All About Dairy Product!

[Yeke]

Milk, Yogurt, Cheese！

牛奶， 酸奶， 奶酪！

Why Chinese dishes don't contain dairy product?

Is fresh dairy product rare in your local supermarket?

Western civilization are bigger/taller because dairy product has been part of their lifestyle for many century's?

What does dairy product have on human health? calcium?

Most Chinese people have a weaker body type and have difficulty packing muscle, nutrition's fault?

Let the brainstorming start!

[tooironic]

Wow those are some pretty bizarre generalisations you are making there. I'm no dietitian, but I would point out that "western civilization" also has higher rates of diabetes, heart disease and obesity. I've heard the "dairy products gives you calcium" argument countless times, but there are plenty of other foods (e.g. orange juice, nuts, chickpeas, etc) that provide adequate calcium as well, so I'm not really sure how valid that argument is. At any rate, dairy products tend to be high in fat, and sometimes sugar as well, and that is why personally I try to avoid eating too much of them (as tasty as they can be!). As for the geo-cultural reasons as to why the East supposedly does not have much access to dairy, I'll have to pass that over to someone else.

[roddy]

As for the geo-cultural reasons as to why the East supposedly does not have much access to dairy

I'll do this, it's easy.

There used to be not many cows. Pig milk tastes bad. The end.

[liuzhou]

Pig milk tastes bad.

Unless you are a baby pig.

[flameproof]

There used to be not many cows.

I think that is the main reason. And in places with some cows, or cow like animals there is milk and milk products. Tibet i.e. or India. But demand seems to grow.

Wow those are some pretty bizarre generalisations you are making there. ... I would point out that "western civilization" also has higher rates of diabetes, heart disease and obesity.

But China catches up fast, very fast. Fat kids is a major problem in China. Keep in mind that the food situation in China 20 years ago was terrible. Only the last 10-15 years you get everything all the time.

My prediction is, cheese + etc. demand will grow - but will stay as a niche product.

[peekay]

Up to 95% of Chinese people are lactose intolerant. Hence they're not so keen on consuming diary products.

Numerous scientific studies have shown most Chinese only consume diary products when cheese-like slices are strategically placed between greasy "Big Mac" patties, even though this "cheese" makes them sick. In academia we refer to this phenomenon as the Yao Ming Effect.

[Yeke]

Oh yeah, soy milk is very popular. Soy milk is the Cow milk of China! Maybe that's why a lot of Chinese boys have more feminine body type including me. haha

Milk are not refrigerated in department store (from what I saw) and they come in bag too! Just like Canada.

[ABCinChina]

Yes, I agree that most Chinese people are lactose intolerant. But I love eating dairy products like Cheese. (it's too expensive here) I've also read that drinking soy milk will raise estrogen levels as well.

Thus, I urge all off my Chinese brethren to eat more dairy and start going to the gym more often. Let's start getting healthy and conquer stereotypes!

[liuzhou]

With all this lactose intolerance, how come every supermarket I have ever visited in China has shelf loads of dairy products? Milk powders, UHT milks and Yoghurts in particular.

[peekay]

They're mainly for small kids. Children start developing lactose intolerance as they grow older... otherwise Chinese babies would get really sick consuming their own mother's milk. Most Chinese kids are fully lactose intolerant by the time they're four or five years old.

Also, many lactose intolerant kids & adults can still eat small amounts of specific diary products. Those small bottles of yogurt might be fine because yogurt contains active bacteria which help breakdown lactose. Some types of cheeses are easier to digest too (in particular, aged hard cheeses and some fermented cheeses have very low lactose levels.)

So they might be able to eat slices of Cheddar or even small amounts of Camembert, but wouldn't feel so good after consuming Feta. A piece of yummy Tres Leches cake from Mexico might well send them to the hospital.

[miss_China_so_much]

otherwise Chinese babies would get really sick consuming their own mother's milk.

What do you mean? Breast milk makes babies sick?

[peekay]

Yes, exactly.

It's a hereditary disease called Congenital Lactase Deficiency, where newborn babies cannot consume their mother's milk at all. These babies are lactose intolerant since birth (or develop lactose intolerance by the time they're just one or two weeks old.)

