If you’re allergic to wheat, groceries and health food stores can’t do enough to accommodate you – stuffing their aisles with gluten-free crackers, cakes, pastas, pizzas and cereals for your every pleasure.
But if you’re allergic to dairy – a food more than half the people in the world can’t tolerate – nada. Unless you consider the few Plasticine substitutes for cream cheese or soy milk food, you’re plain out of luck.
Nonetheless, lots of folks can’t drink milk or eat cheese without gastrointestinal side effects like bloating, gas, diarrhea and more problematic symptoms like sinusitis, asthma and inflammation.
Dairy is the most common food allergy in U.S. children, at 2.5 percent, but most outgrow it. Few adults are truly allergic, which refers to the immune system producing an allergic antibody. But many are lactose intolerant, meaning they have some degree of difficulty digesting milk and its tasty by-products like cream, cheese and yogurt.
In fact, many Native Americans, Asians and Africans have little or no tolerance for dairy. (You’ll never see cheese in an Asian grocery, and iced treats are made of beans, not milk.) Even Mediterranean populations have a limited ability to digest it. (You’ll find few pastry shops south of Florence.)
Here in our own little burg, most nutritionists and health-care practitioners don’t eat dairy and discourage their clients from consuming it, too. They note that humans are the only species that drink another mammal’s milk and the only one that drinks milk beyond infancy.
While this may be healthy, it’s certainly no fun.
“Is there no joy in life?” asked Katie Burford, owner of Cream Bean Berry and maker of its organic and locally sourced ice cream. “Why live without cheese? I don’t see why it can’t be part of a good diet.”
So, one must ask, is dairy bad?
Locally, the health-care community divides into two camps. One avoids dairy with the same passion as other delicious foods like gluten, sugar and trans fats. The other largely eschews milk, but permits it in other forms – yogurt, cheese, sour cream – if it’s raw or organic and full-fat.
“People should cut down on their dairy,” says Sherri Wormser, a therapeutic chef with a certificate in nutrition. “Humans are not meant to digest the proteins in milk, and in most people, they create histamine reactions.”
Her clients most frequently complain of respiratory ailments. Because dairy products can inflame your body’s mucus membranes, it can irritate the nose and lungs and cause symptoms like congestion, aggravated asthma and trouble breathing. It can also bedevil your hormones, creating brain fog and migraines and, in the worst cases, contribute to hormonal cancers.
But wait, didn’t we all grow up believing milk was good for our bones and dairy was a necessary ingredient to becoming healthy and strong?
Calcium and milk are not the same thing, Wormser notes. The grocery store and farmers market hold better sources of calcium and vitamin D than milk. She cites dark leafy greens as a good source of calcium and the Four Corners’ abundant sunshine for providing ample vitamin D.
Both pro- and anti-dairy sides agree that the 60-year advertising campaign the federal government has mounted to persuade generations of Americans that milk is healthy – remember “Milk, it does a body good” and “Got milk?” – is hooey.
While the U.S. Department of Agriculture recommends three cups of milk a day, everyone I interviewed for this article recommended shunning all commercially raised and processed dairy products. And even those who eat dairy products keep their consumption to a minimum.
Alas, all dairy is not created equal.
Milk, for starters, is the most difficult form of dairy to digest. For some reason, cheese, sour cream and yogurt all go down much easier. But most importantly, nutritionists and naturopaths say, eat dairy products that are free of the goop industrial farmers feed cows such as bovine growth hormones, antibiotics and genetically modified grains – so buy organic.
Better yet, buy milk products that haven’t been pasteurized. That sanitation method requires heating milk, which kills the enzymes that make it easier to digest.
The state of Colorado doesn’t see it that way, however, and bans the sale of raw milk. But a loophole in the law allows farms that sell whole and partial shares of cows to sell the raw milk, too (James Ranch and J&M Dairy are two local providers). You can find raw cheese at local health food stores.
If you buy organic milk and unpasteurized dairy when you can get it, then it becomes more palatable to those who cast a suspicious eye on it.
“Dairy is not inherently bad, It can be a great source of protein and a great source of fat,” says local nutrition therapist Jess Kelley. “If my clients can do dairy, I tell them to enjoy it.”
Both she and Wormser say they see more people with sensitivities to gluten than dairy in their practices, even though the latter is a more frequent troublemaker for so many.
Kelley’s baby daughter can’t tolerate dairy products – not unusual for children younger than 3 – forcing her to give it up while she’s breast-feeding. But she misses it.
“I think it’s harder to go dairy-free than gluten-free,” she said.
Rarely mentioned in any nutrition-based discussion of dairy is that many of the world’s most delicious foods require it. Just try making a baked good without it – disaster. Ice cream (along with potato chips, one of life’s most perfect foods) is based on it. And the simple pleasure of eating a warm slice of crusty bread would be nothing without a sunny pat of butter.
Pastry chef Jocelyn Skill says she would be finished if she couldn’t use butter and cream in the cookies and confections she bakes at her North Main Avenue shop, Skillfully Decadent Desserts. She uses organic dairy in all her products, even though she herself has a slight intolerance.
“I will never give up dairy,” she said. “I love it.”
So after all is said and done, good dairy is only bad if it’s bad for you. The choice is yours. I’m going to celebrate with a butter cookie.
phasterok@durangoherald.com
