Type I diabetes, commonly known as juvenile diabetes, and its causes have been the subject of many studies throughout the United States and the world. Recent studies have indicated that this illness may actually be caused by what we eat. The studies, conducted by Dr. T. Colin Campbell of Cornell University, show that early-onset type I diabetes may specifically be caused by early childhood milk consumption.
Type I diabetes is an autoimmune disease that initiates when the body produces antibodies that attack antigens – poisons that that body has been exposed to – that unfortunately are almost identical to its own pancreas cells. This causes the body to attack its own cells, and the result is that the pancreas will stop producing insulin. From the recent studies, Dr. Campbell states that they may have pinpointed milk consumption as a potential food that initiates the production of these antibodies in infants. The research showed that when an infant is weaned from breast milk too early and consumes cow’s milk, they may not fully digest the milk proteins, and as a result amino acid fragments from the cow’s milk pass from the infant’s stomach into the bloodstream, where the immune system attacks them as foreign invaders. The immune system cannot tell the difference from these amino acid fragments and its own pancreas cells, and thus type I diabetes is initiated.
Marketing from the dairy industry leads us to believe that cow’s milk is healthful for children, and is the source of nutrition currently used in many infant formulas. This research may cause many new parents to reconsider.
For more information on this topic, please contact the T. Colin Campbell Foundation at www.tcolincampbell.org