Milk and dairy products cause heart disease, diabetes and osteoporosis -- interview with Robert Cohen

Mike Adams: What is it that drove you to have this kind of interest and energy to pursue the truth about milk and dairy products?

Robert Cohen: Three little girls named Jennifer, Sarah, and Lizzie -- my daughters. I wanted them to have healthy bodies. I wanted them not to live four years of high school life with zits all over their body like their dad did. And you know something? They've been zit free! No acne, and if you look at my book, Milk A to Z, I take every letter of the alphabet and fill in something about milk. Z is for zits, and we know that these cows are actually being milked before they give birth, and that milk is different milk -- it's milk instructing mammary tissue to grow. Little girls have changed these days, but we find that with the secretion of all of these androgens, the cows are constantly using the androgens to produce other hormones. Teenage acne is improved the second we give up milk. It takes a couple of weeks, and the acne's gone. And these androgens stimulate the sebaceous glands, which are the glands that cause the acne, cause the zits.

So we find a dairy link to a number of human conditions. And I'm not the first to say this -- Dr. Spock said this. Dr. Spock sold 75 million copies of his book on child care. The only book that sold more than Dr. Spock's book in history is the Bible. Dr. Spock said that no human, no child, no adult needs cow's milk -- it's a deception on the government's part to promote. And we're learning, as I've said, more doctors are learning today something they were not taught in medical school. You want to look at the etiology of allergies and diabetes? You look at diabetes, you look at the New England Journal of Medicine, July 31, 1992 -- right there, you can look it up! It said that exposure to these bovine proteins, bovine serum lactobumin is a trigger for insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus, and a few months later, October of '92, Scientific America talked about the dairy slogan,"Milk, it does a body good." It said, "Milk, it does a body good -- it sounds a little hollow these days."

Mike Adams: Can you give a brief summary of -- you've mentioned a few here, diabetes and acne, heart disease is mentioned in your book quite prominently -- but what other chronic diseases are, say, aggravated or even caused by chronic milk consumption?

Robert Cohen: Well, you know, that's an interesting question. Let's look at the Big Five -- in America, the number one killer is heart disease, and then we've got osteoporosis and cancer, and diabetes and asthma. We look at nations where they drink milk, we find these diseases are common. We look at nations where cheese consumption has tripled in the last 30 years, like England and France and Canada and the United States, we find also a tripling of asthma and breast cancers. Guess what country has the highest rate of breast cancer? Number one in breast cancer rate, Denmark, followed by Norway, followed by Holland, followed by Sweden -- are you detecting a trend?

Mike: Milk consumption.

Robert Cohen: Let's play some more trivia with you, Mike. We know breast cancer -- what country has the highest rate of heart disease?

Mike Adams: Well, I'm still thinking the United States.

Robert Cohen: Nope! Denmark, Norway, Holland and Sweden -- you're going to get it sooner or later! Bone disease, heart disease, breast cancer -- see where are we going with this? --highest rates of dairy consumption. We're seeing absolute correlations between these diseases and dairy consumption, and I can give you the reason. We have much more than just national epidemiological studies -- we have mechanisms by which these diseases occur, in breast cancer and every cancer, thousands of things cause cancer. Every time we pick up a newspaper there's a new thing identified as causing cancer.

But thousands of things cause it -- once you get it in your body, one thing makes it grow, and the one thing that makes it grow is the most powerful growth hormone you make in your body called insulin growth factor. And remarkably, the greatest miracle of science, of nature, is that this hormone in a cow's body and in a human body is identical. As a matter of fact, out of 4700 different species of mammal and hundreds of millions of different proteins in nature, there's only one hormone in the entire animal kingdom that is identical between two species -- human and cow IGF-1, which has been called the key factor in the growth and proliferation of breast cancer, lung cancer, prostate cancer, every human cancer.

Mike Adams: Now of course, the dairy industry says that all of these hormones are destroyed through pasteurization and they don’t get absorbed by humans who consume their products. We know that's not true, but why is that?

Robert Cohen: Let's analyze that statement, because maybe they're right, and if they're right, that means breastfeeding doesn't work. So if you're thinking that breastfeeding doesn't work, then go ahead and drink your cow's milk, but if by some remote chance you're thinking, Well, maybe breastfeeding does work, well by drinking the cow's milk you're breastfeeding, and you're taking the hormones, and in a very efficient way, more efficient than even nature, because nature finds a way to make lots of something. Like, if you look at fish, at codfish -- they're laying tens of thousands of eggs. Some species of fish lay over half a million eggs, because the fish, somehow there's some innate knowledge that has determined that most of those eggs are going to be eaten by predators. Most of those eggs will not survive to become new baby fish.

Well, the body works the same way -- you make millions and millions of sperm. You make millions and millions of cells. You make enough so that something survives. And in the case of this hormone, IGF-1, your body is constantly making it, and it's broken down very rapidly, or bound to other protein receptors. But in the case of cow's milk, we've improved upon nature -- we have cow's milk where normally these proteins are gone very rapidly. We homogenize milk - in other words, we take the milk and make the fat molecules between 10 and 100 times smaller. We make many more of them -- a pint of milk can contain a trillion tiny fat molecules. They envelop and protect these hormones, which naturally, most of them are destroyed. So now we have a mechanism by which we double the amount of this powerful growth hormone in your body, and where it usually is broken down in less than a second or two, it now remains active for up to 30 minutes. When it finds an existing cancer, which is also common, that is the turn-on mechanism. And that's why the nations that are drinking the most milk today and eating the most cheese are the ones with the highest rates of every human cancer.

