Milk is gross

Oh no, you’re not done with me yet. It’s a Friday, which means no school and some serious blogging catch-up.

On my list of topics to blog about is “milk is gross.” I’ve been making a serious effort to cut back on dairy products. I’ve noticed that, on days that I don’t consume milk or cheese, I feel much more energized and alive. I hope to eventually ditch dairy altogether (and if you’re wondering how I’m going to grow strong bones without milk, you need to go back and read my post on bones, calcium and osteoporosis), and now seems like a good time to justify that decision.

In the interest of fairness, I have to first admit that I’m not an expert, and I only know what I’ve read. For information on the benefits of drinking milk, go to the “got milk?” campaign’s website. The first visual – animals and milk on a manufacturing line, a chicken in a bathtub (WTF?) and a horse on a treadmill – totally creeps me out. But if you click on the link way at the bottom, “Copyright 2009 California Milk Processor Board – Legal Disclaimer,” you can access all of the studies that back the strong-bone-strong-muscles-less-PMS claims.

I urge you to take everything you read with a grain of salt, and always ask yourself, ‘Who’s getting something out of this?’ In other words, when the 2009 California Milk Processor Board tells you to drink more milk, is there some kind of conflict of interests? I’d say so. So, if you’re interested enough, do your own research on this topic, and make your own decision, but always watch out for studies funded by groups that profit from your consumption of the product they’re touting. In other words: be smart; think for yourself.

"strong bones" huh?

Now, I’ll let you in on some of the research I’ve been doing.

Americans freaking love milk. We have TV commercials and billboards just for milk. We believe it when the ads (most of them funded by the aforementioned California Milk Processor Board) tell us that our bones and muscles will be strong if we drink milk. And, best of all, nobody gets hurt for milk, right? Cows don’t die to give us milk. It’s really the best of all worlds… (insert dramatic music here) …OR IS IT?

Well, if Superman does it...

Most milking, aside from the milking done by old Billy Bob down at the farm over yonder, isn’t done by hand anymore. When it was, human interaction meant a build-in safeguard against udder (utter udder) injuries going unnoticed. Today, as Erik Marcus writes in Vegan: The New Ethics of Eating, cows are milked twice a day by “milking machines” that are often not maintained very well despite their constant use. Therefore, cows’ utters are often pulled too hard, resulting in just as much milk and utter udder injuries.

As Skinny Bitch so appetizingly puts it: “Cows are milked by machine; metal clamps are attached to the cows’ sensitive udders. The udders become sore and infected. Pus forms. But the machines keep on milking, sucking the dead white blood cells into the milk. How freaking gross is that? To get rid of all the bacteria and other shit, milk must be pasteurized. But pasteurization destroys beneficial enzymes and makes calcium less available without even killing all the viruses or bacteria.” Ew. As somebody who’s had milk with every dinner for the better part of my life, this offends me. Hell, as a female, this offends me.

Because THEY would know.

Farm Journal said the following: “Each cow is placed in a contraption called ‘Unicar’ which is a kind of cage on wheels that moves along a railway line. The cages, with cows in them, spend most of their time filed in rows in a storage barn. Two or three times a day, the farmer pushes a button in the milking parlor. Rows of cows then move automatically up to the milking parlor like a long train. As they go, their car wheels trip switches which feed, water, and clean the cars. After milking, the cows, still in the cages, roll back to the storage area. The cows live in the cages for ten months of the year, during which time they are unable to walk or turn around.” How very natural.

According to Erik Marcus, about 1 in 5 cows suffer from Mastitis, or inflammation of the udders, which often leads to to infections. Think about that. If you go through a gallon of milk a week, that’s 52 gallons a year. Of those, 10 (ish) came from cows with inflamed udders. How much pus do you think you‘ve had to drink lately?

Let’s not forget that humans weren’t supposed to be drinking milk past their early days of breastfeeding. We were never meant to be consuming this crap. In nature, when do you ever see a full-grown horse, cow, pig or gorilla drink milk? You don’t. No other animal in nature drinks milk past infancy. No other animal, with the exception of strange circumstances, drinks the milk of another animal. Ever. It’s just not natural. And it’s pretty “freaking gross” when you stop to think about it.

"That's just common mutant sense."