Natural selection has made this a rare condition (in the past, babies suffering from CLD would most likely not survive) but for some unknown reason this disease is relatively common in certain countries (in Finland most notably.) Today we can feed them lactose-free milk and they grow up perfectly fine.

[wushijiao]

I’m sorry to go on a rant, but…

There are many reasons to be weary of ingesting dairy products, or at least to re-think whether it’s good or not to minimize dairy in-take. Dairy intake is strongly related to breast and prostate cancer (ie. the hormone manipulating cancers). Dairy is also strongly associated with asthma, allergies, heart disease, arthritis, Colitis and Crohn's, constipation, degenerative diseases, acne, and impotence (via clogged arteries). Hormones in dairy (along with other animal proteins) also cause females to reach puberty at a much younger age, which is a sign of increased breast cancer risk (not to mention all the other social and psychological issues related to a girl of eleven years old having a developed body of a woman). Butter and cheese are the number one sources of saturated fat in Western societies.

Dairy and raising cattle for beef are also the largest contributors to global warming, more so than all forms of transport combined, according to the UN.

Dairy companies have blatantly propagated the notion that consuming dairy products are healthy in the US for decades, and now they’re doing it in China. It’s really a bit depressing to think about.

As far as lactose, the problem s exacerbated by making skim milk, in which the relative percentage of fat is dramatically reduced and replaced by protein and carbohydrates, which in cows milk, is lactose.

Chinese people have tended to be smaller than Westerners, on average, and to what degree that is related to dairy is up for debate. Certainly, many people in who grew up in the 1970’s and before, especially in rural areas, were undernourished due to government policies and overall poverty. However, height varied quite considerably between rural dwellers and urban dwellers even in the same provinces (meaning that they were eating roughly comparable diets in terms of cuisine, but of different qualities). In different periods of time, American men and westerns have shown dramatically different degrees of height (which in a general population can be a rough indicator of health, although that’s obviously not true for any one individual person who might be short or tall due to genetics). In fact, Amercan men at the end of the 18th century were roughly 5’10, which then dropped dramatically as people left farms and went to the cities. Here’s an interesting article on the subject:

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/04/05/040405fa_fact?currentPage=1

Yes, dairy does have calcium and vitamin D. But you can get vitamn D from the sun, and from vitamins. Vitamin D defeciency is something people should be nterested in, especially if you live in northern latitudes. If you design a diet well, you can get plenty of calcium from certain plant sources, especially green veggies eaten in big quantities. That also gives you plenty of other bone enhancing vitamins, minerals, and phyto-nutrients, not to mention the thousands of anti-cancer, health-promotng nutrients.

[miss_China_so_much]

Yes, exactly.

Ok, then I'd say like this:

otherwise those babies who were born with high lactose intolerance would get really sick consuming their own mother's milk.

Breast milk is the best food for vast majority of newborn babies, Chinese or not. Majarity of Chinese babies used to be fed on breast milk. Only in recent 10 or 15 years that fomula has become popular

[David W Jackson]

My two cents:

According to TCM, milk is the sexual essence of a cow and is therefore inappropriate for human consumption. It's designed to fatten up calves and is composed accordingly. Human milk, designed for humans, is also for providing intense nutrition during childhood growth. Obvious, right? But then if that's the case, why do we consume dairy products which are scientifically proven to leech calcium from our bodies: http://veganchick.pnn.com/articles/show/29736-does-milk-do-a-body-good

http://www.vegsource.com/articles/calcium_update.htm? Is it possible we are more programmed/brain-washed than our egos would like to admit?

"It’s as unnatural for a child to drink the milk of a cow as it is for a dog to nurse from a giraffe!" - Michael Klaper, MD

[peekay]

Unfortunately both blogs you cite aren't exactly unbiased sources. To "prove" their agenda, they seem to make wrong, sweeping conclusions about complex scientific subjects they don't seem to fully understand.

The Veganchick blog for example claims that milk causes cancer. To add credibility it embellished a thread of scaremongering with: "...researchers at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute have shown that women who consume large amounts of milk may have a higher risk for ovarian cancer."

Yet even the lead researcher of that study, Susanna C. Larsson, concludes that it is better for women to drink milk. "Ovarian cancer is relatively uncommon", she says. "Colorectal cancer is much more common, and milk apparently decreases colon cancer risk." Unfortunately, Veganchick omits to mention this important conclusion, a great disservice to her (mostly female) readers.

