Day 5 - a word about dairy

Before I start on the whole saga that is dairy, I want to make two comments for those of you who are really reading and really caring. :) I failed to mention on the "dry brushing" post that your brushes need to be made out of natural bristles only. Don't buy a synthetic one! And your strokes need to be long. This is not a "scrub the stain out of the t-shirt" method, but a "this is how I'd brush my goldilock curls if I had them" technique. It's okay if it's not completely comfortable, but it shouldn't be painful. Start softly and slowly. Make sense? Also, my man and I sipped on Green Lemonade this morning! Whew! It's soooo lemony (is that a word?), I can see how they got the name for it. Not at all disgusting. Definitely thick, and green. :) He gulped his like a manly man would. Done in 3 minutes flat. I, on the other hand, had to girly it up a bit. :) I put ice in it and ended up using a straw. Too afraid I'd accidentally get a leaf in my mouth, which actually happened, but it didn't gross me out. It took me about 30 minutes to finish mine. But the exciting things happened an hour later. Okay, may I be frank with you? I feel congested every morning. I sneeze and sneeze and sneeze. But I wasn't this morning! Here's the "frank" part: I could actually feel mucus being drained from my head. I never sneezed once, but my nose started running and I could feel it in the back of my throat. TOTALLY DISGUSTING, I know! Sorry for making your gag reflex wake up. :) But, it was just proof to me that the green lemonade was actually doing something, right away! So encouraging. Okay, now onto dairy.

Have you ever wondered why in the world we drink cow's milk? I mean, have you ever seen a farmer trying to give a cow breastmilk? That wouldn't make sense. We could never expect a cow to be able to digest breast milk. But then why do we expect our bodies to digest cow's milk? Well, guess what? We can't. Not all of it, atleast. And everything that our bodies can't use gets stuck in the lining of our colons. Man, this is turning into a very vile post. :( My 2nd baby was diagnosed with allergies to milk and egg. When we started sharing this information with friends and family, we always got the same question. "How will he get calcium?" Then I panicked. How would he get calcium? Come to find out, leafy greens have WAY more calcium than milk does, and our bodies actually know what to do with that stuff! :) Still contemplating different ways that we can get our boys to drink our morning concoction. May be adding blueberries or some similar fruit, freezing it for a bit, mashing it up and serving it as "dinosaur ice cream". :) We'll see about that one. In the meantime, I was just excited that he doesn't have to be calcium deficient just because he can no longer drink milk. Also, are you wondering what it is that our bodies can't digest? Milk that you buy in conventional grocery stores have been pasteurized and homogenized. This kills everything good that's in it, especially enzymes. Today is not the day to discuss raw milk, but that should be a consideration. What else is so bad about milk? The cow is pumped with antibiotics and growth hormones. These obviously get into the cow's bloodstream and into the milk. We drink a tall glass of the white cold stuff and also get a mouthful of the antibiotics and growth hormones (let alone pesticides, herbicides, etc. that were in the hay and grain that the cow was fed while it was lactating) which then goes into our bloodstream. Ew! Another interesting fact that I came across while reading my new favorite health book The Raw Food Detox Diet by Natalia Rose is this: it's at the top of the list for mucus-producing foods. Here's a quote from the book. "Milk is one of the most mucus-forming foods we can consume. Knowing this, it should come as no surprise that American children suffer to such a great extent from asthma, allergies, ear infections, and colds." Definitely something worth considering, right? Here's something else that I thought was interesting. "According to Victorias Kulvinskas, cofounder of the Hippocrates Institute and best-selling author, pasteurized dairy and cooked meat cause our white blood cell count to increase by 300 to 400 percent. This is what happens when the body responds to infection!" So, if our body goes into attack mode trying to deal with dairy, shouldn't that be a sign that we shouldn't be consuming it? Okay, it's confession time. Right before sitting down to blog this afternoon, I had ice cream. :( Shame on me!