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 we're gonna go we're gonna come back the most it's pretty simple drew 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 interest 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 going to take you all the way all back so historically humans never drank milk i mean were you going to milk a saber-toothed tiger 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 100 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 caffes or confined animal feeding operations under horrible conditions and fed all kinds of horrible things including ground 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 was actually banned in humans because it caused all kinds of cervical cancer and fetal abnormalities and women who took it 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 you're also eating 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 fit all kinds of weird stuff and so basically it's it's not the dairy it used to be so well maybe you could tolerate dairy if you're having it from some heirloom cow raised in on grass and not fed all this weird stuff and antibiotics and hormones might be okay and i think we kind of have to take a 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 um there there's a recent paper uh that was published in new england journal medicine the most prestigious medical journal in the world by dr 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 100 studies on dairy and they basically blew apart all the myths that we've held so dearly to all the myths that have been actually promulgated by the dairy council in 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're 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 will may help you grow tall and strong but that's not necessarily a good thing it that it helps you with your 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 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 a hundred thousand people particularly adults that they followed them and the more milk they drank the more fractures they had so that for every glass of milk they drank they had a nine percent 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 um it affects people's digestion widely because it actually increases um lactose intake and probably 75 percent of the world is lactose intolerant uh what about heart disease in the saturated fat and milk well it turns out that there's no correlation um and there was a paper review over six million person years of data um by dr darius mozafarian from tufts was published a few years ago called his butter back i think it was called his butter back and 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 it 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 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 wait a minute all the things we believe are just not true so in some senses dairy is not exactly what they told us in terms of it being very likely uh linked to many of the things you talked about earlier and in other cases having a certain amount of dairy could be beneficial yes well we we don't know for sure and the question is what dairy and i think uh what culture where's the dairy from and we're gonna get into some interesting stories about dairy and how how all dairy is not the same dairy is not dairy is not dairy but there are there are there are uh some interesting correlations with diabetes and dairy the more dairy fat you have in your blood the more um 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 the saturated fat is that your is that what yeah maybe it may be unsaturated fats seem to correlate with a positive benefit which is kind of couch country um which is contradicting everything with soda we thought we knew and the um the other fascinating thing is that we eat dairy now in a homogenized pasteurized form which is unlikely ever did before historically and pasteurization is good because it reduces the risk of infection and you know terrible things you can get from raw milk but the homogenation 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 unhomogenized milk let's say or somogenized milk there are profoundly different effects on your cholesterol the homogenized milk is terrible whereas the the unhomogenized milk is 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 there 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 i mean like we know from the literature that you know dairy can cause eczema and allergies and asthma and irritable bowel and all kinds of cancer 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 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 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 other than gluten the most common food sensitivity and it may not be a true allergy but it just may be a sensitivity that it's 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 the right then there's sort of a secondary list you know eggs or grains or beans or corn or soy or nuts or seeds or night shades those are sort of down the list of the elimination diet but dairy and gluten are you know 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 percent 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 for 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 in 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 there is the first thing to go let's talk about by the way you know 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 well you know if i consume regular you know industrial modern dairy it will give me terrible digestive issues congestion you know runny nose and i'll get pimples so that is for sure i've tried and tested it so many times however uh 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 homogenized is goat and sheep dairy different how is it different is all goat and sheep dairy okay are only some versions of it okay so you start to get in the nuances of the information and food and i'll just sort of share a story of my recent trip to sardinia where they are shepherds and they basically have goats and sheep and they and sardinia has a blue zone yes sardinia the blue zone where people live to be very old and uh it has the longest lived males in the entire world well over a hundred as 20 times as many centenarians as there are in the united states and their diet is predominately cheese okay and a lot of cheese and they have this interesting uh 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 its 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 and that's so important understand so these the dairy that i eat when i was in sardinia did not bother me at all i didn't get any gas 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 it 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 to 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 three four hundred milligrams a day of calcium as opposed to what the government here recommends which is a thousand to fifteen hundred milligrams so why do 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 in preventing osteoporosis and bone 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 you know between you know 50 to 75. uh what's interesting to note is a recent paper came out about covid that if your vitamin d level is over 50 nanograms per deciliter your risk of death from covered with zero there's no treatment that does that no drug no vaccine nothing so it just it's important to have your vitamin d at a right at the right level but calcium is definitely not uh 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 right could support the leaching of calcium from your body but you for example you have some coffee if you have a cup in the morning that's fine but if you're drinking coffee all day or having tons of caffeine and 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 calcium 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 you get all kinds of other benefits uh same thing with sesame seeds tahini which is browned 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 or the bones but you get with the bones and you eat the bones you're going to 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 uh you know the uh the latitude that you live in and you're out in the sun 20 minutes naked from 10 00 am to 2 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 e so about 80 to 90 percent are either deficient or insufficient in vitamin d and you should really get it from a supplement and and there are many of them out there but vitamin d3 between two to five thousand a day is safe and effective and keeping your vitamin levels up and everybody's a little different some people need more less depending on their genetics but but really that's a good range and it's important to just check your level so that you see that you're not you know 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 you know i don't have dairy that often but when i do it's generally sheep or goat cheese and um i don't really drink milk uh but but cheaper goat cheese from um you know grass-fed um or kind of pasture-raised goat and sheeps are great and and you have to be careful because what are they feeding them and is it it just 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 doc the work of dr fred provenza's is fascinating in this area he's some 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 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 is fascinating so this isn't just some abstract idea there's tremendous work being done in this by fred provenza and steven van valette who was at duke and now he's going to be at utah state and 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 or which means vitamins 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 in the cleanliness but there is a risk of infection things like brucellosis campylobacter cryptosporidium e coli listeria salmonella these are various bugs that can occur in milk that can make people pretty sick so i think you know 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 you um you know 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 you know if it's a really good place if there's