Dire Beasties Warning

By Robert Cohen, NotMilk.com

Dire Beasties Warning

Milk and dairy represents forty percent of the average American's diet. That adds up to 666 pounds per consumer.

America's unworkable health care solution continues to malfunction as treatment costs rise and ill people become sicker. One wonders why companies such as United Health Care seem not to care.

United Health Group is a health care insurer with 75 million clients. Since health care is their business, and since diabetes treatments represent a large percentage of their coverage, it is in their best interests to decrease the number of insured persons requiring expensive treatment.

A few days after Thanksgiving, 2010, United Health Care Group issued a terrifying prediction regarding the future of diabetes in America. Their major points: 

More than half of Americans will have diabetes or be prediabetic by 2020 at a cost to the U.S. health care system of $3.35 trillion.

Diabetes and prediabetes will account for an estimated 10 percent of total health care spending by the end of the decade at an annual cost of almost $500 billion ˜ up from an estimated $194 billion this year.

The average annual health care costs in 2009 for a person with known diabetes were about $11,700 compared with about $4,400 for the non-diabetic public.

Diabetes, which is reaching epidemic proportions and is one of the fastest-growing diseases in the United States, currently affects about 26 million Americans.

Another 67 million Americans are estimated to have prediabetes, which may not have any obvious symptoms.

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Milk and dairy represents forty percent of the average American's diet. That adds up to 666 pounds per consumer.

Consider:

Eighteen years ago, the October (1992) issue of Scientific American (you can probably find a copy in your local library) reported:

The National Dairy Board's Slogan, 'Milk. It does a body good,' sounds a little hollow these days.

That conclusion was made after the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) published a peer-reviewed study in which a protein in milk was identified as the key factor in type-I diabetes. In their July 30, 1992 issue, NEJM reported:

"Studies have suggested that bovine serum albumin is the milk protein responsible for the onset of diabetes...Patients with insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus produce antibodies to cow milk proteins that participate in the development of islet dysfunction...Taken as a whole, our findings suggest that an active response in patients with IDDM (to the bovine protein) is a feature of the autoimmune response."

A few years later (October, 1996) the British medical journal LANCET published this conclusion:

Antibodies to bovine beta-casein are present in over a third of IDDM patients and relatively non-existent in healthy individuals.

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America's unworkable health care solution continues to malfunction as treatment costs rise and ill people become sicker. One wonders why companies such as United Health Care seem not to care.

By this critical omission, they send a self-destructive message to their 75 million clients.