From: pburch@bcm.tmc.edu (Paula Burch)
Newsgroups: misc.kids
Subject: Re: Dr.Spock and the Milk Controversy
Date: 2 Oct 1992 18:51:46 GMT
Organization: Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Tx
Distribution: world
Reply-To: pburch@bcm.tmc.edu (Paula Burch)
NNTP-Posting-Host: roc.mbcr.bcm.tmc.edu
Keywords: Spock, Milk
Originator: pburch@roc.mbcr.bcm.tmc.edu


In article <36Te02NJ24Bm01@JUTS.ccc.amdahl.com>, avs20@ccc.amdahl.com (  134  Atul V Salgaonkar) writes:
|> ....
|> I would like to know more about :
|> - Potential link to diabetes
|> - Risks of drinking calcium  thru milk
|> - Risks associated with drinking cow's milk at different age groups
|> Of course, I agree that breastmilk is the best nutrition for infants.

There is supposedly no harm in letting your child drink cow's milk over 
the age of 1 year, although you might want to avoid it anyway if s/he's 
at a high risk of juvenile diabetes. Juvenile diabetes (more accurately 
known as Type I diabetes) is apparently more likely in children who drink 
cow's milk before one year, but children who have never had any cow's 
milk products still can develop the disease, and the vast majority of 
people who drink cow's milk as children never develop diabetes.

The group that advocates not giving any cow's milk to children, ever, 
is an 8000-member group of animal-rights activist physicians, which 
believes that using cows for milk is unethical. This makes any of 
their pronouncements on the subject of the safety of cows milk 
rather untrustworthy, since their purpose is to promote an agenda 
unrelated to health factors.

Cow's milk is not necessary in the human diet, and the high RDAs 
of calcium in the US are apparently needed only due to the peculiarly 
high protein content of the American diet. If you do follow the 
standard American diet, however, you would be very unwise to dismiss 
the recommendation to consume lots of calcium, and it's hard to get 
a kid to eat, for example, two cups of cooked kale, in order to get 
the calcium equivalent of one cup of milk.

The link to diabetes is that the antibodies that destroy the insulin-
producing cells in causing Type I diabetes may actually be triggered 
by exposure to the protein Bovine Serum Albumin, abundant in cow's milk. 
Infants tend to have relatively "leaky" guts, so more whole proteins 
are absorbed by them than by most adults. Proteins are supposed to be 
broken down by digestion into amino acids, and only amino acids, not 
whole proteins, are good to absorb through the gut. When whole proteins 
are absorbed, allergies or other antibodies may develop.

To summarize--most infants who drink cow's milk products will never 
develop Type I diabetes, and some infants will develop it even if they 
never consume any cow's milk products, but some infants may develop 
Type I diabetes only if they do consume cow's milk products.

It is possible that avoiding dairy products in the diet of the nursing 
mother may be helpful in protecting SOME infants. Most adults do not 
have "leaky" guts, but some few do, and women with leaky guts can have 
babies that are (1) sensitized to dairy products in utero and then 
(2) develop colic when their mothers drink milk. These babies can 
almost always tolerate human milk from other mothers who drink cow's 
milk, because these other mothers do not have "leaky" guts. My guess 
is that a few of these infants might eventually suffer from more than colic 
if their mothers persisted in drinking milk, but this is only a guess. 
Of course, no one would drink milk if she found that avoiding milk 
prevented the trauma of having a colicky baby. I think everyone with 
a colicky baby should try avoiding dairy products for at least one week,
just as a test, just in case this is a cure, but of course many (most?) 
cases of colic have nothing to do with dairy products.

Paula Burch
pburch@bcm.tmc.edu
Newsgroups: misc.kids