Dairy, inflammation, pain and healing
If you have any kind of digestive issues like gut permeability (leaky gut), IBS, SIBO, bloating, constipation, diarrhoea, or intolerances to gluten, corn or soy, there's evidence that you could benefit from quitting dairy, at least while you're healing your body.
This is also the case if you have acne, eczema or psoriasis or autoimmune disease. For me, it triggers some weird kind of eczema that appears only in one eyebrow and makes me lose hair there.
Why?
If you have gut issues it means you probably have leaky gut, where improperly and partially digested food particles damage your gut lining, through which they can now cross into your blood stream on the other side. In your blood stream, your immune system goes on the defence as it attacks these unrecognisable food particles. Such an immune defence is what’s known as inflammation. Another result of leaky gut is that your immune system may now tag that food as hostile, causing you to react every time you eat it. This is called a food sensitivity, which it end up as an allergy or even autoimmunity. In dairy, the protein casein and the sugar lactose are particularly hard for our body to break down and digest. This can easily cause disease and prevent healing not only in our gut, but across all our systems
Gut infections, especially yeast or candida, love feeding off dairy. If you have any of the above conditions, it's likely you have gut infections i.e. bacterial overgrowths and pathogens, parasites, viral infections, or yeast/fungal overgrowths. The greater the number of infections in your gut, the poorer your digestive, and overall, health and immunity
Most dairy contains antibiotics. Also, unlike raw dairy it's also been sterilised, meaning it lacks life-giving bacteria. Raw dairy in Australia has been cold pressed, meaning the fats in it are damaged, and potentially toxic and inflammatory
Most dairy outside the EU – and in particular in Australia and the US – is made using GMO (genetically modified) rennet, a clotting/fermenting agent. There are concerns that genetically modified food enzymes may potentially contaminate food with bacterial toxins or mycotoxins, allergens, or other impurities. They may also impact the health of our gut microbiome. Research shows the more diverse and numerous our beneficial gut bacteria, the better our health outcomes. Poor gut health is inflammatory
Another issue is that many dairy animals are fed GMO grains. These grains are made to uptake glyphosate, or Round Up, a herbicide or weed killer clearly researched to destroy good gut microbes vital for human and animal immune and general health. We may be consuming dairy from an animal with sub-optimal health
What does dairy have to do with skin problems? Our skin reflects the state of our gut, or more specifically our level of internal inflammation and gut immunity. Our gut hosts 80% of our immune system, so when we have skin conditions, it's important to look at what's going wrong there
Reducing inflammation is important to improving our health because inflammation is a factor in most diseases. It’s also what causes our pain – the swelling, redness and low-grade fever we feel along with the other things we can’t identify as easily.
Cutting out dairy can be challenging. My background is Dutch so you can imagine how I feel about cheese. But I remember how unwell and lacking in energy I was when I ate dairy regularly, and how my eyebrow has since grown back.