SHR Show #2670 Becoming Unconfused about Dairy
Carl Lanore: Welcome back to another episode of Super Human Radio. Today is February 18th.
I'm joined by my good friend and brilliant individual, Joel Greene.
We're going to talk about becoming unconfused about dairy. This is really a hot topic. So many dietary templates demonize dairy. There are so many doctors who tell their patients, "Don't eat dairy". Are they right? Is there something intrinsically and inherently bad about dairy? Does the context and the individual play a role in whether or not dairy works for you or not?
No. Some of the longest-lived populations on the planet today are lacto-vegetarians that, other than greens, eat nothing but dairy. And they're the longest-lived individuals on the planet. So is dairy really bad? And you know, Joel Greene loves to talk about how silly baby talk is. "Tell me what's good. Tell me what's bad". So we're going to get to the bottom of dairy today and find out: is it a superfood or is it a super unhealthy food? This discussion will clear things up for you.
Without further delay my guest, Joel Greene
How you doing brother?
Joel Greene: Hey brother. I am super good.
Carl Lanore: [00:01:18] So you've been doing a series. Okay first of all, you are the originator of the term "baby talk" in the context of people who want to discuss nutrition; is this good? Is this bad? That's what people always want to know. And because science is not that easy, you termed that "baby talk" because it's really the wrong way to look at things. And you recently did a series about dairy, because dairy is demonized; wouldn't you agree with that?
Carl Lanore: Dairy's bad. That's the baby talk. Dairy's bad or dairy's good, and it's neither of those right? So, start at the beginning. What were some of the original points that you made when you started doing this series "Becoming Unconfused About Dairy"?
Joel Greene: Yeah. So I started this series I'm doing on Instagram and I'm probably gonna bring it in other places, called Unconfused. I just really wanted to take on some of these kind of basic topics where nobody knows what to think and then just really go a little bit deeper and break them down and look at them really objectively from all angles. I just did that with dairy and I've been researching dairy, just kind of as a thing for about 15 years. So I have, I have a huge stack of research on it. And what I think a lot of people would be very surprised to understand is that dairy is incredibly functional. When you look at it in the research, it's almost a rabbit hole of endlessly fascinating functional aspects and characteristics. We've been coached into thinking dairy's bad, but when you actually begin to dive into the research, it's quite surprising. You see that it has a number of functional uses and that it is very good for body composition. And there's very good research that shows that it's very good for conditions. It’s very good for hypertension, inflammation... and it's a very nuanced discussion. It really makes you take everything you think you know and park it and kind of relearn as you dive into it. I just did a series on dairy and the net of it is, when you look at dairy as a functional food, beginning with body composition, it's probably the most functional food in the universe of foods. You can make a very good case that it is. And that alone will fire up half of the ecosystem and polarize them into like, "you're crazy! It's bad! And we know it's bad and here's why!".
Carl Lanore: [00:03:34] I love the argument that we shouldn't be drinking any kind of milk once we are no longer infants. And let's be clear about something. Bovine milk and human milk are very similar, except maybe the amount of certain proteins or certain actives seem to be higher in bovine than in human milk. But people love to say, "Oh, well, once you're not an infant anymore, you shouldn't be drinking milk" Why do they even come to that conclusion? If milk is the only thing in nature made specifically to be food for humans. And we know, from an ancestral and evolutionary perspective, that mothers nursed for up to three or four years before children were completely weaned. You know nursing is just a pain in the neck because of industrialization of America. It's like, "Oh God really let's get that baby on solid food as quickly as possible". But from an evolutionary perspective, children were drinking mother's milk until three, four or five years old.
Joel Greene: [00:04:36] Yeah. And you don't have to go too far into bodybuilding circles to find bodybuilders who are seeking out dairy farms to find Colostrum, you know, bovine milk, because it makes them put muscle on like crazy, you know? So the contention that we shouldn't be drinking it past a certain age is one of those tropes. Like, you know, I like to scrutinize things. I like to just ask the question. We're in an age where free thought is kind of on the ropes. You know, it's a very bad time for free thoughts. We're in this age where hegemony of thought is kind of reining and you're not supposed to really think things through. But the idea that dairy is bad is this thing that we've all accepted. You shouldn't drink it past a certain age because it seems to make sense. But when you begin to break it down, it doesn't really seem to hold up to scrutiny. It's just kind of a trope. It's kind of something that we've accepted, but it's, in a sense, pseudoscience. Why shouldn't we drink it? Is there a reason? It gets into a lot of concepts that are pretty fascinating.
