An interview with Michio Kushi
EWJ: What are the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual effects of consuming dairy food, especially on infants and children brought up on cow’s milk?
MK: According to the biological order, which we can’t violate if we want to maintain our biological status as human beings, each species of mammals depends upon its mother’s blood and then upon mother’s milk in order to grow as an embryo and after it is born. However, among mammals, the various species—cows, goats, horses, apes, human beings—are very different; in other words, in the tree of biological evolution, the various branches are different.
We have a human figure, based upon human hereditary factors such as genes chromosomes, and DNA, and in that human form we have human organs; however, if we are nursed on cow’s milk and continue to eat dairy food, our body cells start to change and become more like cows cells.
Cow’s milk has protein, fat, and various other nutritional factors resembling those of human milk, but the cow’s protein and fat molecules are different from human milk’s protein and fat molecules. If we analyze cow’s milk into amino acids, fatty acids, etc., these substances appear similar but are in fact different from those found in human milk. First of all, the quantity in which they are present is different and secondly, the size of the molecules is different, so their effects are different. Cow’s milk molecules in general have a larger size than those of human milk. Thus, cows develop a larger body size than human beings. People who take cow’s milk generally become physically bigger than people who don’t, but at the same time their various organs are more expanded—less compact and generally looser—including the liver, intestines, brain, and various other organs. Therefore, emotionally, physically, and mentally they tend to become slow, less alert, dull, and less sensitive.
In particular, that very special domain of the human species, our spiritual capacity—the understanding of ethical problems, cosmological views, universal consciousness—that potential can’t develop. People who have been nourished by cow’s milk generally stop their development at the emotional, sentimental level, which is a cow’s level of awareness and judgment. They cannot go on to develop intellectual, social, ideological, and cosmological perspectives. Among many young people, for example “New Age” people, there are lacto-vegetarians who are attracted to “New Age” or so-called spiritual movements, but their motive and their understanding of those spiritual movements is very sentimental and not based on really deep cosmological understanding. If you compare non-cow’s-milk-fed children and breast-fed children as well as children who are drinking cow’s milk often and children who do not drink cow’s milk, there are distinct differences in mentality and intellectuality. The former group is much more dull, cloudy, and foolish. However, it is worth nothing that although milk-drinking people are slow, they do have a very gentle character, just like cows. They are not violent unless they also take sugar.
EWJ: What organs does dairy food affect most? What is the relation between dairy food and degenerative illnesses including cancer?
MK: Dairy food actually affects all organs; however, because it is a product of the mammary gland, it mostly affects the human glands and related structures, especially the reproductive organs. The most commonly affected are the breast, uterus, ovaries, prostate, thyroid, nasal cavities, pituitary gland, the cochlea in the ear, and the cerebral area surrounding the midbrain. Its adverse effects appear first as the accumulation of mucus and fat and then the formation of cysts, tumors, and finally cancer. Many people who eat dairy food have mucous accumulations in the nasal cavities and inner ear, resulting in hay fever and hearing difficulty. Accumulation of fatty deposits in the kidneys and also gallbladder leads to stones. Another example is the development of breast cysts, breast tumors, and then breast cancer. Common problems from dairy are vaginal discharges ovarian cysts, fibrosis and uterine cancer, ovarian cancer, and prostate fat accumulation with cyst formation, etc. In the case of the lungs, the fat and mucous accumulation in air sacs causes breathing capacity to decrease.
EWJ: How much of a factor is dairy food in causing current health problems in America?
MK: About 80 percent of the major problems are linked to dairy consumption, including cancer, tumors, cysts, many skin diseases, allergies, hearing difficulties, stone formations, breathing difficulties, hay fever, mental illness, sexual disease, infertility, arthritis, rheumatism, and so forth.
EWJ: All these degenerative diseases are on the increase as dairy consumption has been skyrocketing. Now, why has dairy food-eating grown so much in recent years? More and more people are eating dairy food—cheese, pizza, yoghurt, ice cream, etc.
MK: If food is whole food—in other words, unrefined—then it contains enough nutrients, including enzymes, vitamins, etc. But if our food is refined, people need to supplement it. They seek a source of protein and fat, as well as enzymes and bacteria for easy digestion, and they find it in dairy food. So the refining of food has led people towards dairy food, since they are not aware anymore of how to use wholesome food such as whole grains, plus vegetables, with traditional fermented food such as pickles, sauerkraut, miso, tamari soy sauce, etc.
