> Humans are the only "animal" on the face of the earth
> that drink milk from another animal.

Humans are also the only animals who eat grains and cook their food.
If you're taking eating lessons from animals, do you also eat roadkill?

> In the third world countries, the problems they had were bad enough, but at
> least they didn't have heart problems until good old Uncle Sam, in his
> benevolent way, shipped our wurplus milk to help them out.  Now they also
> have heart problems in addition to all their ather problems.

Non-western countries have experienced a number of unhealthy changes
in the past few dozen years, including the introduction of sugar,
all sorts of pollution, and increasingly sedentary lifestyles.  This is
not a controlled experiment.

> Why do doctors
> tell people that have heart attacks to get off all dairy products?

Because dairy products are a huge source of dietary fat for most
Americans, and people deal better with outright prohibitions than they
do with having to trust their judgement about how much fat is too much.

> My sister did not have asthma when we were
> children, she does now.  According to the AMA, there is no connection, but
> she has always drank milk and eaten  milk products and still does.  Of
> course who am I to give her any advice?

Bill Clinton is having all sorts of problems, and he has always consumed
dairy.  You think there's a connection?

> Everyone I know that has stopped
> all dairy products have had a marked improvement on sinus problems, asthma
> if they had it, and other breathing problems.

Good for them, for discovering their allergies.

> On top of everything else I have found with drinking milk is all the
> chemicals they feed the cows, and of course it winds up in the milk.

Actually, as of May 98, only about 25% of all American dairy products come
from cows treated with bovine growth hormones, and a number of
supermarket chains have declared that their dairy products come from
non-hormone-enhanced cows, so this shouldn't be a huge concern.

> Are
> they good for you, these chemicals have been banned in all of Europe, why
> not here?

The reasons the hormones are banned in Europe are political and economic.
The way the hormones are administered makes them more easily used by large
farms, putting small dairy farmers at a great disadvantage.

Plus, when they were first introduced, there was a widespread international
dairy surplus, making a product whose aim was to increase milk production
completely ridiculous, since the government would have just bought the
excess milk.

Since the European farm lobbies have always been strong, they were more
successful than their American counterparts in effecting a ban.  Incidentally,
all of the associations of small American dairy farmers were against the
hormones, so you really can't look at this as a Great Dairy Conspiracy.
Wisconsin and Vermont actually banned the hormones entirely, until these
bans were held in federal court to needlessly obstruct interstate
commerce.


Janet