The first is, you have to begin with the idea that there isn't one genome; there are three genomes that run the human body. There is the human, the mitochondrial, and the bacteria genome. So those three genomes together are what run the human body; not one human genome. And that's a very important point because if we skew only towards the human genome, then we go down this line of thinking that, well, you know, lactose persistence and blah, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff. But when you begin to look at how things actually work, which is, well, no, three genomes run the human body and the interaction of those three genomes creates over 4 million snips, genetic possibilities that we're just still documenting inventory, then it brings you into a different way of looking at the problem, which is that many of the genes that we need to digest dairy, are not in the human genome, they're in the bacterial genome. And we can acquire those genes. And so we just stall. But when you begin to think about three genomes, it becomes well, the genes needed to digest dairy are in the bacterial genome. So when those genes are missing, oh, dairy's bad. When you have the genes you need from the bacterial genome, there are no issues with dairy.
And so the entire way of looking at dairy as bad because you can't digest it because you don't have the genes is a line of thinking that's not even based on how things actually work. You have three genomes that run your body. When you begin to look at that it becomes very often, a case of missing bacteria, and not that dairy is bad, but just that you're lacking the bacteria that originally came with the dairy. Like when you first got breast milk, there was bacteria in the breast milk, and that's what allowed you to digest the breast milk. Without the bacteria, you're going to have issues. So very often it's a case of missing bacteria and not the fact that the dairy itself is bad.
Carl Lanore: [00:07:10] So let's stay with this for a second. I did a show probably seven or eight years ago where a group of scientists wanted to see if there was any validity to people who were told they were lactose intolerant because when they consumed milk and dairy, they had GI distress. The research showed that almost 100% of the people who were either told by physicians or deduced on their own that they were lactose intolerant were in fact not lactose intolerant and had lactose persistence, which means that they could digest lactose, which sent the scientists on a new path to try to determine what specifically about dairy was causing these people GI distress.
I submitted some logic. I said, well, maybe it's what the cows are eating because we know that what the mother eats makes its way into the breast milk and that's not accidental, it's actually preparing the baby for the environment that it's going to be coming into with certain nutritional factors that are available in that environment. It's kind of like preceding the microbiome to say, "Hey, when you're a big boy or girl, and you're chewing your food, you're probably going to eat the same stuff your mother did, so let's go ahead and give you some of those nutrient factors now". And, so I said, maybe it's the cows that are eating corn and soy and maybe those things are making their way into the milk and are the things that were actually causing distress for these people. The researchers agreed that that would be a great next step to the study for them. So with that being the case, assuming that in fact, people are not lactose intolerant and your point that microbiome probably plays a large role in that level of tolerance or intolerance, what is it about milk that makes it such a popular allergen today? That so many people say," if I drink milk, I develop stuffy nose and mucus" and all this other stuff. Have you been able to get to the bottom of any of that at all in your research?
Joel Greene: [00:09:13] I would offer that most of it is missing bacteria in nature. It's been shown since the nineties that you can pretty much eliminate lactose intolerance by feeding small amounts of lactose and titrating lactose upwards. And there's a small but growing body of research that has shown over and over that symptoms of lactose intolerance are basically "cured" simply by spinning up strains of bacteria and lactobacillus in the gut. So what you see is that it's very easy to conflate the problem. Like, you have dairy, and then you have sort of these allergy issues and you think, well that's because dairy is bad. But what's been shown is that very specific species of the Bifidobacterium will prevent the conversion of histidine into histamine. And a number of other things present when those bacteria are present. It just makes sense if you think about it. Our first dose of milk came from mom, and in that dose of milk was all the bacteria we needed. Our starter culture of bacteria in our gut came from that. In that, were the enzymes needed to break milk down and digest milk. But they were not human enzymes, they were bacterial enzymes.
And the research seems to show this, it's quite replicatable, that when a species of bacteria that are not present in the gut are increased, the issues with milk go away. I personally know it's true. I used to break out horribly; I would get really bad cystic acne if I had milk. Today, as a post-workout, I drink grass- fed un-pasteurized milk, which gets you high by the way. And it's loaded with morphine analog, gets you really high, but I drink it. I have no issues whatsoever. None whatsoever. I can have ice cream, I can have all this stuff I never used to be able to have. And it's just because I finally figured out like, Oh wow. If I can just retune the culture in my gut, then I can digest the milk. So that's a personal proof. Like when you can prove something personally yourself, no one's ever going to convince me that's not true because I've experienced it. And it's something anybody can prove to themselves. You can do it. You can go and titrate up lactobacillus strains in the gut and Mark Bell did it. It happened with Mark. We gave him HMO and his lactose intolerance went away. So that's the first grouping of issues with milk, which is under the umbrella of the lactose related issues.