if there's really good cleanliness in the in the milk production system you know 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 you know there's there's no all not kind of unsanitary conditions in the milk processing plant or cross-contamination from workers it's it's it's a lot of sort of food safety and hygiene it's required if you're going to make sure uh 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 knew 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 remembered this patient i had come in who was a little kid it was a toddler probably three years old uh two or 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 curse as well when i stopped breastfeeding and i introduced milk and i was dying 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 just 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 the common inflammatory diseases that people suffer from in terms of respiratory illnesses in terms of asthma in terms of eczema and those are those are hugely responsive to elimination of dairy uh and and other patients remember you know severe irritable bowel syndrome you get rid of dairy and they're 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 have a reaction but is it is a 60 hormones in milk causing some type of hormonal response it'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 sheep cheese from spain not that expensive so you can 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 ghosts 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 uh just any kind of thoughts you want to share sure i mean well you know uh acne is a huge problem it affects so many people i know you've struggled with that and 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 is 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 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 of four kids there's just no data to support that it's not my opinion it's not some you know crazy idea that came up out of the hat this is based on extensive literature reviews in major journals like the new england 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 spirit food that it's a great sports drink that helps you lose weight that's better for your bones that it's important for kids to grow it's just pure nonsense i mean i'm six foot three i never drink milk as a kid i mean i hated milk i don't know why but i just didn't like it tastes like snot to me so i just didn't drink it my mother would like force me to have like milk so the only way she'd get me was have coffee and and sugar and milk together so um but i i really think that that we have to be you know 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 uh ludwig that we can we can link to that's quite good that is actually about about exactly this topic and i think you should you should sort of look at that we'll link to it in the show notes but it's sort of more uh less academic more consumer-friendly description of the summary of the findings but it's 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 uh have their own story that we have to be mindful of when it comes to dairy alternatives and plant milks like 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 i mean i think there are problems because you know 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 and leads to all kinds of secondary inflammatory problem so i think there's there's a real importance to understanding how we can choose the right alternatives but again you don't have to think about um 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 feel like it's dairy what am i going to 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 most of the world never don't have milk they just have to whatever they eat like it's not special kids food it's not you know some kind of dairy alternative it's just food now there's foods for example have a lot of calcium like soy which tofu has a lot of calcium in it um they can really help but uh you know we need to sort of break out of this whole idea that we should be consuming dairy every day for our health because it's just 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's easier too it shouldn't be having any added sugars three it shouldn't have these weird thickeners like carrageenan xanthan gum and other things which can be really damaging to the gut uh and and um before you probably want to pick things that are you know more ecologically friendly almond milk is great but it's also a challenge in terms of the amount of water that's choosing most 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 we have concentrated soy milk it can create hormonal disruption you can use coconut milk you can use in fact uh 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 can 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 uh 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 it's milkadamia macadamia 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 um coffee so great recommendations that over there if somebody was going to be in a situation where they had dairy and they know that they typically don't do well with dairy are 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 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 you know going to maybe accidentally adjust dairy so that's available and it's called lactase there's lactate there's lactate 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 a2kc 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 casing mostly a2 casing so it's really 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 it tends to be better tolerate it 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 what kind of environment was the animal raised and were they milk 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 it increases insulin production in the body so you want to be very careful about the these three categories lactose casein and hormones and make sure you're minimizing the effects from lactose minimizing the the a1 casein and minimizing all the hormones do you want to know my secrets for living a long and happy and healthy life well all you 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 the link below so just like you went to italy and you spent time in sardinia with the centenarians and the blue zone those 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 not even meat they very rarely eat meats on special occasions birthday they actually puncture the jugular vein of the cow uh they don't kill it uh 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 time they drink dairy like when it's grassy season they drink dairy but again the dairy is from these i mean these calories 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 um 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 maasai 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 like 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 this is really interesting to see you know how we increase phytonutrient content how we cook it how the method is cooked what we cook it with spices not spices whether you're grilling or not grill those all affect the health effects so and if you sort of look at how do we include a product like dairy it's better include ones that are coming with their own phytochemicals from eating wild plants and also consume them with various kind of spices for example chai is something that you you make in india a lot right that's 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 yeah 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 all 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 master class 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 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 and 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 so it's also not nature's perfect food in terms of sports this is a sports drink in terms of weight loss that that has completely been debunked and 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 but 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 independent science study dairy and sports and weight loss they don't find anything but of course if the dairy council studies it 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 a similar thing so i think it's really important to be vigilant about um 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 and 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 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 this uh 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's like well you know it's just not kosher and so i think um with that said um industrial modern dairy from hosting cows that are hybridized have a1 casein are pumped 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 it's eating a variety of wild plants that's not fit full of hormones and antibiotics but can be i can be part of your diet when i make it a staple you know 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 can eat your cheese and get the phytochemicals because the cheese is preserving it you know over 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 like many things that are going on totally that relates to that well mark it's just another 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 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 vegan diet you talk about an elimination diet inside of there 10 days you can also do 10 day reset 10 day detox diet and they could 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 going to 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 uh was the obesity rate now it's 40 percent i mean it's it's staggering it's an eightfold increase and and the reason is we've increased our

Channel: Mark Hyman, MD

Views: 253,894

Keywords: Mark Hyman, Mark Hyman interview, Mark Hyman live longer, Mark Hyman diet, how to live longer, how to age in reverse, nutrition tips, healthy foods, health tips, health theory, fasting tips, how to never get sick again, prevent disease, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, inspiration, motivation

Id: JvtanADX494

Length: 40min 36sec (2436 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 03 2022