The Vegsource article is also full of this "pseudo-science" propaganda. Citing another scientific study, Vegsource claims that "the more milk women drank, the more bone loss they experienced. OOPS! [Am J Clin Nutrition 1985;41:254]".

Except the actual study found the exact opposite of what Vegsource claims. The study's abstract in part reads (emphasis mine): "We conclude that milk and milk products can be recommended as sources of calcium, that data on the effects of increasing calcium intake from other sources can be applied to milk and that milk may offer an advantage because it does not suppress bone remodeling as severely as calcium carbonate. "

From wushijiao's post above you can see that milk is being blamed to cause everything from impotence to global warming, some sort of a "reverse snake oil". Generally speaking, such claims are without scientific merit.

In China, making milk widely available to children is an important nutritional strategy, and one of Wen Jiabao's government priority.

[wushijiao]

From wushijiao's post above you can see that milk is being blamed to cause everything from impotence to global warming, some sort of a "reverse snake oil". Generally speaking, such claims are without scientific merit.

I'd urge you to read the China Study, a book drawing on the largest study of cancer rates ever conducted in the world (in China) and which has more than 8,000 statstically significant associations, written by Cornell researcher T. Colin Campbell whch shows that there is a clear link between cancer and dairy, and animal protein and cancer. As fat intake and animal protein intake increase, so does cancer.

For example, here's part of the book in which Campbells quotes a Harvard review of medical studies between the link of prostate cancer and dairy:

"A 2001 Harvard review of the research could hardly be more convincing:

....twelve of the fourteen case-control studies and seven of nine cohort studies have observed a positive relation assosiation for some measure of dairy products and prostate cancer; this is one of the most consisitent dietary predictors for prostate cancer n the published literature. In these studies, men with the highest dairy intakes had approximately double the risk of total prostate cancer, and up to a fourfold increase n the risk of metastatic or fatal prostate cancer relative to low consumer." (p. 178 )

"As we have seen with other forms of cancer, large-scale observational studies show a link between prostate cancer and an animal-based det, particularly one based heavily on dairy....... ....(further on the page)...With regard to prostate cancer, people with hgher than normal blood levels of IGF-1 have been shown to have 5.1 times the risk of advanced-stage prostate cancer. There's more: when men who have low blood levels of a protein that binds and inactivates IGF-1, they will have 9.5 times risk of advanced -stage prostate cancer. Let's put a few stars by these numbers. They are big and impressive- and fundamental to this fnding is the fact that we make more IGF-1 when we consume animal-based foods like meat and dairy."(p.179)

You can watch a video with Dr. Campbell here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NblGYG0h8g8&feature=related

Or you can take a look at Dr Caldwell Esselstyn, Cardiologist at the Clevland Clinic, in Oho has done. In 1985, after decades working as a surgeon, he started to take an extreme nutrtional approach. He took people who had had heart attacks and put them on a diet that had no added oils, meat, fish, fowl, or dairy. He started with eighteen patient, who between them had had 49 coronary events. In the following eleven years, of these previously headed-to-the-grave peole, not one person who stayed on the diet had a coronary event, and 70% saw an opening of their clogged arteries.

Dr. Joel Fuhramn in "Eat to Live" writes, "Dairy is best kept to a minimum. There are many good reasons not to consume dairy. For example, there is a strong correlation between dairy lactose and ischemic heart disease.81 There is also a clear association between high-growth-promoting foods such as dairy products and cancer. There is a clear association between milk consumption and testicular cancer.82 Dairy fat is also loaded with various toxins and is the primary source of our nation's high exposure to dioxin.83....There is ample evidence implicating dairy consumption as a causitive factor in both prostate and ovarian cancer.86 in April 2000 a Harvard study reported that having 2.5 servings of dairy each day boosted prostate cancer risk by more than 30 percent.87 Another recent controlled study conducted in Greece has shown a strong assocation between dairy products and prostate cancer.88" (p88-89)

As far as global wraming, here is the UN press release stating how cows affect global warming (although, in my country- the US- about half the people hate the UN, and the same sort of people dismiss global warming as a hoax, so take the this for what it's worth) :

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=20772&Cr=global&Cr1=environment

I'm not saying dairy isn't delicious, or that people who are in the dairy industry are bad people or anything (in fact, my whole grandfather's side of my family used to be dairy farmer in Minnesota). I'm just trying to point out this information beacause: 1) this info questioning dairy is only a drop in the bucket compared to all the pro-dairy ads you see in TV, magazines, supermarkets, schools and popular culture. And 2) since almost everyone will know people who die of heart disease or various cancers, not to mention the other conditions I mentioned above.

