Translator: Mirjana Čutura Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
Good morning.
May I see by a show of hands who here likes milk and cookies?
Alright.
How about those of you who have young children in your lives?
Are many of them drinking milk every night at bedtime
or having a bedtime snack?
Please raise your hand.
Excellent.
I'm here today to talk to you about the "milk and cookie" disease.
It's a disease that I "created" or formally termed in 2012
to describe an epidemic I have observed for over 10 years
on how too much dairy and sugar is hurting our health,
but, in particular, it's hurting the health of our children.
Here are my takeaway points.
First, too much dairy and sugar simply leads to acid in our stomach,
that causes acid reflux.
And in children, it comes across as symptoms of colds and allergies.
Second, thousands of children right now, today, in America
may be taking medications, many of them,
to treat symptoms that are actually from the "milk and cookie" disease.
And finally,
everybody here and especially doctors who care for children,
we need to be asking every single child, What are they eating and drinking?
So, as my husband likes to say,
I'm "ruining" childhood every single day
(Laughter)
by telling the parents to cut out excessive dairy and sugar
in their kids' diet.
Well, why am I such a killjoy?
Well, you see, my career epiphany is based on three questions.
Why are thousands of babies born every year completely healthy,
but within the first five years of life, they're so "sick" all the time?
They've got chronic runny noses that won't go away.
They cough for weeks and months.
They also have sore throats and a whole host of other problems.
Second, what do these kids have in common?
And finally, well,
if they're on all these medications, why are the symptoms not going away?
Okay, so those are the reasons that I started on this journey.
I want to tell you a story about a patient of mine.
So, several years ago, I met a boy who's three and a half.
I was, like, their fifth or sixth opinion.
Parents come in. They're very nice.
They show me a video.
This boy will wake up once or twice per week
in the middle of night during sleep.
And when he wakes up, he's struggling to breathe,
and it's very scary.
He sounds like this.
(Gasping for air)
This will last sometimes 10, 15 minutes.
Most of the time, it will go away.
They're afraid to go to bed at night.
About once a month, they would take him to the emergency department.
And the year that I met them, they had to call 911 twice.
It got that scary.
But it usually goes away.
And by the time I met them,
he was seeing the pediatric GI doctor, the allergist, the pulmonologist,
and he was on five or six medications -
he's three and a half -
flovin, flonase, singulair, zyrtec, prevacid, albuterol.
Does anybody here recognize what these medications are?
And despite the medicines, he kept having the episodes.
So I did with his parents what I do every single day when I meet a patient.
I ask, "What is he eating and drinking?"
The mom says, "Oh my gosh, he's an incredibly picky eater.
He's a terrible eater."
I look at him. He's not starving.
He looks pretty healthy.
I said, "Well then, what is he drinking?"
"Oh, chocolate milk.
In fact, he loves it so much he wakes up every morning and has chocolate milk.
Then again at lunch, then at dinner.
Oh, but every single night,
he can not go to bed unless he has his glass of chocolate milk.
I looked at the parents, I said,
"You know, these attacks that he's having are actually called laryngospasm.
It's like a charlie horse in your calf, like a cramp.
You can't stop it.
And what's happening
is the chocolate milk is turning into so much acid it's coming back up.
So when it comes up into the throat and touches the voice box, the body says,
'Hey, that chocolate milk is not coming down my windpipe to give me pneumonia.
So I'm just going to close it to save your life.'
That's called laryngospasm.
He's sucking air through a closed vocal cord
or larynx."
(Gasps for air)
That's what makes that scary sound.
So I looked at the parents, I said, "Hey, I've got great news for you.
We can stop these episodes.
All you have to do is cut out the chocolate milk."
The mother looked at me, and she said,
"Hmm, excuse me. I don't think you understand.
I brought a very sick child in here today.
We've been going to many doctors for over a year.
You're telling me the problem is chocolate milk?"
Perhaps they were desperate, and I was convincing that day.
So they said, "You know what? Fine, we'll give it a try."
I always encourage them.
I said, "You know, if it doesn't help, it's okay - I'm crazy. That's okay.
But what do you have to lose?"
So they decided to go cold turkey.
They cut out the chocolate milk that night and every day after,
and he stopped having those episodes.
That's just one of thousands of stories I can tell you about.
Okay, milk comes out of the refrigerator non-acidic.
The pH is actually seven.