To add insult to injury, modern-day dairy cows are producing far more milk than they were ever meant to produce in nature. Genetic engineering has enabled dairy farmers to procure 16,000 pounds of milk per year from each dairy cow they own; that’s almost double the 9,000 pounds non-engineered cows produce. Genetic engineering also makes cows much more susceptible to diseases.

Old faithful, Mister John Robbins says that recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH) is injected into about a quarter of dairy cows in the U.S., and it serves to increase the dairy output from these cows. Unfortunately, the hormone translates to a higher risk of prostate cancer and breast cancer in those who drink milk from injected cows. Awesome.

Skinny Bitch says that most, if not all, of the dairy products we consume in the United States contain pesticide residue. And, just because Skinny Bitch always says it better than I do, one more thing:

“Even if you’re buying the low-fat, part-skim nonsense, more than half the calories come from fat. Fat free? Give us a freaking break! Remember what milk is for. It is designed to fatten up baby cows. Do you really believe it can be made fat free? Get your head out of your ass. Milk = fat. Butter = fat. Cheese = fat. People who think these products can be low fat or fat free = morons.”

So there you have it. About a billion reasons not to consume dairy. If you can’t handle soy milk, I highly recommend rice milk. There are even a lot of good cheese substitutes in grocery stores now.

Oh, and one last note. Milk cows have babies. The female calves are the “lucky” ones who follow in their mothers’ footsteps: they become dairy cows. The males, on the other hand, are born and taken away from their mothers immediately to take away any possibility of bonding (apparently, if mother and child were allowed to bond, the mothers would actually break down their cages to get to their babies). These baby males are put in stalls that do not allow them to walk or, really, move – this keeps their flesh nice and tender. If they make it to four months old (many of them die of diseases), they’re killed for veal.

[Via http://omniveggie.wordpress.com]

To observe.... or not to observe... isn’t that the question?

Treatment before evaluation seems to go against standard practice. To understand how to treat a patient, we need to find out what it is that we need to treat. In the field of osteoporosis, however, treatment before evaluation is often the norm. Physicians often give medications before bone density testing. Even Medicare measures osteoporosis testing as “prescribed a bone protecting medication”. Until recently, the fragility of the osteoporosis patient has lead to therapists following procedures that limit physical function testing in these patients. The extreme concern about the fragility of the patient with osteoporosis is not unfounded. More than 30% of female patients over the age of 65 are not tested (via DXA) for bone loss and more than 79% of patients who have a fracture, never get a DXA…let alone get prescribed a bone protecting medication- how many of these patients do we as therapists work with? Do you always know that your patient has bone loss? This disease has been associated with fractures that have occurred under very low trauma conditions. In contrast, the method by which many of these fractures have been diagnosed has come under scrutiny.

From the first major osteoporosis medication trial (FIT trial), a large substudy (N=6,084) of patients was examined to see if vertebral fractures reported in the non-clinical event group were actually fractures by applying a strict use of a “20% deformity or 4mm loss” measure. This non-clinical event group consisted of patients in the original FIT study that did not associate pain with fracture or they never had pain and therefore never reported an event (i.e. fracture). In addition, this study was cross-sectional, including patients from both treatment groups – placebo or alendronate. So, results of this analysis can be generalized to pharmaceutically treated and not treated populations. The study found that only 1/4 of radiographic vertebral deformities identified were actually fractures according to the strict measure. It appears that many vertebral fractures that have been categorized as such really are not vertebral fractures. It is from this study, and those similar, that we gain our information regarding vertebral fracture prevalence. It can be easily argued that vertebral fracture prevalence is not as severe as we may have been lead to believe.

If a 65 year female with back pain came to your clinic, and an x-ray did not reveal osteoporosis or fracture, would you do some standard spine ROM and strength assessments. Would you look at her movement patterns to understand more about what she is doing to increase her back pain during her daily life? Would you ask her to bend over to see flexibility? Is this really safe? If we are going to determine that we should not ask a patient to bend over when we know they have bone loss, what do we do if we don’t know, what if we don’t even suspect bone loss? Would that change the way you test? It might. You may decide, however, that the benefits of testing to determine what is wrong far outweigh the very low risk of injury during testing. It can be argued that to avoid testing, and “assume the worst” could result in unnecessary treatment. What if you could assess physical performance in the patient with osteoporosis in a safer way and streamline treatment to just what the patient needs?

