People struggle with whether or not to consume dairy products.
I personally have gone for long stretches without consuming just about any dairy, with perhaps just some minor weekend cheating whereby some dairy will be included in a Mexican dinner (a little cheese and/or sour cream on top of my beans) or a potato soup that has some dairy ingredients added.
The lactose issue is especially important for people who may have a candida issue, a topic I put a large focus on. If we’re taking in ANY liquids with ANY sugars…including lactose…we need to be very conscious of the fact that these inherent sugars will tend to feed yeast/fungal conditions in the body, especially in the gut where the center of the problem often is.
Another obvious issue is the actual quality of the dairy, and where it’s coming from. The VAST majority of the time, the dairy product is coming from contaminated cows…cows not tended to in the most respected and appreciated ways, by feeding them non-native grain-type diets such as grains (and much worse), along with pumping them full of hormones and antibiotics, both of which are designed to fatten them up.
It is an entirely unnatural setting for the cows, and to make matters even worse, as if the above wasn’t bad enough, the milk these cows produce is then pasteurized, exposing the antibiotic/hormone residue-ed milk to high enough heat to then in turn partially or completely destroy the nutritional components such as enzymes and proteins, at least what little of them exist with cow’s milk treated this poorly.
Some people also simply have lactose intolerance of sorts, often experienced in the form of excessive gas or diarrhea…and it’s important to understand that for a lot of people, if they DO experiment with dairy elimination from their diet…that often when they return to incorporating dairy back into their diet, they interestingly then HAVE “newly” discovered lactose intolerance.
I used to drink raw milk on occasion, and found my body craved it like mad. This was milk from grass-fed cows, who lived and enjoyed life on an open pasture, and were not exposed to hormones or antibiotics. If you’ve never had it, whole raw milk, it is distinctly different from store-bought pasteurized milk, and I’ve heard others have the same experience I had with it. The way to find it is to seek out a local farmer, or, as I recently discovered, one can be in California (Sacramento at least) and obtain it right in the health food stores there (in my state it can’t be bought in stores).