Carl Lanore: [00:11:26] So Robert Thompson asks the question, and this was going to be my next segway, if there is really any difference between pasteurized and homogenized and raw milk? And the first thing I'm gonna tell you, Robert, is go to the website, real milk.com. This website is maintained by the Weston A. Price foundation and they have so much great research, that's done by real scientists who have nothing to gain because they don't sell milk, that shows that there is a big difference.
So one of the things that happens all the time is people who say they're lactose intolerant, when they start drinking raw un-pasteurized milk, they find out that they're not lactose intolerant because the required enzymes are already there. There's even protein transporters in raw milk that help the protein do its job better. There's oligosaccharides in raw milk specifically for the microbes that are in the raw milk to keep them alive while you're consuming them. So, raw milk is magic. So talk about this: is a lot of the problems we have today with dairy a result of the commercialization of dairy processing?
Joel Greene: [00:12:37] Yes There's very good research that suggests that's exactly the case. There was a study done called the Epic Study, which was out of France, and there's other research as well that corroborates this, that shows that a lot of the allergen issues with dairy began with pasteurization in the fifties. And that when you begin to look at the fermented products- what do you mean by fermented? Well, it just means it's a bacteria in there. Okay. So when you look at the research on fermented milk products, milk with bacteria, you don't see those issues at all. It's only when we begin to again, coming back to the three genomes, the genes we need to break milk down, in most cases, are not in the human genome, they're in the bacterial genome. And so when you eliminate the bacteria needed to digest to make the enzymes to digest milk, you're going to have issues. There was a really very nice girl that Shalina I forget her last name, but she's a track racer. She races like death bikes on tracks. Super cool chick. She messaged me after my first Unconfused video and said that some of the newer practices, she's a rancher by trade, and some of the newer practices with milk are beginning to put some of the fermentation products back in pasteurized milk. So people don't have the issues with it.
A lot of the perceived issues with milk really get to what I call grades of food. And it's this idea that if you want to criticize milk as a category, you have to back up a little bit and understand it. Pick any category, it doesn't matter what, and you're going to have grades of food, going from really crappy to like outstanding. That's true of any category. It's true of tomatoes. Pick a tomato. Okay. You could get the gas-ripened tomatoes, you know, that are engineered and they load them in the truck and ripen them on the way to the market. Or if you've ever had an heirloom tomato you know, from a garden, where the flavor explodes in your mouth and your brain is overwhelmed by it. There are clear differences in any food you want to categorize, and it's true of dairy. So, you know, the the Piedmontese steak is very different from run-of-the-mill grades of steak you can get at the market are very, very, very different.
So when we look at dairy products, we have to keep in mind, what are we talking about? Are we talking about the lowest grade? Are we talking about kind of a median or a higher grade? Much of our perception about dairy comes from experience with the poorest grades of dairy. Like, pasteurized, you know corn-fed, higher Omega six. In fact, something really interesting, when you look at the research in dairy and cancer, it seems to conflict a little bit. There seems to be some research that suggests dairy can promote cancer, but then there's a massive body of research that suggests dairy prevents cancer. And it's a little confusing. When you begin to parse out the research and you look at like, well, what what's going on here? Something that seems to come up quite a bit is the amount and type of dairy fat. So when you have dairy that is higher in fat, but it's kind of the Omega six centric fat, well then that may be oncogenic. But when you look at milk that's higher in fat where it's kind of the omega-3 centric fat, well then it's actually cancer protecting. And all that just boils down to another subset of the Omega three/ Omega six argument. It has nothing to do even with dairy itself. It's just really the types of fat.
T argument is not as simple as the baby talk wants it to be. It can be very nuanced. But the really important takeaway, I think, is that for the stuff we care about, which is body composition, longevity, health, circulation, there are properties in dairy that will blow your mind once you understand what they are. It is extremely functional. And you don't have to look any farther than just, look at whey protein by itself and look at all the documented benefits of whey protein, you know, on blood sugar metabolism, on body comps, all these different things and it's a dairy product and that's true of multiple compounds in dairy. There are numerous compounds in dairy that are novel and unique and highly functional.
