know my secret for living a long and happy and healthy life? Well, all I have to do is check out my weekly newsletter, Mark's Picks, where I share my favorite tips for health, longevity, well-being, and lots more. Check it out and link below.

So just like you went to Italy and you spent time in Sardinia with the centenarians in the blue zone that was over there, I spent some time with the hunter-gatherer tribe in Kenya called the Samburu, who are cousins of the Maasai. And what was interesting to me is that for about 800 years, as estimated, they primarily have lived off of two things.

Milk and meat.

Milk and blood actually.

Blood.

Not even meat. They very rarely eat meat. It's on special occasions. It's a birthday. They actually purse puncture the jugular vein of the cow. They don't kill it. I was there when I saw it happen. They weren't doing it for me, but they were just doing it in their normal life. And it's often when milk is low or grass is low and they're not producing enough milk. And it's one way to preserve their cows and to be there. And the rest of the time they drink dairy. Like when it's grassy season, they drink dairy. But again, the dairy is from These I mean, these cows are funny looking cows. They're funny looking cows. They're not native to Africa specifically, but they have been those cows that have been there for at least a good 300, 400, 500, 600, 800 years. So I guess they are relatively native and, you know, they seem to be in pretty good health and shape. So it's not that dairy is all bad for everybody, but their microbiome has evolved over the last few hundred years to do well with that.

There's also quite a different product, you know, like like the Masai and for example, add many, many spices to the milk and the meat. And the spices, turns out, helps to mitigate any harmful effects from oxidation or the issues you can get with meat or milk. So it's really quite interesting when you start to add the spice in, like in Morocco, they had over 20 spices to the meat dishes. They don't have the same issues with cancer or other potentially harmful effects of meat. And I think it's just really interesting to see how we increase phytonutrient content, how we cook it, the method it's cooked, what we cook it with, spices, not spices, whether grilled or not grilled, those all affect the health effects. And if you look at how do we include a product like dairy, it's better to include ones that are coming with their own phytochemicals from eating wild plants and also consume them with various kinds of spices. For example, chai is something that you make in India a lot, right? Totally. Dairy with tons of spices.

And traditionally would have ginger, lemongrass, a ton of different things that are inside of that. Now we've removed all the medicinal components and we've added more sugar. And so everybody in India has gotten fatter and fatter and fatter.

No insult to my people, but it's.

Just the truth of the situation. Right, exactly. Bottom line, the reason I wanted to bring that up is that there could be some examples, as you mentioned, where dairy could be a fit, but one thing that we know is modern industrialized dairy cannot be the base of our diet. In addition to that, Mark, take us through a little bit of a recap of what you talked about in today's masterclass while we pass it off to.

The conclusion of this episode. So I think, you know, we've all been brainwashed to think that milk is nature's perfect food. And it is if you're a calf, as I said earlier, but not if you're a human. There's no biological requirement for milk. There's no need to drink milk at all, zero. It may have not only a lack of health benefits, but a lot of potential harms, including increased fracture risk, not reduction, an increase in cancer risk, an increase in digestive problems, an increase in all kinds of allergic and autoimmune issues, eczema, sinus, acne, allergies, and worse, autoimmunity. For example, type 1 diabetes has been linked to dairy. It's also not nature's perfect food in terms of sports. It's a sports drink in terms of weight loss that has completely been debunked. The Dairy Council has funded many, many studies looking at how it's a sports drink or a weight loss drink, and it depends how you study it and how this data is looked at. Dr. Ludwig and others have looked at dairy and other companies that are food industry companies funding research and they find that when a food industry company funds research, it's 8 to 50 times more likely to show a positive outcome for that product. So if you're having an independent science study dairy and sports and weight loss, they don't find anything. But of course, at the Dairy Council studies, of course they find something, just like when Coca-Cola studies soda and whether it causes obesity, of course they don't find it's linked to obesity, but of course we know it is similar thing. So I think it's really important to be be Vigilant about the messaging around Dairy, particularly from our government. It's very confusing. Why would our government, why would the dietary guidelines, which are done by top scientists in nutrition around the country, why, why would they be promoting Dairy? Well, it's all political, it's all money, and it's not based on science. And I think that the, the review from Dr. Ludwig was quite, and Will it was quite compelling. And I had a friend of mine who was a scientist, really steeped in area who was actually in conversations with the Dietary Guidelines Committee and said, look, the data just isn't there to support this. And they're like, yeah, yeah, we know, but we kind of have to include it. It's like, whoa, you know, it's just not kosher. And so I think with that said, industrial modern dairy from Holstein cows that are hybridized have A1 casein are pump full of hormones, pump full of antibiotics. They're raised in ways that are harmful for the animals, harmful for the planet, climate environment, and ultimately harmful for humans. With that said, it's okay if you want to have sheep or goat dairy that's pasture raised, that's eating a variety of wild plants that's not fit pump full of hormones and antibiotics, but can be part of your diet. Would I make it a staple? Maybe. I mean, the Sardinians seem to have cheese as a staple. They have a staple in their diet and they have it every day. and it has these phytochemicals, so it actually might be really beneficial. You know, we might be, you know, if you can't get as much vegetables, for example, in the winter, you could eat your cheese and get the phytochemicals because the cheese is preserving it, you know, over the winter.

So, you know, there may be benefits to eating sheep and goat dairy. And their gut bacteria is probably a lot more robust. They're outside, they're farming, they're walking in the hills, they have a lot more activity. So, there's many things that are going on that relates to that. Well, Mark, it's just another a constant reminder of how we all need to become the CEO of our own health. We need to step into the CEO position of our health and get our own information, hire and fire our own team, pick the right doctors, find the right people to support us, find the right information and make our own decisions because if we don't look out for ourselves, nobody else will. So I think it's a perfect place to pass it off to you to conclude and I'll just say one more item. Both you and I have seen the benefits firsthand from removing dairy from our diet, industrialized dairy. Your skin looks great. I hope my skin looks pretty good right now, and I would want that for everybody else. So definitely at least try doing an elimination diet, something like that's in your book, the Pegan Diet. You talk about an elimination diet inside of there. 10-day reset. People can also do 10-day reset, 10-day detox diet, and they can see for.

Themselves after 30 days of removing dairy, gluten, sugar, how they actually feel. Yeah, so bottom line, make sure you immediately quit all industrial dairy. And if you want any dairy, sheep and goat pasture raised is okay. Try it out, see how you feel. If you love that last video, you're gonna love the next one. Check it out here. In my lifetime, I've seen a dramatic change. Now, when I was born, you know, five percent was the Obesity rate. Now it's 40. I mean, it's. It's staggering. It's an eight-fold increase.

And.

And the reason is we've increased our.