The Hormone Factor

If nothing else has convinced you to get your calcium from rich plant sources like broccoli, nuts, seeds, and leafy green vegetables, consider this: you’re ingesting antibiotics and hormones every time you consume dairy products.

They don’t call the meat and dairy industries “agribusiness” for nothing. They’re businesses, and their primary goal is to make a lot of money. They make that money by selling lots and lots of animal products, and that means keeping animals healthy and growing them big. In order to do this, they pump them full of antibiotics and hormones.

Just like a nursing baby ingests whatever its mother has eaten, you consume the cow’s diet when you eat animal foods. That means that you’re getting hormones in your food—hormones that were used to fatten pigs and make cows give more milk, hormones to force chickens to produce more eggs and for turkeys to grow massive drumsticks.

Hormones regulate every aspect of the human body—from how much weight we gain or lose, to our sex drives and our moods, to how much hair we have. They influence your sleep cycle, your complexion, your reproductive cycle, and your brain functions. When cows are given excessive, unnatural levels of artificial hormones to produce more milk, what effect do you think it might have on you when you drink the milk they produce?

If you’ve ever taken any sort of a hormone for medical purposes—steroids, birth control pills, cortisone shots—then you know how quickly that small amount of hormone introduced into your body makes dramatic changes. An imbalance of hormones in your body can make you grow hair in unexpected places, create accelerated maturity in children and adolescents, cause you to feel anxious, depressed, angry, or overly emotional, and cause your face to erupt in blemishes.


Antibiotics for Breakfast

Another cause for concern is the antibiotics found in eggs and dairy products, another by-product of factory farming. Over half of the antibiotics produced in the United States go to treat livestock. Certainly, these drugs keep the animals healthy, but are they something you want to be consuming in your food?

The biggest problem with antibiotics is that they’re all-purpose bacteria killers. Yes, they kill the viruses and bacteria that can cause disease, but they also kill the good bacteria that we need to keep our body’s delicate systems in balance. Good bacteria, like acidophilis and bifidophilis, live in your intestinal tract and on your skin, and they do battle with bad bacteria that can cause you harm.

Taking antibiotics on a regular basis, whether by prescription or inadvertently through processed foods, lowers your resistance to bacterial illnesses like salmonella, which is found in small amounts in eggs, poultry, and meat. Normally, your body should be able to fight off the lesser bugs that it ingests but, if you build up a tolerance to antibiotics through constant exposure, your natural immune system is weakened, leaving you more susceptible to illnesses like food poisoning.

On top of that, you may be taking antibiotics prescribed by your doctor, in a carefully measured dose. If you then eat eggs that contain salmonella, it finds no good bacteria waiting to kill it when it hits your small intestine— they’ve all been done in by the prescription antibiotic. So the salmonella has a nice, warm, moist, antibody-free environment in which to incubate, and you find yourself sick as a dog for a week. Then your doctor prescribes more antibiotics, and the merry-go-round continues.

Dumping the Dairy

Dairy products are included in so many recipes that it may seem like a huge challenge to replace them. Not so! The variety and quality of dairy substitutes has improved greatly in the past decade, and you have a lot of options. If you don’t like the taste of one style of nondairy product, just try another; you’re bound to find one that works for you.

Cow’s milk can be replaced in recipes by rice milk, potato milk, almond milk, or even oat milk. The quantities are the same (1 cup cow’s milk = 1 cup rice milk, etc.); the only difference is the taste. Oat milk is very mild, and lacks the sweetness of both cow’s milk and other replacements; you may find you prefer it, or you may choose to add more sweetener to compensate. Either way, you have all the control! The nut milks, like almond milk, are quite sweet, and both hemp and rice milk are available with flavors already added. You may find that vanilla rice milk tastes better to you than cow’s milk ever did, especially for lightening your coffee or on cereal.

All the milk substitutes can be found in shelf-stable, aseptic boxes at natural foods stores and, increasingly, in supermarkets. This is another advantage over cow’s milk— you can save money by purchasing it by the case, if you like, and stock your milk right on the pantry shelf without worrying about it expiring in the fridge (you will want to refrigerate them once opened, however). Rice milk can also be found in powdered form, although you’ll probably find that the liquid product tastes better.

Vanilla rice milk works great in desserts; use it to make puddings and custards, on your cereal, in baked foods, and processed in the blender with fresh fruit for smoothies. Plain rice milk works well in savory dishes like casseroles, soups, and sauces. And if you need buttermilk—say, to make buttermilk pancakes—you can create a substitute by adding two teaspoons of vinegar or lemon juice to one cup of rice milk.