The dairy dilemma

For a long time, I kept dairy out of my diet. I had been allergic to dairy products as a baby, and I became sensitive to milk products again after a chronic illness as an adult, so I figured that all dairy was bad. I bought into the idea that milk is for baby cows. And, to a certain degree, I still believe that. I still can't eat cow's cheese (except Swiss, occasionally, for some unknown reason) and I have a hard time digesting nonfat milk products. But gosh darn it, I love whole milk yogurt and eat it almost every day.

Back in the day when I believed that milk was evil, I kept it out of my son's diet for the first couple of years after he was born. His milk intake was restricted to breast milk, supplemented with goat's milk after I went back to work (which I fortified with iron and calcium, since he didn't seem to tolerate any commercial formulas). When he hit preschool age, I sent a box of soy milk for him to drink during snack time, so he wouldn't be drinking the skim milk than the other kids drank.

All this was an effort on my part to keep him from developing an allergy to milk. The result, according to a broad allergy-panel blood test he took a few years ago, is that soy is one of the few things that he is allergic to but milk is no problem at all. That's good, since he now hates tofu and won't drink soy milk. So, maybe this effort paid off in a backwards kind of way.

By the time my daughter was born, my feelings about dairy products had swayed since my own dairy allergy was waning. Even as a baby she begged me to taste the maple-flavored yogurt I was eating. (Yogurt was one of the few things I could eat that wouldn't give her an allergic reaction when I nursed her--her worst reaction was to wheat). After a certain age, I let her have whole milk and she never showed any signs of a sensitivity. Now she begs for a glass of milk or a banana-milk smoothie at least once a day. She is very healthy, so I see no harm with this. In some ways, I have made my peace with milk.

My biggest concern with dairy products these days is with bovine growth hormone (rBGH or BGH). It seems unnatural to stimulate cows' udders to produce more milk than they would naturally produce. I won't be surprised if a link is found eventually between BGH and breast cancer in women who drank BGH as children--I don't see how it might not have some effect on developing breasts. Some people on the Internet are also worrying it could cause prostate cancer.

Even if that doesn't prove true, the other worry about BGH is that, according the Christiane Northrup and others, milk produced with it is allowed to have more white cells than non-rBGH milk, which is, in other words, pus. Yuk. Because cows given BGH have a higher incidence of udder infections, they're also more likely to be given antibiotics.

If you can't always buy organic milk, you can check which U.S. dairies are rBGH-free on the Organic Consumers Association rBGH info page.

If I had the money (and time to run around shopping only at health food stores), I would only buy organic cheese, ice cream, sour cream, cream cheese, etc. Right now, I will spend $6 on a gallon of organic milk at the grocery store (I can get it cheaper at Whole Foods usually), but not $6 on a small hunk of organic cheese. I console myself with the idea that I make my own yogurt from the organic milk I purchase, and that most of the non-organic dairy products I purchase are BGH-free. Maybe BGH-free is a meager consolation, at best, since it ignores the pesticides, other hormones and antibiotics in non-organic milk--as well as the probably inhumane warehousing of the animals forced to produce most commercial milk. But given that BGH-free is hard to even find sometimes, it's a meager consolation that is better than no consolation at all.

I'd like to buy organic, but... (Pt. 1)

In a perfect world, I'd buy all-organic food—not so much from paranoia, that everything else is poison, so much as wanting to support non-polluting and (hopefully) more humane agriculture and pasturing practices.

I don't like the idea of farmworkers being sprayed with pesticides, or chickens stuck in cages all day, or pigs packed into barns, their waste products deluging groundwater and local streams.

Of course, it's also nice if the food I eat doesn't contain a potentially lethal combination of chemicals and additives.

Long ago, I worked at the EPA Office of Pesticide Programs and was horrified to discover three things:

• That pesticides are regulated and tested individually; few, if any, studies at the time were being conducted on how combinations of different pesticides would affect humans. (Some crops used more than one pesticide, but you're also getting exposure to more than one pesticide, usually, when you eat more than one food at a time or in a day, and as a cumulative effect, as well). I'm not sure if this has changed—my assumption is that it has not, at least as an EPA effort.
  
  
• That the pesticide companies themselves are responsible for the tests for safety. The government was not conducting independent tests themselves, that I could tell. All the lab reports submitted to the EPA docket on a particular pesticide were submitted by the manufacturer. Tests were conducted on animals—the worst being, I thought, on dogs whose vocal cords had been cut so the researchers wouldn't have to hear their cries of pain. [I hope this has changed since I was there].
  
  
  
• That most pesticides on the market have been grandfathered in. So, the EPA has to prove that individual pesticides that are questionably safe (and which are already on the market and have been used for years), should be recalled—here's the kicker–using safety studies from the manufacturers themselves. Any talk of recalling a pesticide was sure to bring protests from the farmers already using it (as well as intense lobbying from the manufacturers themselves).
  

But I can't afford to buy all-organic, all the time. So I make choices, sometimes based on what's the least bad non-organic vegetable to buy, sometimes based entirely on budget.

A web site that I've found helpful with this process is the Shopper's Guide to Pesticides in Produce produced by the Environmental Working Group, which lists the commercial (non-organic) fruits and vegetables they've found to be the safest and least safe. The full list is at: http://www.foodnews.org/walletguide.php. An abbreviated/wallet-size guide is also available from this page. I've downloaded it and have added it to all my computerized shopping lists. The page also offers refrigerator magnets and shopping bags with the list printed on it.

In a future post (or posts), I'll discuss some of the other factors I weigh in my decision-making processes at the grocery store. I'd like to hear from other people on what affects their grocery-buying habits. Is it all budget-based, or do you also get little nudges of conscience that help you justify spending $4 for a dozen free-range eggs?