Milk and Multiple Sclerosis

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Milk and Multiple Sclerosis , by Greger, MD

Multiple sclerosis is a devastating disease characterized by your immune system

attacking the insulation of your own nerve cells, causing unpredictable

short-circuiting within your nervous system, which commonly interferes with

vision, speech and mobility.

But why would your immune system do such a thing? We know that other diseases of

so-called immune " autoaggression " may be caused by something called " molecular

mimicry, " in which a foreign protein looks just like one of the body's own

proteins. So then when the body makes antibodies against the foreign invader, it

also unintentionally makes antibodies against some of the body's own proteins.

For example, there is a protein in bovine milk that looks like a protein in the

human pancreas, and so human babies exposed to the milk of cows may try to fend

off the foreign bovine protein and, in doing so, destroy their pancreas's

ability to produce insulin, leading to type I diabetes.

Numerous population-based studies around the world have linked multiple

sclerosis to dairy product consumption,[1-3] but cause and effect could never be

proven. So a prestigious research team of German, Swedish, British and American

scientists set out study bovine milk proteins and see if they could find any

milk protein that cross-reacted with human nerve-sheath proteins. And now, for

the first time ever, they found it.[4]

[1] Medical hypotheses 19(1986):169.

[2] Neuroepidemiology 11(1992):304.

[3] ls of Neurology 49(1997):55.

[4] Journal of Immunology 172(2004):661.