Dairy: Good or bad?

WDDTY — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 14:03:00 GMT

My fellow WDDTY blogger Annemarie Colbin’s recent post on ‘Super-immune kids’ provides some concise, useful advice on keeping your children healthy for the new school year, although I suspect that the dietary suggestions she makes are equally applicable to adults.

In particular, her first suggestion caught my eye – avoid dairy. Dairy is a popular part of the Western diet, and is conventionally recommended as a healthy addition to your diet. So I thought I’d give a quick survey of the blogosphere to see what other people are saying about the effects of dairy products on your health.

Over at suite101, Mary Luz Mejia has posted an insightful article asking the question, ‘Does Dairy Cause Acne?’ She discusses the findings of Canadian dermatologist F.W. Danby, who writes:

But how could milk cause acne? Because drinking milk and consuming dairy products from pregnant cows exposes us to the hormones produced by the cows’ pregnancy hormones that we were not designed to consume during our teenage and adult years. It is no secret that teenagers’ acne closely parallels hormonal activity...

It’s an extremely helpful article, particularly for those who suffer from acne or know somebody who does. Even more information on the connection between acne and milk can be found at www.acnemilk.com.

Meanwhile, one Videojug user has posted a short video on ‘How to Spot the Signs of Dairy Intolerance’. This is definitely worth a look, especially considering that giving up dairy is one of the most frequent pieces of advice offered on our Forum. Every week, our readers respond to each other’s health problems, often sharing their own experiences. Time and again I notice people mentioning that dairy intolerance turned out to be the cause of their problems.

For a balanced and detailed account of the advantages and disadvantages of different kinds of dairy products, I strongly recommend Dr Ben Kim’s article, ‘Are Dairy Products Good For Your Health?’

Finally, the WDDTY archives contain a plethora of articles on dairy and health. Feel free to have a browse and, as always, post your comments below so that together we can improve our understanding of this particular health issue.

Birdseye: Health Tips from the Blogosphere : dairy intolerance

Dairy: Good or bad?