In the second place, many people are now starting to realize that meat is not an ideal food, that it causes various health problems such as heart troubles, cholesterol deposits, and so forth. Then they start to reduce their meat eating or egg eating and go toward a more vegetarian diet. However, they do not know how they should go about that. The traditional way of eating centered on whole cereal grains and beans has been forgotten. So people start eating vegetables, but without using whole grains and beans as their staple, and so they need additions of animal quality protein which they find in dairy products. These are the two main factors.
EWJ: One form of dairy food that’s increasingly popular everywhere is pizza. Could you comment on that?
MK: Pizza has several ingredients, including flour, which has carbohydrate, and then cheese, with more fat and protein, plus vegetables, especially tomatoes. So the appeal is that it’s delicious and at the same time it appears nutritionally rich. However, in fact the nutritional quality is all wrong. First of all, pizza is made with white flour which is highly refined. Secondly, the main ingredient consists of highly processed cheese, loaded with oil. Epidemiologically it would be very interesting to compare high school students who eat pizza often and those who do eat pizza: you would probably find a distinct difference in their behavior, their thinking, and the health of their reproductive organs. Especially among high school girls, pizza is popular, but that is responsible for the increase in their irregular menstruation, vaginal discharges, and fibroid tumors. An important factor is that pizza parlors don’t mainly serve coffee or tea but ice-cold soft drinks. So people consume the oily pizza with cold soft drinks, and the result of that combination is the formation of hard deposits of fat leading to tumors, cysts, and stones. In view of all those factors, pizza is in some cases a worse food than a meat sandwich.
EWJ: So the main problem with pizza is the oiliness of the cheese, its high fat content. Why are people attracted to that kind of greasy food?
MK: The modern American way of eating includes plenty of fat and oil. Why? When you eat plenty of food, some portion is used for building up the body and for energy, but the excess changes into fat; then if we fast, that fat is changed into necessary protein, energy, etc. In the same way, if the balance of our diet is not good, then we need fat and oil to balance the deficiency. Present-day food is highly refined, and people throw out many parts of the vegetables, so in order to supply that lacking portion they use plenty of oil and fat, such as butter, salad oil, etc. If we bring back a balanced diet, then a very small volume of oil from time to time is enough. Grains and beans contain adequate oils.
EWJ: In terms of macrobiotics, where would you classify dairy food on the spectrum of yin and yang?
MK: Animal food as a whole is considered a more yang category in comparison with vegetable food, but milk, which is the original form of dairy food, is a very yin substance which contains plenty of protein, sugar, and fat. Also the minerals in it belong to the more yin category of minerals such as calcium, which is very prominent. So milk is a very yin, expansive food, which calves rely on to become cows, very large animals.
However, human beings process milk in many ways and produce various types of cheese, yoghurt, and other dairy products. Depending on the process used, different dairy products range considerably from yin to yang. For example, butter, which contains almost 100 percent fat and floats on water, is very yin. Next, yoghurt, which is a fermented form of milk with a sour taste, is relatively yin. Next comes milk, followed by cheese. But among cheese, there are various types: some more soft and some more hard, some with less salt and some with more salt. A soft type of cheese containing less salt is more yin, and a hard, salty cheese is more yang. The most yin dairy food, butter, is more yin than most vegetables, such as cabbages or carrots. But the most yang category of dairy food, that is, very salty and hard cheese, is about as yang as salty fish. So there is a very wide range of products made from milk. This feature is very unusual among foods. Such different qualities are possible because milk, after it is consumed by calves or human babies, produces various types of cells, bones, and tissues of great diversity from yin to yang. How is it possible that one food can become something as different as hard bones and soft baby fat? This is because milk is itself a product of blood; it is the mother’s blood changed into milk form through the mammary gland. Since blood can nourish and replenish any type of body cell, milk has the potential to change into very yin or very yang cells. Human beings intuitively or traditionally utilize that quality of milk in order to make milk very yin or very yang through different types of processing.
EWJ: Assuming that dairy food has gone to make up different kinds of tissues through the bodies of people who have consumed it all their lives and that those tissues are abnormally expanded, how does the process of eliminating those cells and replacing them with healthier ones proceed?
