by Starr Pelc
When I was 20 years old I was pregnant with my 1st child. Growing up I spent a lot of time with children but being born in Czechoslovakia I hadn’t really spent any time with vegetables and fruits.
Until I was about 30 years old I thought that there was something wrong with me because I couldn’t sit still and when I did I was so uncomfortable, especially my legs, that I had to constantly stretch them, move them, shake them. If somebody would have just massaged them really hard nightly for hours or at least hit them with their fists I would have been a happy camper, but that’s a lot of responsibility for another person… so I mostly suffered and thought ‘that’s just the way I am’.
I also had to massage my son’s legs every night as he tried to fall asleep because he was so uncomfortable that without the massaging he would wriggle in his bed for hours. Yes… we had ‘restless leg syndrome’ as it is now called and now there is a drug to cure it! But nobody ever told me that if I stopped eating dairy ALL my pain would simply disappear.
I stopped eating all dairy products for about a year and never felt better. In fact I had never known it could feel so comfortable living in my own skin.
My, now adult, son was learning to cook and brought over a HUGE pan of home made lasagna with TONS of ricotta and mozzarella. I thought it couldn’t hurt to pig out on this awesomeness, after all I hadn’t eaten dairy in a year. I ate to my heart’s content and that night I swear I felt worse than I ever had when I ate dairy regularly. My body was not happy!
I’m not saying that the kids and I never eat dairy, but we never eat it on a daily or even regular basis. We order pizza sometimes and so many of our friends eat dairy products that when we get together it’s in almost all the food, so we eat and appreciate the food we are offered but we also know what to expect within an hour after eating…and we never drink dairy milk.
Dairy milk has to be the single most harmful dairy product of them all. It may be loaded with all the vitamins and minerals that they say it is, but all of these are virtually impossible to digest and assimilate by our bodies which makes it absolutely pointless to drink, (not to mention the physical pain that comes with it, and that never ending congestion.)
When my 1st son was a baby I nursed him and I continued to nurse him for 2 1/2 years, as I did with all my children. When he was 6 months old I started trying to lose those excess baby pounds. I made myself a milkshake every day for lunch which consisted of bananas, a container of yogurt and 2 cups of dairy milk. Being the ‘good mother’ – I always shared it with my baby.
He stopped sleeping well and started to scream a lot. Sometimes the only way he would nap was if I laid him on my belly and let him sleep on me. My mom said it was because he was teething, and I’m sure he was, but he was also reacting to dairy.
I was such a ‘good mom’ I lined up at the clinic for his 3 month and 6 month vaccines, never linking the fact that for 4 days after each immunization he was virtually inconsolable as he screamed and screamed and had a fever, after all, ‘he was teething’.
The little guy couldn’t sit still, couldn’t sit in my lap and read a book until he was 5 or 6 and even then it had to be a short book. He was incredibly intelligent but couldn’t focus, his body, his mind, they had to keep moving.
I had my 1st daughter ‘R’ when ‘B’ was 6 years old. He was such a doting big brother and full of SO much love! ‘R’ had a cold for the 1st 6 months of her life, always the drippy nose, asthma and dark circles under her eyes.
At that time I started hearing negative things about dairy but I was not ready to listen . I nursed ‘R’ for 2 years as well but I continued to eat dairy (which went straight to my breast milk) and when she started to eat foods, dairy was definitely in her diet.
I had very real nightmares when she was a baby that ‘I should not immunize this child’…that was always the message. Not knowing a thing about vaccines, but knowing that I often have ‘premonitions’, I listened to this message until I could research the subject further.
Two years went by and my incredibly intelligent daughter who could speak in complete sentences before she could walk told me that she was allergic to egg yolks. When I asked her how she knew she said that every time she eats eggs her throat swells up and it’s hard for her to breathe. I discovered the vaccines they give 3 month old infants are based in egg yolk. My little baby girl may have very well died of SIDS and no one would have ever told me that she had an allergic reaction to the vaccine. No one to this day talks about how SIDS death is not due to suffocation on a waterbed or too many blankets, but is instead an allergic reaction that a few children out of every million will experience and die from.
Shortly after that, information started to be everywhere – had I just not been seeing it before now?
I stopped stocking my fridge with dairy and ‘R’s asthma, ‘cold’ and dark circles all disappeared. It was harder with ‘B’ because he ate lunch at school and continued to drink milk and eat cheese. When he was 10 I had him tested and he was allergic to virtually everything he ate which is not uncommon. Due to ingesting dairy for all those years his body became compromised and wanted to accept only a very few foods. I had to put him on a diet that excluded all the foods he was allergic to for one full month to give his body some relief. Then I slowly introduced all the other foods besides dairy products back into his diet making sure that none were served daily.
