Leaning heavily on scientific and medical language, this book is not for the faint of heart. In it the author makes a case for giving up milk and meat. He categorizes the use of milk in the diet as "udder nonsense," and quotes book after journal after scientific paper to back up his premise. "What exactly is milk? The white liquid that is often used for breakfast cereals is a smorgasbord of chemicals ranging from water to a plethora of hormones. Every drop of cow's milk contains any number of hormones. Specifically, cow's milk contains: Pituitary hormones-Growth Hormone (GH), Thyroid Stimulating Hormone (TSH), Follicle Stimulating Hormone (FSH), Luteinizing Hormone (LH), Adrencorticotropic Hormone (ACTH), PRL, and Oxytocin; Hypothalamic hormones:-Thyrotropin Releasing Hormone (TRH), Luteinizing Hormone-Releasing Hormone (LHRH), Somatostatin, PRL inhibiting factor, PRL releasing factor, GnRH, GRH; Steroid hormones:-Estradiol, Estriol, Progesterone, Testosterone, Ketosteroids, and Corticosterone." Milk is a hormone delivery system suited for the species from which the milk is derived. Human milk for babies and cow's milk for calves. With over 9,000,000 milk cows in the U.S. alone, each generating an average of 80 pounds of poop per day, the vast quantities of feed and water required to produce milk, millions of acres plowed over for large, monoculture crop fields dedicated to feeding livestock, deforestation for agriculture in South America, and the Midwest losing its native prairies and grasslands for farming create an inconvenient truth affecting the planet we can no longer ignore.

Breastfeeding vs. formula: could the choice we make put our children at risk?

The story of how Americans came to drink milk For over a century, America's nutrition authorities have heralded milk as "nature's perfect food," as "indispensable" and "the most complete food." These milk "boosters" have ranged from consumer activists, to government nutritionists, to the American Dairy Council and its ubiquitous milk moustache ads. The image of milk as wholesome and body-building has a long history, but is it accurate? Recently, within the newest social movements around food, milk has lost favor. Vegan anti-milk rhetoric portrays the dairy industry as cruel to animals and milk as bad for humans. Recently, books with titles like, "Milk: The Deadly Poison," and "Don't Drink Your Milk" have portrayed milk as toxic and unhealthy. Controversies over genetically-engineered cows and questions about antibiotic residue have also prompted consumers to question whether the milk they drink each day is truly good for them. In Nature's Perfect Food Melanie Dupuis illuminates these questions by telling the story of how Americans came to drink milk. We learn how cow's milk, which was associated with bacteria and disease became a staple of the American diet. Along the way we encounter 19th century evangelists who were convinced that cow's milk was the perfect food with divine properties, brewers whose tainted cow feed poisoned the milk supply, and informal wetnursing networks that were destroyed with the onset of urbanization and industrialization. Informative and entertaining, Nature's Perfect Food will be the standard work on the history of milk.

In the first popular social history of marijuana use in America--beginning with the hemp-farming of George Washington--Sloman traces the fascinating story of America's love/hate relationship with the resilient weed.

Lila is Sanskrit for play, the play of the gods. It is the self-generating genesis of Bliss, created by Bliss for the purpose of Bliss. It is the uninhibited, impulsive sport of Brahman, the free spirit of creation that results in the spontaneous unfolding of the cosmos to be found in the eternity of each moment. It is beyond the confining locks and chains of reason, beyond the steel barred windows looking out from the cages of explanation, beyond the droning tick-tick-tick of the huge mechanical clocks of time. Come, let us enter the realm of the madman and the finely wrought threads of Clotho as they are measured out by Lachesis and cut by Atropos to create the great tapestry of life, including the intricate, intertwining designs of dementia with the trickster, the shaman, the scapegoat, the shadow, the artist and the savior. Come, let us join in the divine madness of the gods.