Michelle Obama’s “Lets Move” Program

On the heels of an extremely controversial and potentially $1,000,000,000,000.00 dollar health care bill, I think it is important that First Lady Michelle Obama’s pet project is taking on childhood obesity.

Solving this problem may well save our country billions of dollars in health care costs the next 40 years if it is solved. She has started a program called “Lets Move” - and the program is filled with useful information and neat tricks to help parents help kids live a healthy lifestyle.

Childhood obesity is a tragedy, and my heart bleeds for children who are stuffed with addicting unhealthy food as a way to quiet them when they are being noisy, reward them when they do well, or the most egregious of errors, sustain them long tem because their parents can’t be bothered to microwave a $2 bag of broccoli. My heart also bleeds for parents who trust in food industry self regulation and deceiving labeling which make junk food seem like an important part of a child’s diet, and a suitable replacement for healthy natural food. I wonder how much of childhood obesity really is a result of parental wilful ignorance and how much of it is adults being fed the lies of processed food so heavily for the past 30 years it is truly unfair to expect them to “know better”.

Obesity is a real and quickly growing problem.  The following images are from the CDC illustrating obesity rates in America over the past 18 years.

The statistics on childhood obesity are staggering: In minority groups the childhood obesity rate is 50%. Really think about that - one half of children in minority groups are not just heavy or chubby, but obese - roughly 30 or more pounds overweight. And this weight problem is only going to get worse given the fact that minority groups are the ones most likely to have diets heavily laden with cheap worthless food found in convenience stores and fast food “restaurants”.

Consider this: a pound is roughly 3500 calories. If you increase your calorie intake by 100 calories a day, you’ll likely gain 10 lbs (365 days x 100 calories) in a year. A fast food burger has about 900 calories in it, and that is without the soda, fries or milkshake. Given the average American child needs about 1,200 - 1,800 calories a day (depending on gender, lifestyle and age), it is pretty easy to see how someone who has fast food as a cornerstone of their diet will often be way over their daily allotment, and will quickly pile on the weight. Not to mention the total lack of proper nutrition and high intake of saturated fat that comes with a fast food diet.

Obesity can lead to many dangerous conditions like diabetes, hypertension and heart disease but it wasn’t until I watched Jamie Oliver’s “Food Revolution” (ABC 9 pm Friday) that I realized how dangerous obesity can be. The show profiled a family, all of whom were heavy, and focused on the 12 year old boy - easily 70 pounds overweight. The show accompanied him on a visit to a doctor who immediately saw physical signs of diabetes in the child. Diabetes, the doctor explained is dangerous not only because reduced quality of life but complications can cause loss of limbs and blindness and life expectancy is reduced by 30 to 40 years. Had this kid had diabetes (he did not, thankfully) he would have an expected life span of 40 years.

Hearing this story infuriated me. I’m not sure when the responsibility of one’s weight is shifted from the parent to the child, but certainly 12 is on the young side of that line. Furthermore, I’m not sure where the responsibility of healthy eating shifts from the food industry to the individual, but when I read Lucky Charm’s Boxes and Tostidos Chips boasting how much FDA recommended grain is in each serving, I think the line becomes increasingly difficult to draw.

Michelle Obama’s position is that this condition is killing our children, and it is so easily overcome, it is absurd we are struggling with it. I totally agree with our First Lady (and I have hired a landscaper to help me plant a vegetable garden in her honor). Obesity is a major contributor to diabetes, heart disease, hypertension and a whole host of other health problems that are expensive to the system and reduce the quality of life. The idea that half of the children in our minority population and 30% of the kids in our middle to upper class population will have these expensive problems should scare anybody paying attention much more than the added cost of our new health care system.

Here are some of the highlights of the Lets Move Program:

Healthy Choices - a support system for parents including extensive education and access to information about good quality foods. This includes a new food pyramid.

Healthy Schools - Better Food in schools, where children get most of their calories during the day

Physical Activity - Getting kids to get rigorous physical at least an hour a day, coupled with the NFL so kids can see some of their role models encouraging physical activity.

