 Parkinson's disease is the second most common neurodegenerative disease after Alzheimer's. In the US, there are approximately 60,000 new cases diagnosed every year, bringing the total number of current cases up to about a million, with tens of thousands dying from it every year. The dietary component most often implicated is milk, for which contamination of milk by neurotoxins has been considered the only possible explanation. High levels of organochlorine pesticide residues have been found in milk, and in the most affected areas in the brains of Parkinson's victims on ontosy. Since pesticides and milk have been found all over, maybe the dairy industry should require toxin screenings of milk, and there are indeed now inexpensive, sensitive, portable tests available. No false positives. No false negatives, providing rapid detection of highly toxic pesticides in milk. Now we just have to convince the dairy industry to actually do it. Others, though, are not as convinced of the pesticide link, despite clear-cut associations between milk intake and the incidence of Parkinson's disease. There's no rational explanation for milk being a risk factor for Parkinson's. If it were the pesticides, present milk, that could accumulate in the brain, we would assume that the pesticides would build up in the fat, and the link between skimmed milk and Parkinson's is just as strong. So they suggest reverse causation. The milk didn't cause Parkinson's, the Parkinson's caused the milk. Parkinson's make some people depressed, they reasoned, and depressed people may drink more milk. So we shouldn't limit dairy intake in Parkinson's, especially since they are so susceptible to hip fractures. But now we know that milk doesn't appear to protect against hip fractures. It may actually increase the risk of both bone fractures and death, but ironically may offer a clue as to what's going on in Parkinson's. But first, this reverse causation argument. Did milk lead to Parkinson's, or Parkinson's lead to milk? What one needs are prospective cohorts today, where you measure milk consumption first, and then follow people forward over time, and such studies still. Found a significant increase in risk associated with dairy intake. Risk increased by 17% for every small glass of milk a day, and 13% for every daily half slice of cheese. Again, the standard explanation that it's from the pesticides and other neurotoxins in dairy, but that doesn't explain why there's more risk attached to some dairy products than others. Pesticide residues are found in all dairy products, so why should milk be associated with Parkinson's more than cheese? Well, there are other neurotoxic contaminants in milk besides the pesticides themselves, like tetrahydroisoquinolines found in the brains of Parkinson's disease victims, but in higher levels in cheese than milk, though people may drink more milk than they eat cheese. The relationship between dairy and Huntington's appears similar. Huntington's disease is a horrible degenerative brain disease that runs in families whose early onset may be doubled by dairy consumption. But again, this may be more milk consumption than cheese consumption, which brings us back to the clue in the More Milk, More Mortality Study. Anytime you hear disease risks associated with more milk than cheese, more oxidative stress, inflammation, we should think galactose, the milk sugar rather than the milk fat protein or pesticides. That's why we think milk drinkers specifically appear to have higher risk of bone fractures in death, and may explain the neurodegeneration findings too, as not only do rare individuals with an inability to detoxify the galactose found in milk suffer damage to their bones, but also to their brains.