My husband told me yesterday that I see things in shades of gray when most people see things in black and white. Perhaps. The Bush administration paraded around their lack of nuanced consideration with pride (“you’re with us or against us!”) and even now both liberals and conservatives express impatience with Obama’s relentless bipartisanship and compromise. I see the need for black and white very clearly in my nutrition work. For instance, dairy is the enemy of our time. Arthritic? Cut out dairy. Depressed? Cut out dairy. Have a pimple on your left toenail? Cut out dairy. Maybe if no one ate dairy anymore we could finally achieve world peace and prosperity.
Granted, the majority of the world’s peoples can’t tolerate lactose (milk sugar) past childhood. Granted, cow’s milk protein (casein) forms a hard curd not designed for human stomachs and can cause digestive difficulties. Granted, lots of dairy products are high in saturated fat , cholesterol, and calories and the average American eats too many of them.
None of this makes the all inclusive category of “dairy” the root of all evil.
While whole cows milk is probably only beneficial to infants under two (and even they are way better off with breast milk) lots of fermented milk products have been eaten by humans for millenia and are highly nutritious and much easier to digest. Yogurt, hard low fat cheeses like parmesan, goat cheeses and sheep cheeses like feta are good examples. Higher fat fermented and aged cheeses like cheddar and blue are okay in moderation. These foods wouldn’t have become established in so many cultures around the world if they weren’t tolerated by the majority of people. What isn’t good for you is a steady diet of mac and cheese, nachos and pizza, or nightly platters of cheese and crackers, or the processed glue that passes for “American cheese” (or “fat-free cheese” for that matter).
So if a doctor, naturopath or your next door neighbor suggests you cut out dairy, unless you are experiencing severe digestive problems, you would probably do just fine eating less dairy, and the right kinds. But I’ve discovered most people don’t want to hear that kind of moderate, nuanced advice. They prefer the deprivation of “cutting out dairy” and then putting their energy towards searching out complicated substitutes made with soy or rice and a ton of guar gum.
Go figure.
It’s in the study of science that I first learned to appreciate endemic ambiguity. What was I was taught in introductory courses as cold hard facts I learned in more advanced courses was mere speculation. You can’t see the subatomic level where most biological reactions take place–you merely speculate. And the presence of an observer inevitably changes the action of the observed. At the quantum level, no one can precisely designate the location of any particular particle and any particular time. What we take for scientific dogma is merely the best guesses of our fellow human beings at this particular point in history.
I could ignore those shades of gray out there and live in a fantasy of black and white but then I’d be lying to myself. And–no ambiguity here–that’s just plain wrong.
