If you have a milk allergy, here’s some good news for you: it is probably the easiest of all food allergies to eliminate. The top 4 milk-loving parasites are:
1. Intestinal fluke (the milk-loving variety, not the gluten living variety)
2. Tapeworm
3. Hookworm
4. Roundworm
So if you have a milk allergy, you likely have one or more of these parasites.
The physiology of a milk allergy is simple: you’re not allergic to milk, you’re allergic to parasite poop. In short: you consume milk or a milk product, the favourite food of these particular parasites. They have been waiting for a product with the milk protein in it since your last indulgence. Finally you indulge…a piece of pizza, some cream in your coffee, some birthday cake or an accident and wow! You feel it. You eat, the parasites gorge and like fish in an aquarium they start to excrete waste instantly upon feeding. But their waste doesn’t go into an aquarium, it goes into you…
The particular relationship between your body and their waste is such that its passage through your system is instantly noticeable. Since everyone has multiple species of parasite in them already, there may be an underlying genetic component to why you in particular react in the way you do to the waste bacteria that parasites excrete when they eat milk specifically. If it is genetic, I don’t know why the genetic potential expresses itself in some people and not others: I don’t understand genetics. However, I do understand parasites and the bottom line is that if you get the parasites out, you’re no longer dealing with your genetics or the waste or the parasite. You can now consume milk products without a reaction.
On the one hand this is cheerful news: your milk allergy is curable. On the other hand it can be an unpleasant thought: that negative dairy reaction is your body processing out parasite waste. But if it’s an unpleasant thought, at least it’s a curable thought.
Why you?
I’m not convinced it’s merely genetics, and I think I can add to the general discussion in this field by proposing two possible contributing factors that you probably haven’t considered.
1. Lack of protection from your own childhood parasites. Everyone has childhood parasites. Most people get their first few from their mother’s breast milk. While it’s not ideal to have parasites at any age, they do play a biological role: if you’re going to be exposed to parasites on a regular basis anyway, you might as well get one the very first time, derive protection from it, and then be protected for the rest of your life so that you only have, for example, the one tapeworm to deal with and not 100 tapeworms, which nobody could handle. In this way acquiring a parasite in infancy can be seen as a natural defence mechanism against acquiring future parasites.
Understanding this, we can see that failing to be adequately protected from future parasites (e.g. milk loving parasites) could be the result of an ineffective blend of parasites from childhood. This might also explain why a mother and child would both have a milk allergy: the mother may have passed on an ineffective blend of parasites to her child, which is in turn propagated throughout the generations. By contrast, the people who have the perfect blend of these parasites are the ones who will never develop an adult milk allergy. Something in the bacteria from their existing parasite species renders them immune to further infection and their count of organisms is never able to snowball out of control.
2. Too high a count of your adult parasites. However your count snowballed out of control, remember that a milk allergy is never activated by a single milk loving parasite but rather, a count that is too high to handle. Perhaps you have eaten too much of the same parasite-containing food source over too long a period of time and slowly, despite your natural protection, built up a high count. Perhaps your childhood parasites have grown in size over the years and with age, are now fully grown organisms capable of producing a larger bowel movement full of toxic bacteria, so that while your parasite count hasn’t changed, the amount of waste you’re processing out has increased.
Usually, points one and two both apply. If you have a milk allergy you are 1) not adequately protected from the parasites that caused it and 2) processing out too much parasite waste which is either coming from A) too many organisms within a species, B) too many species or C) organisms that are too large producing too great a quantity of waste for you to eliminate without a symptom. Why not 1 + 2 A, B and C? A perfect storm.
Focus now moves to the important question. Where do you get a milk-loving parasite from? Well, milk! Or more specifically, a cow.
Cows have parasites too
Any farmer knows that cows have parasites. They de-worm their cows once a year with a medicine called ivormec, which is a bovine form of ivermectin, but ivermectin only works on some species of roundworm and strongyloides, not tapeworm, fluke or hookworm, so all cows have tapeworm, fluke and hookworm and they don’t get treated for it. Ever. I have yet to meet a farmer who uses praziquantel on their cows. Actually I have yet to meet a farmer who has heard of praziquantel (from someone other than me…).
The surviving parasites in the cow have a clever way of ensuring that they make their way into every member of the herd: through the milk. Sure their eggs can wash out in the feces (manure); sure the eggs can lodge in the flesh (steak tartar, or rare-cooked beef) but it is not widely appreciated that they also wash out through the milk during lactation. Parasite eggs wash out through the milk of every cow, every day, every time. So all cow’s milk has parasite eggs in it. 100% of cow’s milk, even if the farmer de-wormed the cow with ivormec, which as outlined doesn’t address most species of parasite, has parasite eggs in it. Interestingly, transmission through breast milk is the same process whereby a human mother passes on her parasites to her child. This happens with all mammals.