Healthy Food that is Affordable and Accessible - a government program helping to bring healthy affordable food to areas in the country without this access. Also, information on bringing Farmers Markets into neighborhoods. I am going to write more on this topic very soon!

Telling people the truth about their diets (hint: you aren’t eating nearly enough vegetables, and you don’t need to eat that bread) is a total uphill battle further complicated by the food industry’s advantage of billions of dollars in advertising, years of food industry propaganda, and tasty tasty sugar, fat and salt to combat you.

I wish First Lady Obama luck in her endeavors.
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Next Time on Popular Excuses: Farm Fresh To You - Fresh Veggies & Friut to delivered to my door!
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Reading List:
The CDC Site
Lets Move Program
Jamie Oliver's Site
Burger King Nutrition Facts

LA Marathon

My Time 4:36:08

I realize this is a slight depart from my normal Popular Excuses post, and my Next Time On post will be up soon, but I am all a buzz about the LA Marathon which I ran March 21, 2010, and I just gotta talk about it.

History:  I ran LA in 2008, and swore I would never run a street marathon again. It was hard on the body, ugly, and circling downtown for 10 miles was, to be blunt, a total dry hump. I decided to only run ultras from that point on, and spend the next two years enjoying California trails 50K at a time.

Being on the LA Marathon mailing list, I was alerted in late 2009 about a shiny new course for the 2010 LA Marathon, from Dodger Stadium through Hollywood to the Sea. As a home grown Californian, a Santa Monica native, and an employee at offices located in Century City and Brentwood, I couldn’t believe how wonderfully familiar to me the course was. I was giddy with excitement at the idea of finishing a race in the middle of Ocean Blvd, basically my backyard. I signed up the day I received the email (if my bib number is any clue to how quickly I signed up, I was #4750 out of 25,000 entrants).

I started training January of 2010, and out of fear of injuring myself trying to run my Boston Pace, my training consisted only of running very slow for long periods of time. I started with an hour and worked up to 2 hours 40 minutes, with plenty of cross training every week including yoga and cycling. In fact I ran a relatively small amount considering I was marathon training, only once or twice a week max. I avoided injury on the course, though my knee did start to hurt towards the end of the day, despite my slow speed and attempt to baby it.

Marathon day came March 21st at 5:00 in the morning, and after some internal debate about where to line up in the chute (I finally decided to try for a 10 min mile pace) and a delay due to cars parked on the freeway, (ostensibly to sneak a peak of the super runner purple & grey, yours truly), the gun sounded and we were off.

Instantly, I was smiling, and my smile only got bigger as the course went on (especially passing a 101 onramp and then a Cheshire cat grin came across my face entering Hollywood). The weather was perfect; the stadium and “THINK BLUE” signs were a nostalgic send off, and the spectators were so encouraging they were an endorphin drug pulling me along the course. I wasn’t bothered at all by the uphill start, mostly because I slowed my pace way down (though I was listening to some pretty heavy breathing around me and knew that for some people it was going to be a long day). The green Nike Store helpers and Cheer Alley just plain fun. I chatted with people along the way, and found a guy wearing a Mt. Disappointment 50K shirt from 2008, and race I had run that day also. Later I asked a guy with a Camelbak why he had brought water (“Because I don’t want to stop” – makes sense), I ran around an downed runner or two and after seeing pictures of Transformers actor Shia LeBeouf (that guy beat me by less than a minute), I remember seeing him through the Veteran’s center and thinking about the strikingly relevant Veterans shirt he was running in.

(See the guy in the green shirt - that is a Mt. Disappointment shirt and I have the ladies version)

I think my experience with a few races under my belt made me a better at pacing than most people, because in the last 4.5 miles of the race I passed 676 people and was only passed by 76, which is an ego boost to be sure. When I rounded San Vicente onto Ocean, I almost cried I was so happy to be so close to the end. The crowds were dense, the energy was palpable and I almost believed every one of them was in some way cheering for me, I cranked up The Temper Trap’s "Sweet Disposition" (yeah, I admit, I needed music after mile 13). When I passed the 26 mile marker I tapped the guy next to me on the shoulder and told him we were going to sprint to the finish. I bested him by less than a second, but I think he had fun leaving it all out on the course with me.

