First of all, I want you all to give yourselves a big round of applause. Nice. You deserve it. Because as consumers like yourselves are becoming more aware of what goes on in factory farming and expressing your outrage, manufacturers are responding. Even though the US approves the use of recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone, US, by the way, is one of only three industrialized nations that hasn't banned it's use, more and more venders are putting pressure on their suppliers to source milk that can be certified that rBGH was not administered to the cows. They're doing this because consumers are learning that when cows are made to produce unnaturally exorbitant quantities of milk by being injected with rBGH, another hormone also sky rockets in the cow. The hormone Insulin-like Growth Factor I of cows treated with rBGH also increases and this hormone ends up in the milk. The IGF-1 in cows is identical to the IGF-1 in humans and this milk has been shown to increase the IGF-1 levels of the consumer (1,2). The IGF-1 level in human's blood is positively associated with breast cancer, prostate cancer (3, 4), uteri cancer (5) and ovarian cancer (6,7). Cancer of these four organs, breasts, prostate, uterus and ovaries, are going to be mentioned quite a bit today. That's because these organs are all very sensitive to the levels of sex hormones in our blood and we'll find that today's milk has a considerable impact on the sex hormone levels in the blood of its consumers. And the use of rBGH is not the only factor that makes today's milk so rich in sex hormones.

We get plenty of warnings that estrogen replacement therapy promotes breast cancer. It promotes breast cancer because it stimulates the mammary glands so if estrogen activity is higher than normal, cancer cells in the breast proliferate. Estrogen's carcinogenic effect is not limited to the breasts. Estrogen also increases cell division in the uterus cells. Increased cell division means increases DNA replication which leads to increased DNA replication errors which leads to increased mutations which ultimately lead to malignant tumors in the uterus (8,9). And estrogen has been shown to have an adverse effect on the ovarian epithelium (10). Estrogen also indirectly promotes cancer to all these organs by increasing the carcinogenic effects of Insulin-like Growth Factor I.

Well, that's a lot of talk about estrogen but what does this all have to do with milk? Profits would be lost if cows were not constantly producing milk. So cows are milked even while they're pregnant. Pregnancy tremendously boosts estrogen concentration in the cow's milk and this gets ingested by the consumer. In fact, 60-80% of dietary estrogen comes from dairy (11). Sixty to 80% of dietary estrogen comes from dairy. Actually, it turns out that the most active forms of estrogen, estrone and estradiol, have low oral bio-activity. They have trouble surviving the GI tract. But much of the estrogen in milk is in the form of estrone sulfate which is absorbed intact and is readily converted to estrone and estradiol once it's in the consumer's blood. That's probably why estrogen levels of people that consume dairy regularly are so much higher than that of people who consume little or no dairy.

So if A then B and B then C, can we say if A then C? Here's what I'm getting at. I said that dairy consumption increases estrogen activity and I said that high estrogen activity causes cancer. So can I say that dairy consumption causes cancer? One report published in a 2005 issue of Medical Hypotheses correlated the incidence rates for breast, ovarian, and uteri cancers with food intake from 40 countries in 5 continents . The food items included were animal fats, meat, eggs, butter, milk, cereals, pulses, beans, soy beans, peas, fruits, vegetables, coffee, tea, and alcoholic beverages. Milk was second only to meat in its correlation to breast cancer and cheese was next. And out of all the foods evaluated, milk was the most closely correlated to the incidence of ovarian cancer. Milk and cheese ranked #1 and #2 for uteri cancer. A study published in a 2005 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute gathered the data from the 12 publications foun d by searching the medical journal data base Medline for prospective studies evaluating the association of dairy products and calcium with prostate cancer found that dairy and calcium intakes were each individually and collectively associated with the risk of prostate cancer (12). Another review study published in the International Journal of Cancer in 1995 evaluated several cohort and case control studies and concluded that dairy is positively associated with ovarian cancer (13). This may also be attributed to galactose, the sugar derived from the digestion of the milk sugar lactose. Because studies show that galactose is also toxic to the ovaries (13).

For the case of the ovaries, the hormones may not be the only factors in milk that promote cancer. The ovaries have a high local concentration of the enzyme galactose-1-phoshate uridyltransferase. No, you don't need to memorize the name of this enzyme but what this enzyme does is it metabolizes galactose and the fact that it's so concentrated in the ovaries is likely why galactose is so toxic to the ovaries. We Let's back up. effect galactose, the milk sugar formed from the digestion of lactose, has on the ovaries. We know galactose is toxic to the ovaries but is it contributing to milk's carcinogenicity to the ovaries? It's been shown that lactase activity is positively correlated to ovarian cancer. Lactase is the enzyme that digests lactose into galactose. So let's evaluate the possible reasons why lactase activity is positively correlated to ovarian cancer. We'll acknowledge the first possibility with a tongue twiste r. Ladies that lack lactase lack the ability to digest lactose into galactose thus they absorb less galactose to be metabolized by the galactose metabolizing enzyme galactose-1-phoshate uridyltransferase thus they are less likely to develop ovarian cancer. But there's a second possibility. We know that if we consume little or no dairy our lactase activity diminishes. So perhaps, women with less lactase activity are at less risk of developing ovarian cancer simply because they're not consuming dairy, thus not consuming all those sex hormones we discussed earlier, and the low lactase activity is an unrelated indicator that they're not consuming dairy. Either way, it's not looking good for dairy, whether it's due to the hormones or the galactose or both, it's coming from the milk.

Let's move away from the hormones now and talk about what happens to the milk after it leaves the cow. Today, milk gets homogenized to keep the fat from separating from the whey. This is a physical manipulation of the milk that breaks particles down to much smaller particles by pressing the milk through very tiny pores. In so doing, it somehow causes the fat in milk to protect some of the proteins from digestion AND it makes the proteins so small that they can be absorbed into our blood from our gut without being digested. Some of these proteins trigger our immune systems to produce antibodies to fight them off. It turns out that these proteins are very similar to the protein in our cartilage so the antibodies we produce to protect us from this unfamiliar protein in our blood attack our own joints. That's why dairy is so linked to rheumatoid arthritis. Another protein in milk that homogenization causes to be absorbed intact is an enzyme called xanthine oxidase. As the name implies, it is a potent oxidizer and it oxidizes cholesterol in our arteries. Cholesterol oxidation is what causes plaque and subsequently atherosclerosis, arteriosclerosis and all the other ailments that arise from circulatory blockages.

OK. Time for the wrap up. One, today's milk is unnaturally high in sex hormones because of the hormones the cows are given and because the cows are milked while they are pregnant. These sex hormones promote cancers of the uterus, ovaries, breasts and prostate of the consumer. Two, galactose in milk is toxic to the consumer's ovaries. Three, the homogenization of milk enables some of the proteins to be absorbed without digestion. These proteins oxidize cholesterol in the arteries which promotes plaque and they cause an immune response that deteriorates the consumer's joints. I'm Ken Viscidi, not Kansas City. Thanks again for tuning into This Vegan Life. If you have questions, comments, or praise, write me at ken < at > thisveganlife < dot > com. See ya next time.

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