Carl Lanore: [00:16:31] I you want to learn more,( I'm talking to the audience), about why dairy is so heavily processed today, there's a book out there by Dr. Ron Schmidt. And he has passed away. He was on my show in 2006 or 2007. And it's called The Untold Story of Milk. He explains that at the turn of the century distillers were trying to find a use for the mash that was used in the process of making alcohol. And since the distilleries were closer to the city than the farmers, they decided to start milking cows and feeding them the mash. And when they did this, the cows who were taken off of grass, and were fed corn and grain mash, developed mastitis. And the pus got into the milk and it killed 1100 people. It was called the "Swill Milk Epidemic" and the New York state was hit the worst. And children were killed because that's who mommy was giving the milk to. And so, instead of the government going "distillers should not be in the business of making milk" because the distillers had big money, don't forget, they could buy politicians, it's always that way, they said, "Hey, we heard about this thing called pasteurization in France. Give us a chance to see if this fixes the problem". And it did, because pasteurization killed the pathogens. But it also killed everything else that was originally good about milk. Remember, we didn't get that saying in the Bible, "the land of milk and honey", because milk was killing people thousands of years ago. It was because milk and honey were considered wonderful blessings that if you were living in the land of milk and honey, you had abundance and you had health. I wasn't until the Swill Milk Epidemic and the distillers getting into the business that we even needed to pasteurize milk. But for thousands and thousands of years, we had been milking cows, and other animals, and benefiting from their milk. So if you really want to understand why we drink the crap we drink today and call it milk, the book is very cheap. It's on Amazon and it's called The Untold Story of Milk. It's fascinating. It will make you rethink why we drink pasteurized milk today. Milk has never been bad for us until -the other thing I want to mention is I did a show probably about five or six years ago when we learned that, through molecular sieving, that milk producing companies were now actually able to remove isolated amino acids from milk that they wanted to use for something else. The milk you're getting today may not even have the amino acid profile that you think it does. Think about that for a second. Can they even call it milk? They sued Muscle Milk for calling Muscle Milk "milk", and it’s not milk. They're going after companies now for calling almond milk "milk", because it's not really milk. Well, the milk we drink today, isn't even milk anymore.
Joel Greene: [00:19:30] You know, Carl, I'm right on the fence of starting a podcast. I haven't, because I don't want to do one, unless it's stuff I really want to talk about, you know, but if I do, I want to have you on a regular basis. Cause like, I have so many things I want to say, based on what you just said, and I feel like we can talk for three hours on this. There are just so many topics you and I can riff on, just, wow, this is so fascinating. Like, I didn't know that about the immunoprofiling in milk.
Carl Lanore: [00:20:01] Oh yeah. So Robert loves Fairlife milk. He always talks about Fairlife milk because it's lactose-free. They're stealing a lot of stuff from milk today that we don't even know about. Milk isn't delivering what it used to deliver. And that's why if you go to the website, realmilk.com, you can find a farmer in your area that you can do what's known as a cow share program, where you buy shares of a cow, and then you're entitled to buy milk from that cow. And it's raw and un-pasteurized. At the beginning of this show, I said that some of the longest-lived individuals on the planet, lacto-vegetarians, like the Hunza, they're not drinking pasteurized milk. They're milking their own cows. You think that the Maasai are buying milk at the grocery store and then mixing blood with it? No, they're milking their own cows. That's not pasteurized milk.
Joel Greene: [00:20:48] When I was growing up, my dad was a rancher at heart, and he had a place out in Riverside County. We had horses and cows and all this stuff and, you know, goats and all that. And we would have cow’s milk every morning. And if you've ever had cow’s milk, It's so rich that when you have regular milk next to it, even whole fat, regular milk, it tastes like water. Like the difference is profound. Some of the most switched-on people in the world are ranchers and bodybuilders, like they just know stuff. And do you remember Yemeni? Yemeni Mesa?
Carl Lanore: [00:21:22] Yes, of course. He was at Quest.
Joel Greene: [00:21:23] Yeah, so I was talking to Yemeni one time. Yemeni was the original metrics poster guy. He was the first guy in the metrics ads and Yemeni was, you know, a high-level bodybuilder. He looks fantastic even today. I mean Yemeni is ripped. And we were talking one day and he said, "you know, I knew a dairy farmer out in Bakersfield and I used to make a trip out to Bakersfield once a week to get his fresh-off-the-cow colostrum. Man, that stuff, I put so much muscle on drinking that stuff.
And, it gets to like, I keep using this word functional. Because most people are not aware of the functional properties that are in dairy. One of them I talked about recently is its effect on angiotensin converting enzyme. And when I was at Quest, one of the projects I was working on was to create foods that essentially mimicked fasting. And one of the ways that you mimic fasting while eating is to suppress angiotensin converting enzyme, because if you can suppress angiotensin converting enzyme, it affects a whole swath of things that effectively mimic fasting. And milk is loaded in very special types of glycoproteins that some of them suppress angiotensin converting enzyme, which is effectively a natural ACE inhibitor. And it's a property that you find for the most part, really mostly in dairy products. Angiotensin converting enzyme, inhibitory peptides. And it is this mechanistic link in dairy products, you can trace that all the way to dairy's role in reversing hypertension. So most people think dairy gives them hypertension. It's actually the reverse. It actually reverses hypertension, and it is directly due to its angiotensin converting enzyme, inhibitory properties.