Even now three days later, writing about my experience, my joy knows no bounds, and for the first time in over a year, I feel like a real runner (I ran the whole time, albeit slowly). I am already furiously checking the LA Marathon website waiting for news on the 2011 race. I am even considering purchasing this stupid picture of myself throwing up some horns:

I received an email telling me I was a legacy member of the new course, so I hope to keep the tradition of completing the LA Marathon from the Stadium to the Sea as long as my legs (or heaven forbid, my arms) will let me. The energy I have for this race is contagious, and I think I’ve already convinced three people to join me next year. Very well done, and hats off to the R.D & the City of LA and Santa Monica. I’m not sure what it took to get that course, but I believe it's beauty and history contributed to what may have been a life changing run for a lot of us athletes.

I LOVE LA!

Emotional Eating

I’m in a bad place right now.

I ate horribly all weekend, I ate a lot right before bed on Saturday and Sunday, I ate junk food which I NEVER do, and I had almost no salad. This morning I was too afraid of the scale to weigh myself, I was looking at pictures of me in which look terrible, I have a ton of work staring me in the face, and I finished it off with spilt coffee all over some tax returns. I’m stressed about cleaning my house tonight for the maid tomorrow and I have a marathon on Sunday I feel under prepared for. My house needs work, my laundry and dry cleaning need done, and all I want to do…

..is eat. I just ate breakfast, but I want more. Maybe a cookie – even some carrots or yogurt or a (new) cup of coffee.  Pretzles maybe.  Just a few?

This is emotional eating, and I’m feeling it right now. It is so intense even as I write this entry, knowing better, I’m evaluating.  Maybe I am hungry…

I think emotional eating is a huge and complex machine, fueled in large part by the unrestrained Western diet and the ubiquitous attitude towards food as prescription free Prozac. Think you are immune from emotional eating? How common is it to see women in the media, crying in their pajamas over a container of ice cream, or to see food as a reward for a good day at work, or even now to see Lance Armstrong promoting light beer, ostensibly because he worked his ass off earlier in the day on the bike. Emotional eating is bad for your body and your psyche and if you suffer from emotional eating, it is so powerful you may feel you can never escape it. If you feel this way I suggest a book that was recommenced to me called “Shrink Yourself’ by Roger Gould.

Dr. Gould discusses the causes, effects and beginning cures of emotional eating. I used to think I didn’t eat emotionally, but I found through my reading that I do it all the time. I will eat I’m bored, when I get home from work I’ll binge because I’ve starved myself all day and the last thing I want to do is the laundry or the dishes. More often than not though, when I eat emotionally it comes in this form:

“I was ‘good’ all day, I ran 7 miles, and nothing I’m eating is ‘bad’, so I’m going to go ahead and have as much of it as I want, even though I’m not hungry.”


“I did a hard Pilates class today so I can have Chinese food.”

“I went for a 5 hour bike ride today so I can eat more than two servings of peanut butter with my carrots; hey it even has protein in it!”

When I read this in Dr Gould’s book, I felt like he was talking to me: “in order to compensate for eating excess, you have to exercise to much...Any time you need to stop exercising ... your weight balloons up quickly. I’ve seen patients ...who put on substantial weight after injuries and then couldn’t lose it, though they had been trim athletes at one time - albeit athletes with food addiction.” “To lose weight for life you need to conquer food addiction, not merely run around it” p162.

What Gould doesn’t talk about, which I believe is entirely relevant, is how weight can balloon much faster if the food you turn to is loaded with the addicting quality (literally addicting - rats will work as hard for junk food as they will for heroine) of sugar, fat, and salt that Kessler talks about in “The End of Overeating”. Kessler also talks about using food to self medicate as reinforcing in a physical way the reaction to emotional eating. “Because a cookie makes me feel better, its easy to develop the habit of seeking it out when I’m sad or angry. Over time, as neural pathways link the change in my mood with the experience of eating the cookie, the association grows stronger.”p150. He continues “when emotions amplify reward, the drive for reward becomes even harder to control.”

