No, Chocolate Milk is NOT an ideal “recovery” drink!

June 2^nd to June 9^th, I will partake with Team Swiss at the annual ALC (AIDS LifeCycle) bike ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles. A seven-day journey shared with 3000 like-minded people coming together from all corners of the world to cross 545 miles through beautiful California. Chocolate milk is a big sponsor for this event…

This blog is not about my yearly participation; I’m writing about a consistently

promoted product as the perfect “recovery” drink, post-exercise. My father taught me early on not to drink much milk, for this high-nutritious liquid is intended to grow a 30lbs calve into a 1200lbs cow. 

During ALC, many encourage chocolate milk as perfect energy and muscle recovery drink that replenishes energy and replaces electrolytes – but this myth is simply bogus! I hear friends praising the well-being effects, and I will specify why consuming chocolate milk makes you feel like this… It’s worth repeating that drinking goat’s milk can disrupt your electrolyte balance, a common dilemma for sports participants!

There is no benefit of consuming chocolate and sugar-enriched dairy (apart from being the source of whey protein). Most humans, after the age of ten, lack an enzyme called rennin to digest milk! Quite to the contrary, dairy seems to have detrimental effects on your health. Milk should be for calves (baby cows). Most humans cannot digest it. You may tolerate it, but you DO NOT fully digest it. I have aided clients with chronic constipation, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), arthritis, chronic sinusitis, and various serious allergies by simply limiting their milk and cheese consumption.

To understand the complexity of my blog, I must bombard you with a few milk facts that are necessary to understand these over-promoted products. It’s a hundred and twenty billion-dollar industry in this land (USofA)!

Today’s dairy cows are fed gas-preserved storage food, which changes the nature of the milk and causes health problems for the cows. They are fed soy, corn, cottonseed meal, or other commercial feeds, which contain all sorts of things, including chicken manure and citrus peel cake, laced with pesticides. These foods are not appropriate for cows, which are ruminants and should be feeding on green grass in the spring, summer, and fall. By nature, they are supposed to regurgitate green feed, silage, hay, and root vegetables in the winter. Unfortunately, most dairy cows are kept in confinement, given antibiotics and hormones, and never see green grass their entire lives. These same cows have been tweaked and shot up with Posilac to produce up to 55 or more pounds of milk per day nearly all year long. But alarming is the injection of a genetically engineered form of bovine growth hormone (rBGH). A manufactured or synthetic hormone is used to increase milk production artificially. For humans, rBGH also increases blood levels of insulin growth factor 1 (IGF-1) in those who drink it. And higher levels of IGF-1 are linked to several cancers. (read the link below)

This method of farming dairy is a burden on global health. Each cow regurgitates between four compartments of the stomach and producing an amazing amount of carbon… That could be reduced by 75% by simply adding seaweed to their diet… if only the industry would!

First off, we have to preserve what nature would spoil in two days by mandatory quickly heating milk to 165 degrees for about 5 seconds. (Water contaminated with an equal amount of feces and bacteria in the US, as mandated by the same regulatory board, must be boiled for more than seven minutes by 212 degrees before being considered drinkable…) Hence, pasteurization merely kills certain bacteria. However, this process disables certain enzymes needed to break down milk fat in our human digestive tract. It robs the milk serum of vitamins, denatures fragile milk proteins, kills beneficial bacteria, and promotes pathogens. Even calves fed pasteurized milk instead of colostrum (high antibacterial milk right after birth) reflect poorly on this product, and many die before maturity. Pasteurization was instituted in the 1920s to combat TB, infant diarrhea, undulant fever, and other diseases caused by poor animal nutrition and dirty production methods. By today’s standard, pasteurization is absolutely unnecessary for public protection. It’s an archaic, ineffective law…

In some cases, milk is ultra-pasteurized to eliminate heat-resistant bacteria and give it longer shelf life. Ultra high-temperature pasteurization is a process that takes milk from a chilled temperature to above the boiling point in less than two seconds. This process is utilized for the boxed kinds of milk that can keep at room temperature for weeks… Unlike the regular milk that multiplies the number of microbes at room temperature and DOUBLES them every 20 minutes. No wonder milk spoils very quickly.

To make matters worse, milk is homogenized. Homogenization is a process that breaks down butterfat globules, so they do not rise to the top. Homogenized milk is harder to digest, so proteins normally digest in the stomach are not broken down and instead are absorbed into the bloodstream. Often the body reacts to these foreign proteins by triggering the immune system, causing inflammation. It can even trigger auto-immune problems. Homogenized milk has also been linked to heart disease, probably because of the fat globules that are dispersed by the process. This means homogenized fat molecules are so small that they can escape your stomach wall and enter the bloodstream.

In addition to being chemically altered into something that is hard to digest and causes problems, today’s milk usually contains steroids, antibiotics, pesticides from treated grains, bacteria from infected animals, and genetically engineered growth hormones. If you think it’s just a few sick cattle I’m ranting about, look at the statistics of the FDA released October 2012: 40% of all cattle in the United States carry AIDS and Leukemia Viruses. 64% of dairy cattle are infected with bovine immunodeficiency viruses (BIV) and bovine leukemia viruses (BLV) worldwide. (Bovine immunodeficiency viruses can also be properly referred to as bovine AIDS viruses.) They are commonly tainted with disease-causing bacteria, such as salmonella, staphylococci, listeria, deadly E. coli O1573, and Mycobacterium paratuberculosis (possibly one of the agents causing Crohn’s disease; a form of life-threatening chronic colitis), as well as viruses known to cause lymphoma and leukemia-like diseases, and immune deficiency in cattle.

