Udderly contaminated

Some of the scariest surprises aren’t creeping in your bedroom closet or lurking under the bed, they are—gasp!—actually hiding in your cheese. Many people are in the dark about the repulsive ingredients of cheese and the animal cruelty linked to its making.

Old MacDonald’s farm no longer exists. Modern dairy production requires cows be pushed beyond their natural limits, genetically engineered, and fed growth hormones to produce huge quantities of milk. Consequently, milk and milk products are often contaminated with cows’ blood and pus, pesticides, hormones and antibiotics. Modern dairy cows can produce 100 pounds of milk a day, a whopping 10 times more than they would produce in nature. To keep milk production as high as possible, farmers artificially inseminate cows every year. Growth hormones and unnatural milking schedules cause dairy cows’ udders to become painful and so heavy that they sometimes drag the ground.

Despite frequent infections, dairy cows are continually milked. Blood and pus are routinely pumped out with the milk. In fact, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) allows 750 million pus cells in every liter of milk (about two pounds). Since it takes 10 pounds of milk to make one pound of cheese, a pound of cheese can contain up to 7.5 billion pus cells. If your American cheese is sliced so that there are 16 slices to a pound, that single slice of American or Swiss can contain over 468 million pus cells.

To counter infections, a continual overdose of antibiotics is injected into farm animals. With every slice of dairy cheese you eat, supermicrobes stream into your system transferring drug-resistant bacteria into your body, making you vulnerable to previously treatable infections.

Casein, an ingredient in cheese, is a foreign milk protein, and your body reacts to it by creating antibodies which in turn create histamines (mucus and phlegm). The average American lives with a gallon of mucus clogging the kidney, spleen, pancreas, tracheal-bronchial tree, lungs, thymus, etc. Casein is also used to make glue for holding wood furniture together and sticking labels to bottles of soda and beer. Try to scrape off those labels, and then imagine the effects of casein on your body.

One way to guarantee you’re not eating pus and glue is to choose soy cheeses or a cheese alternative. And the next time you crave a piece of cheese, think of the concentration of growth hormones, antibiotics, pesticides and pus that you are ingesting. You are what you eat!