Carl Lanore: [00:23:13] And in fact, I did a show with an Italian scientist. They did a study on Padano parmesan cheese. And they showed that three ounces a day of Padano parmesan cheese lowered blood pressure through those ACE inhibition effects. And I asked him during the show, is it just this cheese? And he said, probably not, because that peptide is found in just about every dairy product. And so while they focused on their cheese that came from their city, he said, no, dairy does that. Dairy will lower your blood pressure. It's fascinating.
Joel, plug your website, please. The Veep website.
Joel Greene: [00:23:53] Yeah, Veepnutrition.com . I just released the brand new world's first immune centric fat loss course. It's the only thing ever released where we're mechanistically dealing with the outcome when fat cells shrink and offsetting all of the mechanisms that kick in post fat loss to prevent weight regain so it's doing fantastic and people are loving it and check it out.
Carl Lanore: [00:24:15] Well I want to put an image up anyway, real quick, cause I want to talk about something. So this is, this is an infographic of what Americans eat on a year in year out basis. Dairy, by far, is the single largest category. Americans eat close to 800 pounds of dairy. That's combined milk as a beverage, as well as cheese and yogurt and other things. The question I have for you, Joel, is, do cheese and dairy get a bad rap because of the amount that people consume here in the United States, you think?
Joel Greene: [00:24:53] That graphic blew my mind when you showed it to me pre-show and very surprising. So, yes, I think that could absolutely play a part if that's correct. If the average person is eating lots of what's to say lower grade dairy products and their gut biome is not tuned to handle dairy then, yeah, you're going to have all kinds of issues with dairy. Just coming back to the idea that the digestive horsepower that you need in order to handle dairy is really not so much in your own genome, it's in the bacterial genome. So you have to first acquire the bacterial genome that you originally had when you first started handling dairy and then that got wiped out in order to do it. And then if you're taking in tons and tons and tons of lower grade dairy, yeah, you're going to have all kinds of issues. That would make a lot of sense.
Carl Lanore: [00:25:40] So another question I have for you is what role did the movement to use baby formula contribute to what we're seeing today with people not having the biome capacity to digest dairy? I mean, they didn't get any of those early microbes from the mother, not only from her milk, but from the areola. We know that the skin on the mother's nipple also contributes a large amount of that. You think that part of the problem we're having today is because people were formula fed and still are today?
Joel Greene: [00:26:12] Well, two answers to that question. One would be empirically speaking, absolutely. The evidence clearly shows that there are measurable differences between formula fed infants or formula fed children and breastfed/ naturally fed children. So yeah, there's some very clear differences and propensity and tendency. That's very much the case. And I think just anecdotally speaking too, that also is something that most people could probably verify for themselves. The other thing, when you look at the formula industry, something I mentioned in my book quite a bit is the human milk oligosaccharides. The better formulas now are putting those back in to the formula because they understand what those oligosaccharides do- they potentiate the bifidobacterium that you need as an infant in order to handle dairy and handle other things. So you're seeing a shift in the industry where they're getting a little bit smarter nutritionally and moving to make a formula look more like breast milk, because it doesn't if you don't add those things back in.
Carl Lanore: [00:27:09] What about, what's the role of homogenization? The fat membrane has been shown to be a very powerful lipolytic. There's benefits to the fat membrane. But rupturing the fat membrane is the process of homogenization. Is that playing a role in people's difficulty with milk today?
Joel Greene: [00:27:27] Yeah. Lipid in milk. Absolutely can. There's some research I've read about the processing of lipid membranes in milk and how that definitely affects the quality and texture in milk and affects things like the utilization of milk in the gut. So, yeah, I think that absolutely plays a pretty big role in things.
Carl Lanore: [00:27:47] What about people with specific disorders? They kind of end up being the outlier. So we're talking about milk and we're juxtaposing that against a fairly healthy population. There is some evidence that people with multiple sclerosis, for instance, may not do well with milk because certain glycoproteins in milk look like the target tissue on nerves that triggered the demyelination. And so, they tend not to do as well with milk, or at least they're being told that they shouldn't consume milk. Do you think that there are certain people out there that milk may not work for them because of an autoimmunity or something like that, where the immune system is overreacting to certain things in the milk that looked like tissue in the body?
Joel Greene: [00:28:31] It's a tricky question. When you look at something like MS for example, what you'll see is that there are species of bacteria that normally are extremely health promoting. What you see are imbalances of these, like Akkermansia, for example, you see imbalances of these health promoting bacteria and what's causing the imbalance. When you look in the case of MS, you get an overexpression of interferon gamma, and the excess of interferon gamma influences populations of key bacteria like Akkermansia. So you get these sort of imbalanced skews that can drive health-negative effects. So normally factions in milk that are health-promoting, when you have an auto-immune disease, you've got too much of a good thing already going in certain species, can actually tip the balance the other direction.