While physical performance testing is far from the rigors and risk of cardiac stress testing, it is a stress test of sorts. In fact, one may argue that the risk of injury while observing a patient’s natural activity patterns is far lower than the risk of injury during a cardiac stress test. By doing physical performance testing with a patient, we can observe how well their musculoskeletal system performs in the context of natural activities. We can also understand if the patient is engaging voluntarily in excessive loading conditions that can lead to fracture.

Moreover, impaired physical performance is associated with increased fracture prevalence. If physical performance is not observed, related fracture risk could be missed.

During the Bone Safety Evaluation (BSE), a physical performance test that is designed specifically to evaluate performance safety while protecting patients with bone loss during testing (hence the term “Bone Safety Evaluation”), the patient is not asked to do anything he/she would not normally, and naturally do on their own. In 10 years of use, there has not been one case of fracture, vertebral or other, during the physical performance testing conducted on patients with bone loss at UOC (over 1600 tests have been conducted). At UOC, fracture incidence has actually gone down with ongoing BSE testing (2007: 26%, 2008: 11%). And physical performance on the BSE is independently associated fracture prevalence.

As an occupational therapist, I find it is critical to observe a patient’s performance. If I don’t understand how the patient is moving naturally, I can’t work effectively to change their movement. Furthermore, if the patient does not understand how they are moving unsafely, they don’t effectively engage in changing that movement.

As therapists, we inherently want to treat without much testing. It’s in our nature to heal even before we have the whole picture. Would we refuse to treat a patient with obvious hemi paresis without an MRI to confirm a diagnosis of stroke? Of course we would not. Conversely, would we begin treatment of hemi paresis without knowing how the impairment is affecting our patient’s function? Again, we would probably not. Yet, if we understood from the MRI the severity, type and location of the stroke and we knew that our patient wanted to resume independence with self-care, we could apply our treatment more effectively; even be able to plan a better long term treatment plan because expected and desired outcomes are better understood. Is it fair to not offer the same expectations for the patient with bone loss? I believe all patients, regardless of disease state, deserve comprehensive assessment and care.

I think we all realize that every time we initiate treatment with a patient whether it is ultrasound, exercise, or anything else, there is an inherent risk of injury, however small. We temper those risks with knowledge, experience, and judgment. The knowledge part of the equation includes various tests and evaluations conducted before therapy. I don’t think it serves the patient to assume anything about their condition when there is a tool that can give us answers. Of course, it goes without saying that when we use the tool, whatever it is, we must use that tool wisely, carefully, and judiciously.

[Via http://sgrantotr.wordpress.com]

Where The Sun Don't Shine: Vitamin D & Vitamin B12

You’ve heard the term ’sun worshippers’ referring to those people who live their lives in the sun scantily clad with the only goal of getting the darkets tan they can. As a photographer, I am also a sun worshipper, but for a different reason. I’m not so much worried about the sun itself, but it’s reflective light. Most day’s when I’m photographing, I’m either waiting on the light to change or hurrying up before it does. Seems like I’m constantly chasing the sun.

But now, more so than ever, it seems my relationship with the sun is leaning towards the former. There’s much to be said about soaking up the sun, and I am realizing more and more how true that is in my research and journey with B12 deficiency.

In addition to being diagnosed with B12 deficiency and Pernicious Anemia, I was also told I was Vitamin D deficient. Which is not too surprising since I lived in a city and latitude notorious for Vitamin D deficiency; Boston. At 42 degrees north latitude, there isn’t sufficient UVB radiation several month out of the year for adequate vitamin D synthesis. Which is the case for people living in other cities in that range and north.

The combination of being Vitamin B12 deficient and Vitamin D deficient, in retrospect, for me was a vicious cycle. How long this was going on, I’m not sure; but indeed well before I moved to Boston. In my research and reading thus far, I have yet to find solid information correlating vitamin B12 & D deficiency, or that one causes the other. But, I do know the symptoms are similar, especially in respect to fatigue and cognitive functions.

Technically, vitamin D is a fat soluble vitamin which encourages the absorption of calcium and phosphorous. People who are exposed to normal quantities of sunlight do not need vitamin D supplements because sunlight promotes sufficient vitamin D synthesis in the skin. (Reference)

Even when I lived in sunny, Austin, Texas prior to living in Boston for a year, I went to work when it was dark and came home when it was dark. I was working 60-80 hour weeks, working late nights on emails, conference calls and meetings with our overseas supplies and factories. I did get my share of Texas sunshine as I am more of an ‘outdoor’ girl by nature, but just not feeling well and healthy in general despite following several doctor recommendations and chiropractic visits, kept me from having the energy from doing as much outdoor stuff as I wanted. The effects of the B12 deficiency (and Vitamin D, I would think), including never waking up feeling refreshed after sleeping, made it hard to stick with an exercise plan and effort it takes to change to and stick with lifestyle of eating healthy.