I’m not trying to scare you – that is not possible – because we cannot accept that science might be correct as a mass. (share your opinion on this blog

…) Besides, dairy is incorporated in 300 baby products and over 2000 food products sold in stores throughout the US; there is just no stopping this madness.

I grew up next to a dairy farm, and as a chef, I still love cooking with cream and cheese, but in moderation. I do, however, not substitute electrolyte-fused water with chocolate milk. Just fact-check this point: Today’s low-fat milk contains 59 uncommon hormones. One of those 59 hormones is a powerful GROWTH hormone called Insulin-like Growth Factor ONE (IGF-1). By a freak of nature, it is identical in cows and humans. Consider this hormone to be a “fuel cell” for any cancer… (the medical world says IGF-1 is a key factor in the rapid growth and proliferation of breast, prostate and colon cancers, and we suspect that most likely it will promote ALL cancers).

So if you do drink milk, I suggest you look for pure raw milk from grass-fed cows (which is hard to get in most states, unfortunately) because it may not be the milk per se, but how milk is chemically altered that causes the problems. I must clarify that unsweetened fermented or cultured dairy products such as yogurt, kefir and sour cream are acid neutral. Yogurt, in particular, is chock-full of beneficial qualities. As is the case with milk, organic yogurt does not have rBGH. (That grass and those roots, however, might be lazed with Monsanto by-products…)

Let me specify what started my blog: Chocolate milk is recommended because it is rich in Vitamin D and calcium. Since dairy cows don’t eat grass, they do not have sufficient magnesium in their milk. The calcium in cow’s milk is basically useless because it has an insufficient amount of needed magnesium content. Cows milk has three times the calcium as does human breast milk. No matter, neither are very usable because there MUST be an equal quantity of MAGNESIUM to be absorbed and used.

Per the USDA, 8 ounces (one cup) of cows milk contains:

Calcium, Ca mg 291.336

Magnesium, Mg mg 32.794

After consumption, now that excessive bone-building calcium has to be flushed out of your system, causing your chemical household to overproduce acid (…it’s actually simple chemistry) and add to it the lactic acid formed after strenuous sport – you are now “attacking” your calcium reserves in your bones with this acid surplus! Your bone density diminishes when consuming more than five cups of milk per week. Your calcium-rich milk is causing the opposite effect.

Milk is fortified with vitamin D2 (ergocalciferol), cheaper than vitamin D3, and rather useless for supplementation. Vitamin D supplements require saturated fat to make them bioavailable to be incorporated into the body structure, but this vitamin is inert when you drink low-fat milk.

The protein myth:

87% of milk is water. That makes it VERY expensive water.

Broken down into its basic groups

Whole milk is: Water 87%, fat 3.25%, casein 4%, other protein 5,75%

(Note: that is 3.25% “milkfat,” which includes 87% water.) 80% of the protein in milk is casein. Casein is a powerful binder, a polymer used to make plastics, and a glue better used to make sturdy furniture or hold beer bottle labels in place. It is in thousands of processed foods as a binder promoted as “something” caseinate. Casein is a powerful allergen, histamine that creates lots of mucus. The only medicine in Olympic athlete Flo-Jo’s body was Benedryl, a power antihistamine she took to combat her last meal… cheese pizza. And she drank chocolate milk as recommended for her quick recovery:

Read up on the whole Flo-Jo story. 

So it is not ideal for drinking milk that promotes liquid formation in your lungs, especially if you bike the next day in the early morning mist! After sport, in all current scientific studies – any fresh fruit and water combination replenishes your system equally and sufficiently. (any adverse study was surely published under the sponsorship of dairy farmers…) Yes, chocolate milk will give you an elevated positive feeling. Still, most likely, it is due to the high amount of sugar and the “upper” effect of the cacao (Next time, I’ll write about processed cacao and coffee beans…). Hint: Check the sugar content in one cup of chocolate milk!

TCMchef Raphael

Ref source:

–         Chan J. Dairy products, calcium, and prostate cancer risk in the

Physicians’ Health Study. Am J Clin Nutr. 2001 Oct; 74(4): 549-54

–         Holmes MD. Dietary correlates of plasma insulin-like growth factor I

and insulin-like growth factor binding protein 3 concentrations.

Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev. 2002 Sep; 11(9): 852-61

–         Weinsier R. Dairy foods and bone health: examination of the

evidence. Am J Clin Nutr. 2000 Sep; 72(3): 681-9

–         Kerstetter JE. Low protein intake: the impact on calcium and

bone homeostasis in humans. J Nutr. 2003 Mar; 133(3): 855S-861S

–         Barr SI. Increased dairy product or calcium intake: is body

weight or composition affected in humans?

J Nutr. 2003 Jan; 133(1): 245S-248S

–         Oranje AP. Natural course of cow’s milk allergy in childhood

atopic eczema/dermatitis syndrome

–         Lund BM. Pasteurization of milk and the heat resistance of

Mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculosis: a critical review of

the data. Int J Food Microbiol. 2002 Jul 25; 77(1-2): 135-45

–         http://www.dairycheckoff.com/news/release-012403.asp