I mean, there's never a total black and white with any food. I use the example of a casomorphin allergy. You can have very specific type of casomorphin allergy, and milk is probably not right for you. But then when you look into the a1 a2 discussion with milk and you look at like, well, a2 milks good, a1's bad. No, it doesn't really hold up like that because what you see is that again populations of bacteria with a1 milk are different and you have different populations of bacteria. When you shift the populations of bacteria, there seems to be some suggestion that you're not having the same issues with a1 milk. So it's not as simple as the milk is good, the milk is bad. You always have to take into account the populations that we have in the gut as well.
Carl Lanore: [00:29:58] I want to get this LISTENER QUESTION in before we take a break. Patricia Graham Anderson say, "if no milk form, including nondairy, is really healthy, then what's next?"
We're not saying that milk is unhealthy. We're saying that milk is actually healthy. But you have to take it into context. And I think I could summarize by saying that raw, un-pasteurized milk, while people are afraid to say, "go find some", because if you do get sick on it, then you want to blame everybody who told you, I have consumed raw un-pasteurized milk for the better part of 20 years. My children consumed it when they were young and in school. I don't know if they seek it out today. No one's ever gotten sick in my household. But then somebody drinks it and they happen to get sick and they blame it on the milk when it may not have been the milk. That's actually been shown in several research studies. But I think that it's safe to say that raw un-pasteurized milk is probably a superfood. What do you think?
Joel Greene: [00:30:53] Yeah. In fact, talking about mechanisms of dairy, let me give one that probably will blow your mind if you're listening to this. Okay. So one of the aspects of looking at the body in terms of, if we take an immune centric approach to the body, one of the interesting aspects about obesity and adipose mass, is that it's basically called mitochondria immuno transfer. And so it's a process where normally speaking, mitochondria are transferred from macrophages, from immune cells, into, out of the sites to, as kind of a way of maintaining energy balance. And that's how energy output within adipose or within fat cells is sort of maintained in normal weight humans. But what happens with obese humans is that macrophage mitochondria immediately transferred into adipocytes gets impaired. And one of the ways that you can ameliorate that is through dairy. Specifically, dairy modulates expression of the sirtuin 1 gene, sirtuin 1 protein, which is the longevity, the anti-aging gene. And by modulating the sirtuin 1 gene, dairy can trigger mitochondrial biogenesis and mitochondrial transfer from immune cells to fat cells. Now, you can create irreversible mitochondrial damage, you know, VC. So, even if you think you've solved the problem your fat mass is never the same again. One of the ways you can prevent that is with dairy. So this takes us into very specific mechanisms, mediated by immune cells, where they transfer mitochondria to maintain energy balance in fat cells. And very much like angiotensin converting enzyme, there are properties unique to dairy that mediate that process and can restore normalcy. So it really takes us down this road of thinking functionally about dairy that there are a lot of functional aspects that make dairy a superfood in a lot of respects. .
Carl Lanore: [00:32:52] So we have some comments and I want to talk about this. So Bear said that Percoba no longer sells five kilo bags. I got them to do that for my audience, but they aren't really catering to humans anymore because their big business is catering to people who raise cattle because they add this to the calves' food to help the calves grow faster and be stronger. And of course Robert Thompson told me about Tractor Supply, and I'm going to go to my Tractor Supply. They sell colostrum fairly inexpensive because it's designed for cows. So let's talk about colostrum for a second. What do you think the real magic in colostrum is? Is it the immunoglobulins and how it modulates the immune system? Is it the fat? Because it's almost 50% fat, contrary to most dairy stuff. What do you think about it?