Someone drinks the milk or eats a milk product, the egg hatches on contact with stomach acid, they get a parasite, and blame it on that trip they took to Mexico. This isn’t bad luck, it doesn’t happen one time by chance: it happens every time every person takes every drink of milk every day of their lives.
But don’t they pasteurize milk?
The problem with Pasteurization
Historically the bad-milk problem was supposed to have been solved by pasteurization, a production process named after Louis Pasteur (1822-1895).
Pasteurization was developed as an acknowledgement that bad bacteria can come out through the milk, and heating it can kill those bacteria. Unfortunately this was the 19th century when bacteria received equal and sometimes greater focus than parasites in medical circles. Ironically in the 20th century parasites were assigned even less (less-to-no) importance in health issues, which some people have interpreted as a move backwards in thinking.
The problem with pasteurization is that while it works on bacteria, it doesn’t get the milk hot enough to kill parasite eggs. Parasite eggs are killed at 100°C or 212°F
Pasteurization is conducted at the following temperatures:
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As you can see, the milk in the vat at HHST pasteurization only reaches s temperature that would kill the parasite for one one-hundredth of a second. That’s not enough time. It would need to spend 10-15 seconds at 100°C/212°F. Less than 1 second is insufficient to rupture the membrane that protects the genetically active material that will grow into your next parasite. If the membrane remains intact, the parasite egg can still hatch.
They’re hardy little creatures and sub-100°C pasteurization doesn’t kill them.
There is a form of pasteurization that does kill them. It’s called UP or ultra-pasteurization where the milk spends 2 seconds at 138°C/280°F. While 2 seconds isn’t very long, the milk has to pass through every degree from 100°C to 137°C to get to 138°C, which means the parasite eggs are long dead by that time. UP milk and products made with UP milk are completely safe.
But dairies are not required to use UP to call their milk pasteurized, so most milks and most milk products, around 90% of what’s on the market by my estimate, have parasite eggs in them.
Interestingly enough, this is why so many nutritionists and prominent Doctors draw a correlation between bloating, excess mucous, digestive disorders… and milk products. They’re just not realizing this is because almost all milk is full of parasite eggs, which hatch on contact with stomach acid. There is evidence that these eggs are constantly hatching over the course of your life, which may explain why your parasite count is proportionate with age. Adults have a much higher parasite load than children, seniors have a much higher parasite load than adults. Why do you think children have so much energy and seniors are notoriously exhausted? Or did you think that was aging?
The enormity of this realization may take some time to come to terms with.
What is a milk product?
The issue is that milk products are virtually everywhere. Milk is in milk, obviously. But milk as a source of parasites applies to foods you might not immediately think of as milk. Butter, yogurt (all yogurts), cheese (all cheeses) cottage cheese, sour cream, ice cream (say it ain’t so…), cream, cream cheese and whipped cream. Milk baked into a cake doesn’t matter because the oven baking temperature kills the parasite eggs. But these other milk products aren’t boiled any more than milk is since they’re made from milk after it leaves the dairy. This explains how a tapeworm ended up in my cheese….
Traditionally, emphasis on dairy products has been placed on whether they are organic, hormone free or antibiotic free, with a sneaking suspicion that raw milk is the healthiest milk because it has enzymes that are good for you. Think about it this way: would you rather have enzymes that are good for you, and a stomach full of hookworms, or no enzymes and no hookworms? An enzyme can last for an hour, there is evidence that a hookworm can live in you for 20 years.
We haven’t even been asking the right questions. This was evident recently when I sat down to dinner in a restaurant where the waitress proudly told me that their food was gluten free, hormone free, antibiotic free, organic, and free range. She proceeded to put a very nicely made slice of organic, gluten-free bread on the table in front of me, spread with organic herb and garlic butter. It was glowing with gluten free organic goodness.
But did you boil the butter, I asked her?
The Dairy Paradox
You see, eliminating a dairy allergy is so simple that it’s barely worth spending time talking about it. All you need to do is eliminate the parasite causing the allergy and there is no more allergy, problem solved.
However that immediately leads us to the dairy paradox, which is that is soon as the elimination of your dairy allergy allows you to start eating dairy, you’re going to reinfect yourself from that dairy with the very parasites that gave you the dairy allergy to begin with: Tapeworm, Fluke, Roundworm, Hookworm.
Dairies don’t boil their milk products. Grocery stores and restaurants assume pasteurization means it safe and sell it to you, unaware of the larger issue. You assume somebody somewhere made sure it was safe so you buy it. You eat these products and acquire all of the parasites that are in them. The only reason you don’t get sick every time you eat dairy (this statement applies to the people who can eat dairy and therefore don’t have a dairy allergy, of course) is that you already have all species of parasite that you could get from dairy so there are no more that you can catch. Your parasite glass is full. And if you’re lucky, your parasite blend is protecting you from reaching an overall count/quantity where you could start to think you have a dairy allergy.