I’m not saying junk food has no place (ok, maybe I am) but I am saying using food as a reward for working out or to help you ease your tears after a break up probably isn’t helping you lose weight and definitely isn’t helping you face the emotions that are driving this eating in the first place. The problem is further compounded because using food during emotional times has a very real effect on your physical reaction to dealing with unpleasant situations.

Emotional eating in a culture where avoiding problems with sugar and fat is encouraged and cheap addicting food is almost totally unrestricted. What a mess!

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Next time on Popular Excuses; Michelle Obama’s Fight against Childhood Obesity - Yes its Necessary (especially at 50% amongst minority children)
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Reading List:
Roger Gould “Shrink Yourself”
David Kessler “The End of Overeating”

Super Food: Spinach

I eat a lot of Spinach.  Maybe even more than this guy --->.

I must go through 3 bags of it a week. I have spoken with my mother extensively about creating a sustainable spinach garden, I eat it raw or cooked, I eat it for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It is extremely convenient that spinach is so good for you because I’m not sure I would eat less of it if it one day came out that spinach could ruin your life.

Actually, Spinach can ruin your life. Because of the shape of the leaves they tend to hold onto dirt more than other leafy greens. If the dirt they are grown in uses manure infected with Salmonella and you consume even a small amount of that bacteria you can contract said disease you run a serious risk of dying or permanent organ damage. Salmonella is the real deal, and I always clean all my raw food before I eat it, regardless of the pre-wash regiment it has gone through before it gets to my kitchen. So keep that in mind because hopefully after reading the following, you too will be a Spinach Enthusiast.

Spinach is super food for several reasons. For all us dieters out there, spinach is a leafy green, and leafy greens are vital in helping you feel before you overeat. Spinach is loaded with green fiber, and helps you feel full- not only because your stomach is physically full, but, as explained in Dr. Gundry’s Diet Evolution “the faster food moves through your lower bowel [as aided by green fiber], the more anti-hunger hormones in your intestinal cells beam up to your brain, telling you not to eat.” It is for this reason I almost everything I eat on a bed of mixed greens or spinach. It has been noticeably helpful in satiating my hunger in the evenings (when I am prone to eat the most).

For all you athletes out there, Spinach is loaded with protein, and calorie for calorie the protein content of spinach matches steak. I don’t know anyone who can eat 200 calories of spinach, but eating your greens (including broccoli; our next Super Food) is an amazing way to have a low calorie high protein diet. Spinach is also loaded with potassium which aids in performance and is an important electrolyte (more on potassium later).

From The Encyclopedia of Healing Foods “[Spinach] is an excellent source of vitamin K, carotenes, vitamin C and folic acid... [also] magnesium 79, iron, vitamin B2..B6, E, and B1.. [and] has twice as much iron as other greens".

I’m not going to go through the benefits of all of those vitamins now, but vitamin C is helpful for your immune system and the repairing of your cells (vitamin C can even reduce your risk of sunburn). The recommended daily dose is between 500 - 1,000 mg a day. 1 cup of spinach has about 28mg. Folic acid can reduce elements in the body which lead to cardiovascular diseases and Alzheimer’s disease and can reduce the occurrence of certain birth defects if present in large enough numbers in pregnant women.

Enough with the science, Popeye and your mother were right, EAT YOUR GREENS!

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Next time on Popular Excuses, Emotional Eating

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Reading List
Dr. Gundry’s Diet Evolution
Michael Murry The Encyclopedia of Healing Foods

But my muffin is healthy - it’s Fat Free

There is a psychological connection between food being labeled fat free and considered healthy. In my personal (and totally unprofessional) opinion this connection is a major contributor to the American weight problem. You may have noticed in prior entries I mentioned that fat isn't fat, sugar is fat. I think its time to discuss what this really means.

The role of insulin, glucose and fat:
Insulin, glucose (a form of sugar) and fat are closely tied together in a somewhat complicated way. When glucose is consumed Insulin is released. Insulin is the delivery system your body uses to get glucose to your cells and when you eat more sugar you produce more insulin which tells your liver to store excess glucose as fat. From Dr. Gundry’s Diet Evolution p.33 - “the higher your resting insulin level the more your body “thinks” winter is coming and it better churn out more fat”.