Edited April 7, 2009 at 04:37 PM by wushijiao

[peekay]

Let's dissect this "China Study" theory that milk causes prostate cancer, through increased animal fat & protein consumption.

Two recent, widely-cited research to support this contention can be found here and here. Reuters, for example, noted publication of these two studies.

The first study is a multi-ethnic cohort research which followed 82,483 men over the period of 8 years. Published in 2007, it employed modern, sophisticated methods & analysis. The study found "an association" between milk consumption and prostate cancer risk.

The second study (published at the same time) is perhaps the most comprehensive survey on the effect of calcium and dairy products on prostate cancer risk. Conducted by the National Institutes of Health, this study followed over 293,888 men over six years. Like the first study, this one also found an "association" between milk consumption and prostate cancer risk.

Two of our best studies, both found increased risk of prostate cancer due to milk consumption. Slam dunk case, right? Only for the pseudo-science crowd.

In the first study, they actually only noted an increase in risk among those who drank no-fat or low-fat milk. Those who drank regular milk had no risk increase. Those who drank whole-milk actually had a decrease in prostate cancer risk!

So what they found was actually opposite the argument that increased animal fat and protein intake causes cancer. If anything, whole-milk apparently does a body good. On balance, the study concluded: "In analyses of food groups, dairy product and total milk consumption were not associated with prostate cancer risk."

In the second study, the authors similarly only found "weak association" between skim-milk and prostate cancer. No increased risk found among those who drank regular or whole-milk or any other dairy products. Again this runs contrary to the "more fat and protein means more cancer" theory. The second study also concludes: "findings do not provide strong support for the hypothesis that calcium and dairy foods increase prostate cancer risk."

So why the apparent increase in risk associated with just low-fat (skim) milk?

According to the Prostate Cancer Research Foundation, which reviewed the same two studies above, the linkage appears to simply be a reporting bias: "Men who drink skim milk are more health conscious and therefore more likely to have regular cancer screening and, as a result, are more often diagnosed with prostate cancer."

The Foundation also noted that "researchers are not advising men to stop drinking skim milk" and "at present, there is no proof that skim milk causes or worsens prostate cancer".

Scaremongering still sells a lot of books, however.

[wushijiao]

Actually, the book addresses this, to some degree in its critique of the Nurses Study, in the sense that diet of people eating a relatively high-fat (say 20-35% of calories) are compared to people who also eat a high fat diet (say, again, 20-35% of calories), but one small factor in isolation, say skim vs. 2% or two servings vs. three per day are tested, but in general, they are eating the same thing. Also, the China Study clearly states that you're no better off drinking skim, since the problem is animal products in general (and the mechanisms of increased protein consumption on cancer growth, which dealt with in great depth, and skim obviously contains more protein than whole milk). So, in fact, the book mentions how people who are drinking skim and eating low-fat may not necessarily be doing themselves much of a favor in terms of health in the long-run. Again, I think the book is worth reading.

On the other hand, if I used words such as dairy “causes” cancer, that reflects my poor understanding of interpretation of the science, and my own jumping to conclusions by adding a degree of certainty that scientists might not be completely be comfortable with. However, Campbell does discuss the biological mechanisms that most likely cause cancer, and he doesn’t just rely on population studies or meta-studies. The books I mentioned, especially the China Study, are much more cautiously worded. I’ve heard vegans ask Campbell if the evidence shows that eating low levels of animal products (in the range of, say, 5% from calories from animal products) is risky, and his answer was that he could speculate, but he couldn’t say conclusively for sure.

[liuzhou]

With all this lactose intolerance, how come every supermarket I have ever visited in China has shelf loads of dairy products? Milk powders, UHT milks and Yoghurts in particular.

They're mainly for small kids

Probably, but some (a lot) are specifically targetted at the elderly.