But if you’ve just had your dairy allergy eliminated (e.g. your dairy loving-and-pooping parasites eliminated), your parasite motel rooms are empty and you will very quickly acquire all of the things that you just got rid of. Hopefully, after elimination the next combination of parasites you acquire will be better than your last combination, or will take years to grow to full size, so you won’t be aware that you have re-acquired these organisms for some time. If you’re unlucky, you’ll get sick the very first time you put dairy in your mouth and will mistakenly assume that you still have the original dairy allergy.
This is the dairy paradox.
The Solution
If you’ve got the right blend of dairy parasites to begin with, they are protecting you from further infection and although it’s not a particularly accurate belief, you can sleep easy by thinking of yourself as being immune to dairy parasites. In other words, if dairy hasn’t been an issue up until now, don’t worry about it, since there are more important things in life than something that isn’t causing a symptom.
However, if you do have a dairy allergy, or are simply looking for a way to live a healthier lifestyle, there are a few things that you can do to ensure that you’re not topping up your parasite count every time you have a milk product.
1. UP: Consume dairy products made by the UP pasteurization process. Here’s a bit of news to cheer you up: Häagen-Dazs ice cream has never once tested for parasite eggs based on my testing, so it appears that they use UP pasteurization for their milk or otherwise boil it during the manufacturing process. Therefore you should be able to eat Häagen-Daz ice cream and not expect to acquire any parasites from it. I have also had good success with Riviera brand yogurt and sour cream, however please remember that my past experience with a product may not indicate that future batches are clean. It is best to check the company website and see which companies use UP in their production processes.
2. Cook it: You can cook your dairy. Frankly this is something the pasteurizing dairy itself should have done but in the absence of them doing it, there’s nothing stopping you from doing it. Whether it’s milk, butter or cheese, if it’s brought past the temperature that kills parasite eggs (100°C) it is safe. So boil your milk, boil your butter and put it back in the dish to solidify, bake your cheese (so baked brie is fine, mozzarella baked on top of a pizza is fine, and cheese cooked onto a cheeseburger is fine) boil the cream before you put it in your coffee (the temperature of hot coffee is below the boiling point, so pouring parasite cream into hot coffee doesn’t render it safe). Just remember that melting isn’t hot enough, the milk product has to be at 100°C for at least 10 to 15 seconds.
Restaurants can be quite accommodating if you ask nicely. Here’s a picture of what that organic, gluten-free, hormone-free, antibiotic-free place did with my butter.
3. Muscle Testing: You can go through the time, effort and inconvenience of muscle testing all of your milk products. I do this when I don’t have time to cook them and can’t find any UP products. My experience has been that about 10% of the milk products in a grocery store are in fact fine, meaning there are no parasite eggs in them. The only explanation for this is that they were brought to the boiling temperature in the manufacturing process (e.g. UP) and muscle testing can find them if you do it accurately. ‘Accurately’ is the key word there…self testing is not accurate. It is interesting to observe that there is little consistency between which products test fine and which don’t. It has nothing to do with organic, hormones, antibiotics, free range, GMO, and sometimes one product within a batch will test fine and the others don’t. In general it does seem to be consistent with cost: cheap tends to be a warning sign, but then expensiveness isn’t a guarantee of safety.
However I acknowledge that muscle testing your foods is a real hassle. You can’t be sitting in a grocery store muscle testing things all day long. It would be nice if national health regulatory agencies would simply get on board with this idea and require the dairies to bring the milk to the correct temperature to begin with.
I am working on providing dairies with a technological means of de-worming their milk without boiling, but that’s not going to be an immediate option for a few reasons, the main issue being that they aren’t even aware they need such a product…
It occurs to me that it might be interesting if someone were to assemble a list of all of the UP pasteurized products on the market, and have a small community of people who understand this and try to stay as clean as they can. I don’t usually approve comments on these blogs but if anyone wants to do some research and post which companies do in fact use UP, I will approve those comments below.
The real solution to the dairy paradox, and to dairy in general being a major source of parasites in the modern world, is for society as a whole to upgrade/update our understanding of what constitutes adequate to pasteurization and make UP the requirement as opposed to simply an option. I don’t think this is an unreasonable proposition.
Do you need to stop using milk products?
Certainly not. If you’re like most people, you’re not even aware that you have parasites, let alone milk-loving parasites. And I never advocate avoidance.
If you don’t want to drink milk for ethical reasons, I respect that. If you want to consume milk products, understand the need for adequate pasteurization, and perhaps take matters into your own hands and see to it that your milk products are UP, cooked or muscle tested.
And then remember that there’s no such thing as a dairy allergy, it’s just a high count of dairy loving parasites, and those can easily be treated.