Healthy Eating

Jun 29, 2006

Mucus and Drinking Milk

For some time now we have known that drinking dairy products can increase mucus. Recently there have been claims that milk can be linked to causing osteoarthritis and the problems are well-known but little is brought to the attention of the public.
I receive research and medical findings from many sources including publications written by medical doctors. In my constant search for healthy eating information I came across this March 2006 article in "Real Health Breakthroughs." This information is given reference from "Carbohydrate in Nutrition" by Ron Kennedy, M.D. and the Doctors’ Medical Library (http://medical-library.net).
For many people, mucus is just a part of life, but it doesn’t have to be. The excessive formation of mucus can be simple to solve if you change your diet. That is a big IF when it becomes a matter of cutting back on your intake of sugar and starch (which becomes sugar in the body). Although a certain amount of mucus is normal, some of us find it problematic. You would dry up and burn without it, just like running an engine without oil. What we’re talking about here is excessive mucus.
If you consume massive amounts of sugar in any form—pastries, high-starch vegetables, ice cream, artificial sweeteners or fruit juices, you’ll probably suffer from excessive mucus. And eventually you’ll contact some problems a lot worse than mucus—diabetes and heart disease, for example.
Potatoes contain starch which converts to sugar in the body. Sugar can creep into your diet in some less-than-obvious ways, like by drinking milk. Milk has a lot of sugar in the form of lactose. When the milk is in its raw, unpasteurized form, your body absorbs the sugar at a safe, natural rate. This article claims that drinking copious amounts of raw milk will actually reduce your blood sugar. I don’t know enough about that to subscribe to that approach. I do remember my father taking us for a ride in the country to purchase fresh milk directly from the farmer. Pasteurized milk was supposed to be safer and then homogenized milk mixed the cream into the milk in a way that prevented it from separating at the top. But when milk is pasteurized, it transforms the lactose sugar into beta lactose. Your body absorbs this unnatural sugar faster than it was designed to absorb natural sugars, leading to a domino effect of problems in the body.
First, a massive dose of sugar enters the bloodstream, which leads to a powerful insulin injection from the pancreas into the blood. This causes your blood sugar level to drop drastically, which makes you crave even more sugar. Eventually this vicious cycle will lead to a failure of the insulin-regulating mechanism. When this happens, the blood will be saturated with insulin but will be resistant to it. The end result: obesity and adult-onset, insulin-resistant, Type II diabetes—the kind of diabetes your parents had.
Action to take: To avoid mucus—not to mention diabetes and heart disease—drink raw milk. It may be hard to find, but you can talk to the manager of your local health food store about ordering it. Cutting out the middleman and heading to the nearest farm might be the route to preventing major diseases. The other (less expensive) option is to cut down on your sugar intake. Doing both is recommended.
Sugar is a major problem for Americans and is too readily accessible to children in the form of vending machines in schools and other events. Schools are realizing the effects of sugar and removing vending machines. School discipline problems drop and focus on studies shows in the way of higher scholastic scores. Medicine that was needed to settle children down, like Ritalin, are needed less often. People do have an addiction to sugar and our culture further exacerbates the problem with ads, commercials which associate sugar with celebration, joy, happiness, family gatherings and even sex.
Changing the improper dietary habits of the American people will not happen overnight, but neither did addressing the problems associated with smoking.

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