Mark Bittman on food and all things related.
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Although lactose intolerance and its generalized digestive tract problems are well documented, and milk allergies are thought to affect perhaps 1 percent of the American population, the links between milk (or dairy) and such a broad range of ailments has not been well studied, at least by the medical establishment.
Yet if you speak with people who’ve had these kinds of reactive problems, it would appear that the medical establishment is among the last places you’d want to turn for advice. Nearly everyone who complained of heartburn, for example, later resolved by eliminating dairy, had a story of a doctor (usually a gastroenterologist) prescribing a proton pump inhibitor, or P.P.I., a drug (among the most prescribed in the United States) that blocks the production of acid in the stomach.
But — like statins — P.P.I.s don’t address underlying problems, nor are they “cures.” They address only the symptom, not its cause, and they are only effective while the user takes them. Thus in the last few days I’ve read scores of stories like mine, some of which told of involuntary or incidental withdrawal of dairy from the diet — a trip to China (where milk remains less common), or a vacation with non-milk-drinking friends or family — when symptoms disappeared, followed by their return upon resumption of a “normal” diet.
Others abandoned dairy for animal cruelty reasons, or a move towards veganism, and found, as one reader wrote, “My chronic lifelong nasal congestion vanished within a week, never to return.” Still others (I’m happy to report) read my piece and, like one writer, “immediately gave up dairy … and quit taking my medications. After nine days … I have had no heartburn, despite the fact that I have eaten many foods that would normally bring it on…. It feels like a miracle.”
When a lifetime of suffering, medical visits and prescription drugs can be resolved with a not especially challenging dietary change, a certain amount of retroactive frustration seems justifiable.
There is anger as well as surprise, because you’d think that with a grapevine’s worth of anecdotal stories and at least some studies linking dairy to physical problems, few people began this kind of self-testing at the suggestion of their doctor — unless, that is, their doctor was in the “alternative” camp.
So I got mail saying things like, “When I think back to all the things I’ve missed because I had a migraine, it makes me a little angry that the solution for me was so simple.” When a lifetime of suffering, medical visits and prescription drugs can be resolved with a not especially challenging dietary change — one that, when it works, has rewards well worth the sacrifice — a certain amount of retroactive frustration seems justifiable.
I don’t want to give the impression that the response was uniform. Though it was overwhelmingly in tune with my own experience, there are people who insist that the symptoms don’t come from all milk but “American” milk (this doesn’t happen in Europe, some say), or pasteurized milk (raw milk is the answer) or cow’s milk (“goat’s milk doesn’t cause problems”) or uncooked milk, or nonorganic milk, or only milk — that is, that yogurt and cheese don’t cause the same kinds of problems. Others suggested that it’s not milk but coffee that’s the problem (and for at least one writer, that was undoubtedly the case), or that milk — as was thought when I was growing up, and my father drank it to ease his ulcer — was soothing rather than irritating.
All of this, of course, can be true for some and not true for others. (It would not surprise me a bit if it were eventually discovered that industrial production methods, which include giving dairy cows feed that they have trouble digesting, produce an inferior and somehow damaging form of dairy.) I do think that on the basis of what appears to be widespread experience anyone with chronic heartburn or any of the other ailments mentioned above would be missing an opportunity if he or she didn’t give a nondairy diet a shot. As Erik Marcus, who publishes Vegan.com, wrote to me, “In talking to other vegans I rarely hear them say they feel much different after quitting meat or eggs, but you hear all sorts of stories like yours and mine once they quit dairy.”
The stories here expose problems both with agriculture and with medicine. Once American agriculture became fixated on producing the most crops possible, regardless of the cost to land, water, air, animals and people, one of the jobs of the Department of Agriculture became figuring out how to sell all that produce.
Thus selling and therefore consuming milk and other dairy — whether it’s good for you as an individual or not — became an all-American task. (It’s effective, too: we’re on track to produce 91 million metric tons of fluid milk this year, less than 15 percent of it by small farms.) But the job of an agriculture department should not be to sell whatever crops our farmers can grow most efficiently, it should be to encourage the growth of crops that will benefit the greatest number of Americans. Those crops are not corn and soy, grown largely to create hyper-processed food or animal feed (and in turn animal products), but an increasing variety of plants that can be directly eaten by humans.
As for medicine: for many doctors drugs are the answer to almost every condition, a situation that suits Big Pharma just fine. More than $13 billion worth of P.P.I.s were sold in 2010, so if as few as 10 percent of those people were helped by a dietary change, the makers of Nexium, Prevacid and Prilosec would be feeling the pain. Not the same kind of pain felt by the millions for whom dairy causes problems, however.
