No Dairy

No dairy?

But dairy is good for you - isn't it? All those commercials with those "healthy" milk smiles, we need to get our calcium from somewhere - right?

Well...what kind of milk are you drinking?

This one really needs to be a personal decision. There are plenty of reasons why milk is BAD for you, a quick search on the Internet will give you more reasons then you will care to read. However, what about all those benefits that milk is supposed to have? Milk is GOOD for many people. The real question is what milk are you drinking?

RealMilk.com is a project of the Weston Price Foundation and there is a lot of information at both websites. I really recommend taking some time to check it out.

So, do I really avoid consuming dairy? I did pretty well most of the time, although I like to "cheat" once in a while with cheese - not too often though. But then I looked into it some more. Getting real milk (unadulterated, whole, raw - pure) is pretty hard to do. Selling raw milk is treated as a worse crime than selling drugs (this is not an exaggeration). So I figured that all those people doing their scientific tests on the negative side effects of milk (specifically in regards to Endometriosis) have not conducted tests with raw milk.

There are many benefits of raw milk, so I figured I'd let myself be a Guinea Pig and have milk. The catch with that is that I've only been able to get a small amount of raw milk and all of that goes to making yogurt. Yogurt in itself has many benefits that will make even pasteurized (still avoid homogenized) milk better for consumption. (I had asked my naturopath about this and she advised me to consume the yogurt for a few days in a row to see if I had a reaction to it.) Even so, some people still react to dairy. For example, when we still lived in Canada we got a hold of some raw cheese. I was fine on it, but my husband's eczema got worse from it. You will need to test yourself by going on an elimination diet and adding the dairy back in to see how you fair.

So what do we do? There are many alternatives to milk, even if you can't get the real deal. The biggest problem is most likely what you will serve on your cereal. The kicker is, if you are taking a change to eat healthy you probably won't be eating cereal (I'm talking about boxed, store bought stuff).

We started by buying soy milk (sorry to say). STAY AWAY FROM SOY MILK. Fortunately we learned about the harmful effects of soy. We then bough rice and almond milks. These we used mainly for baking. Then we looked more carefully at the labels on these boxed milks. While we had always stayed away from sugar, there were other things that made us suspicious (vegetable oils, etc.) Around the same time, we started experimenting with making our own nut milk, which is really easy to do.

A constant in our house as also been coconut milk (or in Australia coconut cream). This is the one thing we would buy. Of course you need to check the label. There does exist coconut milk that does not have additives.