Joel Greene: [00:33:41] Well, colostrum has a lot of stuff in it. It's got human milk oligosaccharides in it. So there's a very strong immunomodulatory aspect to those. And then, yeah, I think the fat in colostrum is highly anabolic. I mean, if you, if you look at it like the high-fat feed, is extremely anabolic. But it's also got a lot of other compounds in it that are very pro muscle. When you look at real milk, like unpasteurized milk, it is extremely anabolic on all the body's pro signaling pathways. So you get strong activation of nK and you get strong activation of m-tor And it's just by its very nature, the protein profile in it, the amino profile, it's super rich in leucine. And then you have the combination of dairy calcium and leucine together. There's a myth out there that dairy calcium is not absorbable. I've seen guys who consider themselves experts to say this and it's totally wrong. Dairy is by far the most absorbable form of calcium. Now here's the trick: you need insulin to grow. You need insulin function to grow. And in order for insulin to fire properly, you need mobilization of intracellular calcium. So the way that insulin actually works is, when the insulin receptor fires, you get the NAADP cascade, nicotinic acid adenine nucleus phosphate fires. And in that mobilizes intracellular calcium. So you have to have intracellular calcium pool. Well, what you find is when you look at the way that calcium in dairy, calcium in colostrum works, once it gets in the gut, the presence of these glyco macro peptides and the presence of bioactive peptides in dairy works synergistically with calcium. So when I say bioactive peptide, the way to think of it is it's an encrypted code and digestion un-encrypts the code. So you have these very special proteins that turn on as soon as they get into the gut, that are present in colostrum, present in dairy, and they've worked synergistically with calcium. And they work in a way that you can't get with calcium supplements. They work with a way that no other food seems to match. And it's because the presence of these long chain oligosaccharides in milk and bioactive peptides facilitates the absorption of calcium in the gut. So you get this massive influxion of utilizable calcium. And at the same time, you're getting these highly anabolic peptides that are present in dairy. They get un-encrypted. It’s very, very functional. I would say that I have personally spoken to guys like Yemeni that firsthand probably know better than anybody else, because they've been able to take the really real stuff, the real colostrum and put muscle on.
Carl Lanore: [00:36:04] So one of the things that I learned from Ron Schmidt when he was on the show in 2006, about his book, The Untold Story of Milk, is that before milk was pasteurized, milk was given to type-one diabetics because it contained active insulin. You have to remember the baby, whether it's human or a calf, doesn't have all the equipment to even digest and metabolize. So the milk must carry not only the things that are nutritious, but the things that allow that to be absorbed and utilized by the calf because their system is naive to this stuff. Back in the day, before pasteurization, type-one diabetics drank a glass of milk with every meal because of the insulin that was active in milk. And so, when we talk about milk being a superfood, there is nothing in the world that has not only the nutritional factors, but the transport enzymes and the insulin and all the stuff you need to actually utilize that nutrition.
And again, we can't talk about milk without recognizing that at the turn of the century, it was transformed by commercial dairy production. It was changed radically. It was changed forever. From the biblical times that said milk and honey equaled life and health, to today where milk is causing all these problems. And keep in mind, the people that are keeping you from getting raw unpasteurized dairy is the milk industry, because they don't want you to know that raw unpasteurized dairy is so healthy, so wonderful; that people literally buy cows to have access to their own milk.
There's another interesting thing I want to throw at you. Iron overload is a real thing today, but guess what helps you rid iron from your body? Lactoferrin. And there's lots of it in colostrum.
Joel Greene: [00:38:09] On the video I recently did for Unconfused, there was a section where I went into some of the functional aspects or functional properties of dairy. And the top of the list is lactoferrin. Lactoferrin is an iron binding protein that's present in milk. Finding ways to eliminate excess iron as we get older is a big, big deal. Lactoferrin does two really important things, number one, it binds iron, but it also binds lipid polysaccharide, which is not generally well known. Age related inflammation or explosion of the Inflammasone, inflammaging, begins in adipose mass as we age and adipose mass acts like a megaphone. So what happens is, as adipose mass becomes inflamed, it magnifies inflammation across the whole body. Then you're looking at this acceleration of cellular senescence. So when you look at what lactoferrin does, not only does it bind iron, but at the same time, it also binds polysaccharide and helps prevent polysaccharide from penetrating into adipose mass, where it inflames the whole body. That's a big deal. And when you combine that with other properties that are present in dairy, for example, there are O linked glycans in dairy, which are glyco macro peptides. These are very specific long chain sugar proteins that do a number of really interesting things. At the center of them is a galactosamine sugar that feeds Akkermansia, feeds bifidobacteria, feeds some of the healthiest bacteria that you'd want in the body. You get not just one, but over a dozen mechanistic angles where dairy is beneficial for longevity. It's beneficial for body composition. It's beneficial for inflammation, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, blood pressure, going on and on and on. So it's extremely, extremely functional food. And going back to your point of when we see what's happened to the quality of our dairy over the last 50 years, you get a little bit better picture that it’s a really, really functional food that has been sort of neutered through a lot of very poor grades that are consumed in mass. But if we come back to what it's originally meant to do, you find exactly what you're talking about. Some of the leanest, healthiest, longest lived humans consumed dairy.
