Milk and dairy products are definitely ‘loved’ in this country. But do they love you?

When it comes to heart health, perhaps it would be better said that milk is your arch enemy. Let’s look at why from a clinical nutrition approach.

You’ll be hearing a lot more about dairy products and how they create ill health, but today we are specifically addressing homogenized milk. This milk contains an enzyme called xanthine oxidase. This bovine (coming from cows) enzyme has been shown to damage the cells in the walls of arteries, a process that begins atherosclerosis or hardening of the arteries leading to heart disease. This enzyme should normally never leave the digestive tract but homogenization reduces the size of fat particles in milk to the degree that they do pass intact across the intestinal wall and into the bloodstream. (A leaky gut would aggravate this, but that’s a different discussion.) Once in the bloodstream, the enzyme travels to the arteries where it wreaks havoc. When the body identifies something it considers to be a toxin (called an antigen) the immune system produces something called an antibody (made against the antigen) to attack it. If something is not seen as a toxin by the body, it will not make an antibody. So it is a key fact that antibodies to xanthine oxidase have been found in the blood of individuals with atherosclerosis. Further, bovine xanthine oxidase has been found in the atherosclerotic plaques of humans. In case you’re wondering, we humans make the same enzyme, but it is not found in our arteries. An animal study done with rabbits found the presence of bovine xanthine oxidase in the blood of rabbits fed homogenized cow’s milk. There is an incidence of heart disease around the world consistent with the consumption of homogenized milk. The mechanism, as explained