The food industry loves sugar. Its cheap, it can be made from corn (High Fructose Corn Syrup), it tastes delicious and most importantly, humans are hard wired to consume a ton of it. In The End of Overeating, Dr. Kessler describes studies whereby our common sense knowledge of our love of junk food is confirmed; humans with unrestricted access to food high in sugar fat and salt will consume these items to a dangerous degree (up to 7,000 calories a day with totally unrestricted access). As further evidence of our hard wiring of our uncontrollable appetite for sugar, Dr. Gundry reminds us that “given the opportunity, all apes will gorge and fatten up on fruit and ignore other foods during certain seasons” p.24. Animals use the sugar in fruit to fatten themselves up for winter.

Fruit, however healthy, is loaded with sugar. Especially fruit juice - some bottles of which boast up to 6 pieces of fruit per bottle. The delivery system of sugar to the body through fruit juice is so fast, when you give blood and you get light headed, they feed you orange juice - nothing else compares in terms of speed to raise your blood sugar levels. Without the use of fiber to slow the delivery of sugar to the blood stream, fruit juice is a recipe for weight gain.

Additionally, I am convinced the food industry loves sugar because it is easy to sell to people on a diet - sugar has less than half the calories per volume as fat. Worse still, once you eat sugar it doesn’t take very long before you want more of it. From Dr. Kessler’s The End of Overeating p213. “Simple sugars offer the least satiation because they release from the stomach at a rate of about 10 calories per minute. That provides only a transient effect; sugary foods will typically satisfy hunger only for about an hour.”

It is in these ways that sugar is fat, and whenever you see a food that boasts it's lowered fat or fat free content, look on the back and see what flavor was added to make their product palatable, I can almost guarantee that flavor is some form of sugar.

So it seems the situation seems to be as follows: The food industry has food to sell and pressure to sell more of it to meet an ever expanding bottom line. Lucky for them they’ve got a culture obsessed with weight loss to sell it to, and you have a nifty trick to sell it to them with;  Make food fat free, but load it with sugar. Sugar is cheap, low calorie, and with no satiety factor so your customers keep coming back for more, which in turn makes the consumer more fat, and seeks out fat free food more intensely than before.

Nice.

From what I’ve learned good fat is an essential part of your diet, and if you aren't an emotional eater, it can help you lose weight to incorporate more of it into your diet if you don’t eat it. Good fat will help you feel full for longer, and coupled with leafy greens will fill you up very quickly. Fat is a vast topic, and I'll cover more on it later, but for now, keep in mind that if you eat a lot of fat free foods and fruit and you still aren't happy with your weight (oh my gosh how many times have I been there), consider the idea that you may be feeding your weight problem the very thing it wants to keep you fat - SUGAR!

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Next time on Popular Excuses, Super Food - Spinach
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Reading List
Marion Nestle “What to Eat” p314
Dr Gundry’s Diet Evolution
Dr.Kessler The End of Overeating

Super Food: Omega-3 Fats

Omega-3 Fats are awesome, and if you are reading this in America, I can almost guarantee you don't eat enough of them.

Unless you've been living in total isolation, I'm sure you've heard a bit about Omega-3, and if you are anything like me, you filed all that information into the portion of the brain that knows it should care, doesn't want to change their diet to get on the latest band wagon, and additionally can't be bothered do the research to see if its worth a change in their diet.

So let me tell you, from one non-band-wagoner to another, go forth and ride.

Fats are used in your body for cellular construction, and building your cells out of bad fats like saturated fat and trans fats makes your cells unable perform at their optimum level. So when we eat fat we need to eat “good fats” like mono and polyunsatuarted fats. Omega-3 and Omega-6 fatty acids are essential monounsaturated fats, essential because they must be consumed through your diet, both are needed in your diet, and they can't be produced by your own body (unlike saturated fat, of which you need to consume none). Omega-3 and Omega-6 fatty acids are found in plants and stored in the bodies of the animals which eat them, which is how they travel up the food chain. In this sense, you are what you eat and in America, we eat Omega-6 fatty acids a lot.