Mike Adams: Let's just clarify for the consumers out there which products have these hormones in them. Because it's not just liquid milk. It's everything that's dairy, right?

Robert Cohen: Yeah, that's right! Everything that's dairy. You've got liquid milk in cheese, and sour cream, and butter. That's what milk is. When you use 21 pounds of milk to make a pound of butter, or 10 pounds of milk to make a pound of hard cheese, or 8 pounds of milk to make a pound of sherbet...

Mike Adams: You're concentrating all of those...

Robert Cohen: You're concentrating the hormones, you're concentrating the dioxins, you're concentrating the saturated fat, which we know is good for you of course. That's what milk is, and that's what these dairy products are -- concentrated milk products. If you've got one unit of something bad, you don't want to have ten units of it concentrated.

Mike Adams: Indeed. There have been companies, of course, independent dairy producers, who have been producing milk, and putting right on the label that this is produced without bovine growth hormones.

Robert Cohen: But there's really no difference to me between the bovine growth hormone, which has been genetically engineered, and the naturally occurring growth hormone. It's all the same.

Mike Adams: I've recommended to readers they take a 30-day no-dairy test. Seven days is also plenty, if you're aware of your body, to see the difference, but what can people really expect to change. You've mentioned some of the things, but what about the long-term health improvements? If someone gives up milk, what can they expect to happen in a month or in a year?

Robert Cohen: Well, you know, it's interesting you ask that question, because the Townsend Medical Letter, which is a doctor's letter written by doctors for doctors, over 180,000 get it, in the May of 1995 issue, they talked about cow's milk, the symptoms, that they've been linked to a variety of health problems -- mucus production, hemoglobin loss, allergies, and numbers 8, 9, and 10 on their list were mood swings, depression, and irritability. Now, you think about people who have mood wings, depression and irritability, and many people blame it on Epstein-Barr virus, being middle-age crisis prone.

Mood swings, depression and irritability -- you take estrogen every day, with progesterone and melatonin and all of these different female hormones that are coming from pregnant cows, and it's going to mess you up. I can't even tell you what it's even going to do to you. But I know that we become very hormonal, depressed, mood swings, depression and irritability -- give it up. It really is an easy solution. You can spend thousands of dollars with your doctor, and take all sorts of medication, and give kids Ritalin, but there's no need for it! Just go not milk -- completely dairy-free.

Mike Adams: Right! It is amazing -- so often, people go to their doctor and they get drugs, just to mask the symptoms caused by simple dietary choices.

Robert Cohen: And they teach the doctors none of this in medical school, although many of them are learning on their own. They're learning because they go with their patients and they say, "Stay off the milk for a while." And they do, and they get dramatic results, especially with attention deficit disorder, autism -- we're seeing such dramatic changes in children who go completely dairy-free.

Mike Adams: What about the long-term prevention of chronic disease?

Robert Cohen: There's a place on this planet where they have more people living over age 100 than anywhere else, where the average woman lives to age 86, where people don't even need x-ray machines because they don't get breast cancer or osteoporosis. That place is 160 islands between Japan and Taiwan called Okinawa. Now the book was written by Wilcox and Suzuki called "The Okinawa Plan," and you read that these people are eating 1/20th the amount of calcium that we do, yet they don't get bone breaks.

And you'll read the analysis of calcium intakes all over the world -- South Africa they're eating under 100 milligrams a day, in America 980, and yet we have 14 times the rate of pelvic fractures. It's not the calcium you eat, it's not the cow's milk you eat -- it's the protein, the animal protein that causes the acid condition in the blood which your body must neutralize, and it does so by leaching calcium from your bones. And this is the real science -- this is not the goofy milk mustache ad marketing -- this is the real science that you find in peer-reviewed scientific journals, the truth that most Americans are not getting.

Mike Adams: And yet most Americans think if you have fragile bones or the symptoms of osteoporosis, you have to drink more milk!

Robert Cohen: Which is accelerating the bone loss because of the tremendous amount of sulfur-based amino acids.

Mike Adams: And of course, there are lots of prescription drugs they can take to further mask those symptoms.

Robert Cohen: Which is a shame because they cause a cascading of events. I mean, look at what women take to prevent bone loss -- Premerin? You know what Premerin is? Premerin is one of the number-one prescribed drugs in America. It is what it sounds like -- Premerin -- pregnant mare urine. It comes from horses -- they keep horses in bonds, hooked up to devices that collect their urine. If you scratch one of those little yellow pills, it smells just like pee. That's what it is, the estrogen from pregnant mares, and you know what? We're not drinking estrogen from pregnant mares, but we're drinking estrogen from pregnant cows in the form of their milk. Again, before they give birth they have milk, and that milk is containing female hormones to stimulate their own mammary tissue to grow larger. That’s why our little girls look different today.

Mike Adams: Let's see, we're getting our food from cow pus and our medicines from horse urine, something's wrong with this picture, huh?

Robert Cohen: Wonderful world we live in, huh? Progress.

Mike Adams: Let's talk about infant mortality with cow's milk too...

Robert Cohen: Well, it's interesting you mention that. The American journals really don't like to pick on the dairy industry, and reject many of these articles, but we find, there's a really great journal, one of the world's respected journals, called the Lancet, the British journal. And the Lancet, June 4, 1994, I believe it was, they published a study on sudden infant death syndrome showing that the lung tissue in the cells shows bronchial inflammation similar to asthma from dairy proteins. So children are having their last meal before they die, and what it is, is a bottle of cow's milk formula. And the children fed cow's milk -- the Lancet since 1960 has been doing a series of articles on sudden infant death and showing that hypersensitivity to milk protein is implicated as a cause of sudden infant death syndrome.