Is milk as bad as meat?

CHENNAI: To the audience at IIT Alumni Club recently, the talk by Dr Nandita Shah, from Mumbai-based NGO SHARAN (Sanctuary for Health and Reconnection to Animals and Nature) and a homeopathy practitioner, was a bag of surprises, leaving both meat-eaters and ‘health-conscious’ vegetarians equally astonished.Milk- an indispensable part of our everyday diet which we gulp down our throat to ward off all weakness, could- in fact- be as unhealthy as meat, she argued. “There is sufficient proof in medical literature that says milk and meat have the same properties, which are bad for the human body,” she said. “They both have high protein, high fat and no fiber. That’s why vegetarians and non-vegetarians get the same diseases,” she explained. The presence of hormones in milk (cows are  mammals, hence, there are hormones in milk) are known to cause breast and prostate cancer and IGF, the growth hormone, causes diabetes. “Milk even has pus in it,” she revealed, much to the chagrin of all. “The pus is formed because cow udders are not meant to be handled by humans or a milk machine,” she elaborated. Parmesan cheese is made with milk with the highest pus content! If we did stop consuming milk and milk products, where would grown-ups, especially women, get their daily dose of calcium from? “A 100 grams of breast milk has only 33 mg of calcium,” she said, reasoning that if that amount was sufficient to build the entire skeletal system of a new born, grown-ups wouldn’t need as much calcium as milk contains. “This is why calcium tablets never work, the problem is not with calcium deficiency, it must be something else. If you do require calcium, take it from sesame seeds and not milk,” she added. Reasoning why our grandparents stayed healthy despite their high intake of milk, Nandita said “They didn’t have refrigeration. Neither did they have all the cheese (One ounce of cheese equals 16 ounces of milk). Our elders also didn’t have easy access to all the milk sweets that we consume on a nearly-daily basis.The best diet, in her opinion, had to be a vegan diet, one that eliminates any form of animal products, including dairy. A diet based on plants and whole foods is what humans are meant to eat, she stated. “Eat whole foods because that’s how monkeys eat and they’re so much healthier than us,” she said. “Peel your bananas, but not your apples.”