Ken Stuart wrote:

> Hello,
>
>   A question:
>
> A cow eats vegetable matter.
>
> It then does one of two things with that ingested vegetable matter:
>
> (1) It makes muscles and fat out of it.
>
> (2) It makes milk for its calf out of it.
>
> How can the milk be "foreign protein" and the muscle is not?
>
> PS  Of course, I am putting aside for the moment, the question of lactose and
> lactase enzyme, which deals with sugars, not proteins.

“What milk to feed a newborn baby?” by Professor J. Lestradet, in Journal of
Nutrition and Diet (Cahiers de nutrition et de diététique), March 1982.(excerpts)

Differences between types of milk are fundamental. As a matter of fact, there is
twice as much lactose in human milk as in cow’s milk, and it is known that
lactose is vital
for brain growth, which is twice as quick in a baby as in a calf. The writer
notes that Romulus and Remus couldn’t possibly have been suckled by a she-wolf
since there is nine times as much protein in its milk as in human milk. Such a
high intake of protein would quickly have proved lethal, since the liver and
kidneys, which excrete uric acid, would have been grossly overworked. Such an
overload is already at work with cow’s milk in which there is three times as much
protein as in human milk. It is to be noted that the liver and kidneys of a
bottle-fed child are 30% larger than the very same organs in a breast-fed child.
Cow’s milk doesn’t address calcium absorption better than human milk, although it
contains three times as much calcium. Cow’s milk contains five times as much
phosphate as human milk, and this causes two-thirds of the calcium to be retained
in the gut_the result being that a bottle-fed child tends to have low blood
calcium. Further, cow’s milk, whether formulated or not, contains iron and this
enhances the growth of pathogenic bacteria (which accounts for excretory smells
in the feeding bottle). Using partly skimmed spray-dried milk, one is going the
other way and setting up an iron deficiency in the
newborn, which is, additionally, worsened since cow’s milk protein irritates the
digestive tract and causes microscopic bleeding.
As for salt, which cow’s milk is three times as high in, it is known to cause
water retention and high blood pressure. There are grounds for thinking that
starting a child out on too much salt could well account for some cases of adult
high blood pressure."

If any of you need a more complete description of the differences between cow's
and human milk, just ask me...

Jacques