Of course some days were better than others, and all my attempts were not futile, just short-term; not ever getting better at the big picture level. With ample amount of coffee and sucking it up and making myself do the things I needed to do despite how I felt, I got by. The important things got done. Other things didn’t. Some didn’t get done very well despite my natural tendency to be anal and somewhat of a perfectionist. Frustrating for me to say the least.

Recovering from Vitamin D deficiency

After receiving the diagnosis of the B12 deficiency and Vitamin D deficiency together from my doctor in Boston, I have to admit I honed in more on the B12 in my research and reading. Not that the Vitamin D didn’t seem important, just not as monumental as the B12.

Vitamin D? Yeah, yeah yeah….bring on the B12 I say!

I couldn’t be more wrong.

Along with the series of B12 injections I took a prescription dose, 50,000iu, of Vitamin D once a week for 12 weeks. Luckily, I only had to take it once a week, since the supplements are $3 each (yikes!). After I finished the prescription dose, I continue to take over the counter supplements combined with calcium twice a day.

I’m sure this happens to most people, but I start to pay attention when the same things continually, and randomly come across my plate. Which has been the case with Vitamin D just in the past few weeks. Articles I just happen upon reading, conversations with various people, blogs I’ve come across and a doctor’s visit I went on with my mom.

In one of my recent blog posts I explained that after my B12 diagnoses, I had my mom get checked for B12 deficiency. It worked out, thankfully, that she was able to see my doctor in Boston, but needed to take her treatment here in South Dakota, but was having trouble finding a doctor who was willing to treat her for the B12 or knew anything about B12 deficiency.

So from recommendations from friends, my mom found a doctor she was hopeful would be knowledgeable about the subject. So I went with her to her appointment; I wanted to hear what he had to say. In the discussion, he talked about the B12, but he told her that the Vitamin D was much more important at this point. I’m not sure it’s because she didn’t have as severe of symptoms of the B12 deficiency as I did or because she was also being treated for her thyroid. But regardless, made me reconsider my thoughts about Vitamin D. I left there wanting to do more research and reading about the ’sunshine vitamin’.

According to the Mayo Clinic website:

‘Vitamin D is found in many dietary sources such as fish, eggs, fortified milk, and cod liver oil. The sun also contributes significantly to the daily production of vitamin D, and as little as 10 minutes of exposure is thought to be enough to prevent deficiencies.’

and

‘The major biologic function of vitamin D is to maintain normal blood levels of calcium and phosphorus. Vitamin D aids in the absorption of calcium, helping to form and maintain strong bones. Recently, research also suggests vitamin D may provide protection from osteoporosis, hypertension (high blood pressure), cancer, and several autoimmune diseases.’

Another good resource I found for information is WebMD.

Symptoms of Vitamin D Deficiency:

• Chronic Fatigue
• Cognitive impairment
• Weak bones (Osteoporosis)
• Bone pain (Osteomalacia [similar to rickets])
• Muscle weakness
• Increased risk of death from cardiovascular disease
• Severe asthma
• Cancer
• Type 1 & Type 2 Diabetes
• Hypertension
• Glucose intolerance
• Multiple Sclerosis

Vitamin D Me Please!

As a result of the constant ‘in your face’ Vitamin D propaganda coming at me these past few weeks, as I mentioned earlier, has given me a new perspective and education about Vitamin D.

I continue to take my prescribed supplements faithfully, and with the weather being subzero lately living in the Midwest with the sun nowhere to be found, I have decided to also go to a tanning bed at least one time a week. I am aware of the controversy about skin cancer and tanning beds, but at this point I have to weigh my risk and reward.

I go in the tanning bed for 10 minutes at the most and will guarantee I will not be looking like some of the people I see coming in and out the tanning salon who have similar characteristics like my brown leather purse. Nothing like matching accessories. (Yikes!) No thank you. However, I will like the fact that I won’t be blinding the people anymore at the gym with white legs. I’m sure they’ll appreciate that as well. 

[Via http://b12chronicles.wordpress.com]