Omega-6 fatty acids are extremely prevalent in the Western diet because it is found in corn, and most of the products we consume, in some way shape or form contain corn. Corn is in our meat, because we feed cattle corn to cheaply fatten them up, it's in our dairy for the same reason. It's in almost all processed sweet foods in the form of High Fructose Cory Syrup; it's in our fake fat in the form of Partially Hydrogenated Oil, which is also in everything. Corn is a huge industry, and I'll talk about it at length later, but trust me when I quote Michael Pollan in saying we are "People of the Corn".

What do Omega-6 fatty acids do? When they are consumed on their own and out of balance they promote chronic diseases like inflammation, heart disease, cancer, asthma, arthritis, osteoporosis and depression. What is the best way to get these afflictions in balance? Is it aspirin, heart medication, inhalers, Aleive, bone density pills and Prozac? There is a school of thought out there who thinks there is a better answer.

OMEGA-3! From Dr. Gundry's Diet Evolution "In general Omega-3 fats reduce inflammation, blood pressure, water and sodium retention and pain and also relax blood vessels. Omega-6s do just the opposite" p108. Omega-3 fats have another added benefit, they help curb your cravings for sweet foods because (aside from balancing your diet out), as Dr. Gundry goes on to suggest, when your Omega-6 is too high, depression is promoted. When Omega-3 is introduced, you don't feel the need to mitigate your depression with junk food that isn't actually going to fill you up anyway (sugar begets sugar).

So - how out of balance are you. The ideal balance for Omega-3 to Omega-6 is anything from 4:1 to 1:1 Omega-3 to Omega-6. Any guess what the typical Western diet is?

1:40

Most westerners get 40x too much Omega-6 in relation to their intake of Omega-3. I'm NOT a doctor, but it seems to me that if what I have read on the Omegas is true, it is no wonder this nation is so medicated.

So - wondering if your diet is in balance? Take a look at what you eat the most of, the animal products that you eat and specifically the food those animals eat. Is it grain? Is it corn? Is it partially hydrogenated oil and high fructose corn syrup? Is it the classic Western diet? Then its probably Omega-6.

Do you use olive oil to saute your food, eat your greens and eat wild caught Salmon? Then its probably Omega-3. If you can, purchase Omega-3 eggs, purchase grass fed beef, eat WILD caught fish & buy yogurt from grass cows then you are really in the zone to help promote your Omega-3 intake. Yes, buying all those products in expensive, but if you like you can buy vitamin supplements which are fairly inexpensive (Trader Joe's) or eat a wide variety of your green fats.

At home I have incorporated Omega-3 into our daily lives by cutting down on corn based products, and promoting Omega-3 food, like the proper eggs, yogurt from grass fed cows, and using Olive Oil instead of butter, pam spray and salad dressing and taking 2 vitamin supplements a day.

What have you heard about Omega-3 Fats, leave a comment below and let me know!

Update:  My Mom asked me to post a list of more foods with Omega-3 Fats in them.  In general, think of Omega-3 Fats as green fats, and animals that eat green foods like grass and alge have green fats in them too.

Here is a link to the WebMd's Omega-3 Shopping list: http://www.webmd.com/diet/your-omega-3-family-shopping-list.
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Next time on Popular Excuses, Don’t Worry, my Muffin was Fat Free!
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Reading List
Dr. Gundry’s Diet Evolution
Michael Pollan “The Omnivores Dilemma”
Michael Murry “The Encyclopedia of Healing Foods”

I only drink Skim

The other day, I received a text from my friend, Olly.  “Hey Jes, how bad is milk for you? My mother said it was unhealthy but then totally discreditited herself by citing an Alicia Silverstone book. Wait, milk isn’t made out of corn, is it?”

The magnitude of this question is staggering and through my readings, I have also found it to be extremely boring, so I’ll try and make this speedy. The answers are “sort-a” and “yes”.


First and foremost, most diary cows are fed corn to cheaply fatten them up. So yes, there is corn in milk, and because of this the fat you drink in that milk is omega -6 fat, unless you get milk from grass fed cows. Stay tuned for a discussion on Omega-3 vs .Omega-6 fatty acids.