Carl Lanore: [00:40:12] And if you want to try real dairy, real milk, you can go to the website, realmilk.com. I have no vested interest in promoting this other than to help people find real milk in their area. This website is maintained by the Weston A. Price foundation. You'll find a farmer within driving distance of your home that will let you become part of a cow share program. So you pay maybe $59 for a share of a cow and you can get one to two gallons of milk a week. You can buy legally. It's a game-changer. Everybody who tries real milk says, well, the kids all say they think it's a milkshake because it tastes so delicious. But people talk about acne going away. People talk about sleep disturbances are being removed. And so many benefits. People always talk about, "wow, my kids didn't get sick this year at school". You gotta remember something: real milk is a living thing. Pasteurization kills it. So you're basically eating liquid roadkill when you're drinking commercial milk that you buy at your grocery store. God's honest truth. It really is. I know that sounds like an absurd thing to say, but that's really the truth. So check out realmilk.com and see if you can find real milk.
Joel Greene: [00:41:23] You know, just oddly, I'm not trying to blow sunshine up your ass, but the most anabolic protein supplement I've ever had was yours. And I remember asking you about it, like, Hey, what do you, what do you got in there? Like I'm getting like pumped on this stuff. And I don't normally get that with protein powders. And it was due to all of the elective globulins and you know, all of the milk protein derivatives that you had.
Carl Lanore: [00:41:47] I designed that protein powder around research about what's in human breast milk. I can't take credit for that product. Mother nature dictated what I needed to put into that product to get the benefits of protein, dairy protein, out of that product, because that's what's found in human breast milk.
Joel Greene: [00:42:08] Yeah, absolutely. It was again, like a personal proof, using that. I'm big on personal proofs. Like if I can take something and it works for me, I don't care what the research says. I don't care what anyone else says. It works personally. And that's more powerful than anything. And that was a personal proof, taking that stuff, it was like, wow, okay.
Carl Lanore: [00:42:24] Yeah. And I think there's like maybe a couple hundred jugs left and then we're done with it. It was too expensive to have an impact. You know, people looked at that and they thought, why would I pay $60 for a three pound jug of this, when $60 will buy me, you know, five to seven, maybe more than that from, some other companies' whey protein and of course this wasn't whey protein. This was actually designed to mimic human breast milk. I mean, we had the enzymes in it. We had the bifidobacteria in it. We had added amino acids because people, people don't realize when a mother nurses, a baby, there's not just a casein. And way in there, but there's actually freeform amino acids that go right through the gut and into the bloodstream. So the baby gets nutrition immediately upon it hitting the stomach. And then, then you continue to get proteins for hours after that, because it's a slow and fast protein combination. So I did everything that I thought was important that was found in human breast milk
Joel Greene: [00:43:27] In the supplement industry, that's kind of the history of really outstanding products, like products that actually really do work. You find that story where the costs to bring them to market, to make a real product is so expensive that they're not viable. They work, but you pass a certain price point where it's hard to get people to pay for it.
Carl Lanore: [00:43:49] Yeah, because protein powders are commodity items today. People want it. They look at what's the lowest price I can pay for a pound of this. They don't care if one is better than the other. I mean, let's be honest. If people cared what protein was better than the other, then vegan proteins wouldn't be very popular because they're the least bio available and digestible of all the protein, but people buy up vegan protein all day long,
Joel Greene: [00:44:11] A mitochondrial energy product back in 2007, 2008. And it had no stims. And it really worked. Meaning like when you took it, you felt like you were on caffeine. Like it actually really worked. It felt like you were jacked on caffeine, but there were no stims whatsoever. It was all pure cellular energy. And my cost to make that thing was about 35 bucks a can. Which means like your best-case scenario, just selling it direct, it's going to be 70 bucks a can, but to even think about getting it into retail, it's like $210.
Carl Lanore: [00:44:43] Didn't you give that to me when we were at one of the Quest meetings and I told you, I felt like somebody turned the lights on brighter in the room?
Joel Greene: [00:44:50] Yeah. That was based on it. That is a derivative of it. It was meant to be more of a watered-down version of it. But yeah, without any stims to get it where it really worked. But again, the history of products that really work. Getting it out there in a price people will pay for it is very very tough.
Carl Lanore: [00:45:06] It's because most supplement companies cater to people who want things delivered in baby talk. That's the God's honest truth. People don't want the complexity of the human body is so amazing that to think that this is good and this is bad is an insult to the intelligence of people who pay attention to the complexity of the human body.
So again, the website is Veepnutrition.com. Check it out. Everything that Joel does is legit. Show him some love. Hey, thanks for being on the show today, brother.
Joel Greene: [00:45:39] Thank you. Thank you for having me. Always, always a pleasure.
Carl Lanore: [00:45:41] Please share this show to help other people become unconfused about dairy. We'll see everybody Monday with more Super Human Radio. Take care.
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