MK: Among dairy foods, the milk portion is fairly easy to discharge. Easy means that if you were taking milk every day for, suppose, twenty years, then it takes about two to three years to completely eliminate the part contributed by milk. Cheese, however, especially hard, salty cheese, remains in the form of saturated fat in the very deep places of the organs, especially along the spine and around deep, internal organs such as the kidneys and liver. Those hard deposits are very difficult to dissolve. Generally it takes about seven years of not eating dairy food, while eating cooked whole grains and vegetables, to eliminate those deposits. One way to help dissolve them is to regularly use some fermented soybean products such as miso soup. Pickles are also helpful, including sauerkraut, which is a semi-fermented food. Those things people know traditionally, so Germans, for example, while eating heavy cheese, at the same time drink beer, which is fermented grain. We should also take care when we begin to eat a more traditional semi-vegetarian diet not to use too much salt, which tends to make the deeply accumulated fat harder.
EWJ: What would you recommend as the main replacement for dairy food in a vegetarian diet?
MK: During the transition period from dairy food to a macrobiotic way, a little larger portion of various beans can be used every day. Also, lightly cooked vegetables are helpful.
EWJ: If dairy food is so harmful to health, why does Erewhon (a health food store in Boston), which is supposedly a macrobiotic company, sell it?
MK: When Erewhon was small and employed only macrobiotic people, it didn’t carry dairy food. But as the operation grew bigger and more non-macrobiotic people started to work and shop there, many wanted dairy food. Since they did not find dairy in the Erewhon store, they went to other stores. While they were there, for example, in a supermarket or grocery store, they also stocked up on other food items so they actually stopped buying and eating good-quality food. We felt that we should offer them dairy food, but the best dairy food available, without chemicals and so forth. Then at the same time people bought their dairy food at Erewhon, they would also buy the best quality whole grains, beans, etc. That’s how we began to carry dairy food, but that does not mean Erewhon recommends dairy food. We merely cater to that part of the public which is on the borderline of macrobiotics. Erewhon itself is hoping that eventually those customers will change to a more macrobiotic way and will not buy dairy food.
EWJ: Why is dairy food so difficult for many individuals to give up? Many people are now willing to admit that meat is harmful to health but still resist strongly the idea that dairy food is also harmful.
MK: Dairy food is baby food. In the beginning, human babies don’t like drinking cow’s milk, but when that is forced on them and they become used to it, then just as babies don’t want to give up their mother’s breast-feeding, in the same way people become emotionally attached to this substitute. So there’s first of all a very deep psychological factor. But secondly there’s also a physiological component. After we have built our bodies from milk through years of dairy consumption, our body cells are not completely human-quality cells but also have qualities similar to cows. If we then change our food to grains, beans, and vegetables, it’s a very drastic change: a species change takes place. Deep fear arises and resistance is strong. An example of that physiological resistance is that many American people are allergic to cereal grains, especially wheat. How is it possible for a modern human to be allergic to the traditional staple of our ancestors? That is because all their lives people today have consumed cow’s milk. Therefore their digestive systems are not completely those of human beings; the stomach, the duodenum and intestines, including the quality of the villi, which transmute milk and other foods into blood, are changed. Stopping calves’ food and changing to human beings’ food is a painstaking process. People tend to justify the use of dairy food, insisting that “milk is a natural,” and some scientists, until very recently, were claiming that milk is a nearly “perfect food” when, in fact, that kind of claim is plain non-sense. That claim overlooks all really scientific facts, like the difference between cow and human molecules and the quality of molecules, which I pointed out earlier.
EWJ: In addition to the psychological and physiological attachments, isn’t there a kind of political attachment that plays a part? We know that the nations which have been eating dairy foods are the ones which have taken over the world. For example, Western Europe and North America where dairy food is a staple have tended to colonize the other regions of the world where dairy food is not consumed or plays a minor role in the diet.
MK: The dairy-eating countries like Holland, Belgium, England, etc. have conquered the world. The reason is that their thinking remains at the sensory and sentimental levels as I pointed out earlier. They do not really develop the higher levels of social, ideological, or spiritual awareness. Actually, as I said earlier, milk itself tends to produce a very gentle character, so milk alone cannot account for the character of those countries. The violence necessary for conquest comes from meat and/or the combination of milk and sugar, which those countries consume in large quantities.
They become sharp on mechanical, sensory, and sentimental levels, so they can conquer materially, sensorially, and sentimentally. But they are completely defeated socially, ideologically, and spiritually. When they win material resources through war and external aggression, to a corresponding degree they lose mentally and spiritually, for example, through the decline of ethical and religious values, the breakdown of the family, and internal cultural disintegration. Our principle of yin and yang means the inescapable rule of balance. Winning is losing. Defeat equals victory.
(Originally published in the June 1980 issue of East West Journal)