A lot of people don’t know this, but there is sugar in milk. Its call lactose, and you need a special enzyme to digest it, lactase. If you can drink milk now, it is because the genes which produce lactase are still turned on in your body. But for many people, especially Asians and our hunter gatherer ancestors, those genes turn off after childhood, and you quickly learned that no, milk is not healthy for you, unless you really really loved pooping and puking. It is only through a phenomenon Richard Dawkins refers to as “domestication”, that most of us can happily drink milk.

If you are wondering where our hunter gatherer ancestors managed to get all their calcium while being lactose intolerant, consider that at that same time, over 50% of the volume of their diets came from fruits and vegetables, many of which are rich in calcium including: kelp, collard greens, kale, turnip greens, almonds, parsley, dandelion greens, sunflower seeds, olives, carrots, celery, cashews, romain lettuce, artichokes and the list continues.

Anyway, back on point: Is milk healthy? I have a hard time saying “no”, I think because I’ve been inundated with body by milk adds my whole life. But I can’t find a good reason to say “yes”.

From a weight loss perspective, no. Milk isn’t going to do you much good. Milk is for babies to help them grow, and milk has a hormone in it IGF which promotes cell growth. This is a hormone IN the milk which isn’t removed, so when you get hormone free milk, realize the hormones they are referring to hormones given to most dairy cows bST. Also - when the dairy industry hires people like Brooke Shields to wear a milk mustache and talk about how they owe their bodies to a milk based diet, they are referring to the studies shown where increased calcium in diets is linked to weight loss (hint: if you want to lose weight by increasing the calcium in your diet, make your diet consist of 10x more veggies - there is an added bonus of veggies being good for you in about 10,000 other ways also).

Remember also, lactose is a simple sugar, easily converted into body fat. If you try and make milk lower in calories by taking the fat out of it, you end up with just sugar. I will talk about this in a later article in depth, but removing fat from milk removes the element which lets your body know you are full and satiated - the FAT (fat releases into the body at a slower rate than simple sugars)!

So now you might be thinking, its ok to drink milk, as long as I’m not trying to lose weight. The problem is that most the fat in milk is animal fat, most of which is saturated. Saturated fat (of which you NEED none) has a bad reputation, and has a history of being linked to heart disease (however, that point is contested in the Reuters article linked below). For the most part, a person’s diet should be limited to about 16 grams of saturated fat a day. If you have a 2 serving glass of whole milk (we already went through why it shouldn’t be fat free milk) you are already at 2/3 your daily allotment.

Is milk healthy? If you aren’t trying to lose weight AND you don’t any other animal fat, I guess milk isn’t bad for you. If the articles suggesting a small amount of saturated fat is good for you, and the only animal fat you eat is from milk, then maybe it is healthy. If you only ingest calcium from milk, and have a diet high in protein, then yes, milk is essential because you need the calcium to replenish what the protein leeched from your bones.

On a personal level, I don’t drink milk, I drink unsweetened soy and almond milk. Once in a while I’ll have a Green Tea Latte from Starbucks and because their soy is sweetened, I’ll ask them to add whole milk. I’m still alive and my weigh loss is still continuing (albeit at a snail’s pace).

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I am going to end here - there are quite a few books written on milk, and you could probably make a college major out of studying the stuff. This entry touched on a ton of other topics I will discuss in much depth in the coming months, but I think because I am so obsessed with Omega-3 right now, next week on Popular Excuses, we’ll cover Omega-3 vs. Omega-6 fatty acids.

Feel free to leave comments challenging my position or ask questions about what I’ve written. If I can’t answer your questions, I’m happy to look up any answers I can.

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Reading List
The Ancestor’s Tale, Richard Dawkins p31-33
The Encyclopedia of Healing Foods p117-118
Cliff Sheets, Lean bodies p44
Dr. Gundry’s Diet Evolution - p87-88
Food, Inc. P 232
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE61341020100204

Additional Information on the Industry from NPR:
http://www.npr.org/templates/player/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=1972363&m=1972364