Kefir >> milk
Ever since I was a kid I have been unable to drink plain white cow milk without suffering from a powerful urge to throw up. I'm not lactose intolerant because if I add a strong flavour to the milk I can drink it with no ill-effects. So for years I drank chocolate milk to get the calcium that it seemed was best absorbed from milk. That's actually how I ended up with the nickname QuikChange.
However, in the summer of 2003 I got a cold and my chest filled with phlegm. I don't generally get sick and I'm not a fan of taking medication unless absolutely necessary so I simply ignored the cold for a few days until my immune system vanquished it. The problem was that the phlegm didn't leave with the infection. It made me cough all day, which was very annoying. I was even having trouble sleeping at night and was forced to resort to taking NyQuil. It was a sad situation that went on for almost a month.
Then I went to visit shade_42's mom while in Montreal for a weekend. Upon hearing of my plight, she suggested that I discontinue drinking milk for a few days as it tends to prolong pulmonary congestion. I did as she suggested and in a few days I stopped coughing. At this point I was so relieved not to have my lungs filled with phlegm that I developed a reluctance to drink milk again. When I mentioned this to my vegan friend Caro she told me that milk is not really a very good source of calcium anyway and encouraged me to stop drinking it. And so I switched to drinking soy milk instead.
But a_chatterbox periodically warned me that I wasn't getting enough calcium by avoiding milk. And she's in SciBiz so she knows about that sort of stuff. For a long time I couldn't figure out what to do, with my granola-eating tree-hugging hippie/vegan friends telling me to continue avoiding milk and my biology-steeped dairy-industry-influenced friends telling me I needed to drink milk to get my RDI of calcium. Even the Carrotine Kid was perplexed.
But this weekend I discovered Lifeway kefir, which seems to solve most of my problems by providing a healthy source of calcium that I actually enjoy drinking and is produced from the milk of cows treated with love and respect. canoe_drew had actually introduced me to kefir back in 2003 but I hadn't thought of using it as a source of calcium until I saw the label advertising it as such in the grocery store today.
However, in the summer of 2003 I got a cold and my chest filled with phlegm. I don't generally get sick and I'm not a fan of taking medication unless absolutely necessary so I simply ignored the cold for a few days until my immune system vanquished it. The problem was that the phlegm didn't leave with the infection. It made me cough all day, which was very annoying. I was even having trouble sleeping at night and was forced to resort to taking NyQuil. It was a sad situation that went on for almost a month.
Then I went to visit shade_42's mom while in Montreal for a weekend. Upon hearing of my plight, she suggested that I discontinue drinking milk for a few days as it tends to prolong pulmonary congestion. I did as she suggested and in a few days I stopped coughing. At this point I was so relieved not to have my lungs filled with phlegm that I developed a reluctance to drink milk again. When I mentioned this to my vegan friend Caro she told me that milk is not really a very good source of calcium anyway and encouraged me to stop drinking it. And so I switched to drinking soy milk instead.
But a_chatterbox periodically warned me that I wasn't getting enough calcium by avoiding milk. And she's in SciBiz so she knows about that sort of stuff. For a long time I couldn't figure out what to do, with my granola-eating tree-hugging hippie/vegan friends telling me to continue avoiding milk and my biology-steeped dairy-industry-influenced friends telling me I needed to drink milk to get my RDI of calcium. Even the Carrotine Kid was perplexed.
But this weekend I discovered Lifeway kefir, which seems to solve most of my problems by providing a healthy source of calcium that I actually enjoy drinking and is produced from the milk of cows treated with love and respect. canoe_drew had actually introduced me to kefir back in 2003 but I hadn't thought of using it as a source of calcium until I saw the label advertising it as such in the grocery store today.