 So, we've gone over the overhaul healthfulness of eggs and meat. What about dairy? Overall, harmful, harmless, or helpful? Overall, harmful. The number one source of calcium in the American diet is dairy products, but the number one source of artery clogging saturated fat is also dairy products. One of the top allergens in the U.S. food supply as well. So, while cow's milk represents a substantial source of calcium, it comes with a lot of baggage. Milk really is the perfect food for baby calves, a superbly engineered fluid that will turn a 65-pound baby calf into a 500-pound cow in just one year. So, if we need to gain a few hundred pounds, maybe, but otherwise we should just leave their mother's milk to them. The calcium in dark green leafy vegetables like kale, broccoli, bok choy is absorbed about twice as well as the calcium in milk, and there's a bonus— fiber and folate, iron and antioxidants, and the bone health superstar, vitamin K. Maybe you won't find any of those in milk. What you do get as a bonus to the calcium in milk is saturated butterfat, cholesterol, lactose, and antibiotics, pesticides, pus, and manure. When scientists test pasteurization protocols, they have to actually take into account the manure in the milk. Treat and activation in milk contaminated with infected feces. To replicate what happens in the industry naturally, high concentrations of feces from diseased cows were used to contaminate milk in this study. There was even a study on pus this year, in the Journal of Dairy Science. They asked, frankly, a pretty revolting question. When you taste the pus, the US has the highest allowable pus concentration in the world. You can have more than 300 million pus cells in just one glass. Now the industry has always argued that it doesn't matter how inflamed and infected the udders of our factory farm dairy cows are, because of pasteurization. It's cooked pus, so there's no food safety risk. What these researchers did, though, was to see if you could taste the difference. They made two vats of cheese, one with high pus milk and the other conforming to the more stringent European standards, and not only could they taste the difference, but now with less pus, cheese evidently tasted significantly better.