He would have done great on a raw diet, but back then I had no idea, and now at 49 years old I am just starting to learn how awesome I can feel when I eat raw. All my ‘old lady’ aches and pains disappear within 3 days of eating raw. After all theses years of eating foods that are not optimal for my body, I can hear my body telling me it’s DONE eating junk. I have no choice but to listen, the alternative now is constant pain and discomfort.
It’s just amazing to me what we can get away with when we are young and strong.
The twins have never had any vaccinations, they have only been to the doctor 3 times and that was for physicals required by my Adoption Agency. They have never had antibiotics, had a cold a handful of times and they will be 16 years old this Christmas…’G’ had one ear infection a couple of years ago. After she begged me to buy dairy American cheese for her grilled cheese sandwiches, I buckled and bought some. Within a week of daily American cheese she had such a bad ear infection I could barely get it under control with herbs but the positive side of that experience was the fact that both ‘G’ and ‘M’ were old enough to ‘get’ what I’d been saying about dairy all these years. Proof is in the pudding, now they avoid it on their own but they still love Domino’s on occasion.
My children have never taken any medicine or drugs. I use preventative ‘medicine and highly recommend Grapefruit Seed extract in oil or tablet form, KYOLIC Garlic extract and Vitamin C.
I used to use others but found over the years that this is all we really need. As soon as any of us feel the ‘itch’ of a cold in our nose or throat or if one of the preschool kids come over with something we simply take a dose and never get the cold. The only time we may get a little sick is when we wait too long after the 1st sign to take our dose.
Dairy Allergies have a variety of symptoms and a child may have one or a number of them.
These include – but are not limited to:
– Post nasal drip (constant clear mucus coming out of the nose when one is not ill)
– Dark circles or wrinkles under the eyes
– Swollen looking eyelids
– Red ears and red cheeks
– Eczema
– Inability to sit still
– The need to wrestle with someone or constantly move
– Inability to focus for longer periods
– Aggressive attitude and ill tempered
– Fits of pure rage that can last quite a while during which the child screams at the top of their lungs, sweats, eyes get glossy, may yell profanities…after which they are sorry and exhausted…
– Head banging (I know…it sounds terrible but I knew a child who started this behavior upon switching from dairy formula to Whole D when she turned one….fortunately the mom stopped the milk and her child became calm once again
– Trouble sleeping and/or falling asleep
– No naps, short naps, or hard to fall asleep at nap time
– Fatigue and tiredness (from lack of sleep no doubt)
– Catches every cold in town and takes forever to heal due to the incredible congestion
– Chronic ear infections (due to dairy NOT the ear canal laying flat or whatever lies ‘they’re’ spreading)
A child may have one or all of these symptoms. What is most disturbing is regardless of all of these troubling symptoms, children are continuously being given dairy and told it’s good for them. If the only symptom of dairy allergy was hives or encephalitic shock with the threat of death, such as in a strawberry or peanut allergy, no more dairy would be given to the child.
Doris Rapp, M.D. wrote a great book on this subject, Is This Your Child
Most of these symptoms are the same for the ‘new disease’ called ADD and ADHD. ‘They’ have diagnosed most of the children in America with so ‘they’ can medicate them and make them manageable, so ‘they’ can keep selling and making a profit from all of the products made with the breast milk of a cow – not to mention the profits from the drugs to then ‘heal’ these poor guinea pigs.
Breast milk from a cow is perfectly designed to feed a calf and allow it to gain 100 pounds in its 1st year.
It is no wonder that humans cannot tolerate it. If humans should drink milk beyond the ‘nursing’ years then human breast milk should be pumped and sold like cow milk is.
I went through many tofu cheeses that just didn’t even come close and just never melted but I have discovered some over the years that dairy eaters can’t tell are not dairy:
– Veggie Slices-American flavor (for grilled cheese sandwiches, macaroni or casseroles)
– Rice Cheese-mozzarella and cheddar flavor (for tacos, pizza, lasagna, etc.)
– Soy and Rice Ice Cream and the new Raw Ice Cream are every bit as tasty as Hagen Daz.
About Starr
Starr is a mama of 4 beautiful children ages 28, 22, and 16 year old twins. She has run her own child care and pre-school for 15 years – with children from 6 weeks to 5 years old.
Starr serves NO dairy and although many of the children eat and drink dairy at home the relief they get from not having it all day 5 days a week is enough to keep them from catching the constant colds and allows them to heal much faster.