But, you see, as the temperature goes up, it becomes more and more acid -
the pH drops like a ton of bricks.
Anybody here that doesn't believe me,
please go home tonight, pour a glass of milk.
You can leave it out for several hours.
Better yet, put it at 98.7 degrees, or our body temperature,
and then go drink it later, and tell me how it tastes.
Sugar, as it turns out,
breaks down into a form of alcohol and carbonic acid gas.
The alcohol further breaks down in the body into acetic acid and water,
which is what makes vinegar.
Okay, so you see, the things our children love -
you know, the reason I call it the "milk and cookie" disease -
it's for dairy and sugar.
It's because, well, acid plus acid equals more acid.
So,
the reason I discovered the "milk and cookie" disease
is that over 10 years ago, I finished training,
I'm a big-time doctor now - surgeon.
I became a surgeon so I can offer surgeries to fix problems.
One after another, I meet these kids who are not better.
How am I going to use surgery to fix cough?
I had to come up with another solution, but I didn't know what to do at first,
so every single time I ask the parents, "What is your child eating and drinking?
Take me through their day."
And that's how I found out what they have in common.
They have the "milk and cookie" disease.
As I then thought about,
"Well, how come they're on all these medicines
by the time I meet them, but they're not better?"
And here's what I discovered.
Medications will not work
if they're treating a condition the patient doesn't have.
Hey, so, interestingly, if you're two or three years old,
and you've got yellow, runny, snotty nose,
and you're on zyrtec, claritin, flonase,
it's not going to work if that symptom is not from allergies.
It's the same with antibiotics.
If it's not a true bacterial sinus infection,
the medicine's not going to work there either.
So tonight when you're home, brushing your teeth,
please go a little further, and make yourself gag.
Count for me how many seconds until your eyes are watery,
and your nose is swollen shut.
So it turns out something called a parasympathetic system -
there's two: sympathetic and parasympathetic -
parasympathetic is responsible for digestion,
but it's the same system that causes the nose to be runny.
Okay.
So, we as physicians,
we're not trained in medical school, residency, and fellowship
to ask every single patient, "What do you eat and drink?"
as a part of our interview, our diagnosis, and treatment of illnesses.
We were taught to ask about alcohol use and nicotine
because, you see, those are risk factors for cancer.
But I'm here to tell you today that sugar is the nicotine and alcohol addiction
that has already occurred in America to very, very young children.
And this is a problem we have to save our children from.
Okay.
When I start asking families one after another
what their children eat and drink,
I have learned - now thousands of interviews -
what parents think.
"Well hey, if milk is good for them, the more, the better, right?"
And if a child is a horrible eater -
"Just give them all the milk they want because that's good nutrition."
And when it comes to juices -
"Well, if the label says organic or 100% -
better yet, there's all this fruit and vegetable juice -
that's good for them.
I mean, which kid eats enough vegetables?
At least they're not drinking soda."
What I have learned through talking to families over and over
is this critical importance of telling them what is too much.
Okay.
So when I meet a three-, four-year-old, you know what?
We do this recall.
They're drinking 12 to 40 ounces of juice a day.
I'm not even counting the sweet tea, the lemonade, the fruit punch,
all this other stuff, the pouch drinks, the sports drinks.
We haven't even gotten to the food yet.
So when I tell them the American Academy of Pediatrics has a guideline -
it actually makes suggestions.
By the time you're two,
you don't need more than 12 ounces of low-fat, non-fat, unflavored milk.
When it comes to juices, between ages one and six,
you don't need more than four to six ounces a day.
But our children are drinking way more than that.
So once I tell the parents - by the time I do a little math and I say,
"Johnny here just pretty much eats 50 teaspoons of sugar a day,"
they are horrified.
And it motivates change because of that.
There's something called gastric emptying time.
It's the amount of time it takes food and liquids to digest in the stomach
and get out into the intestines.
So it turns out that dairy, sugar, and fat
cause things to stick around longer.
So the more acid that sits around longer, the more it's likely to come back up.
Oh, and by the way,
babies and kids have very short distances between the stomach and the mouth,
so when they have that milk at the bedtime and lay down,
there's not very far for it to go
before it comes up and causes all these problems up high.
Next time you're at a grocery store,
please pick up any item, turn it around, read the nutrition label.
Under sugar, just take that number, divide it by four
because every four grams is about one teaspoon equivalent.
So that's how you can tell how much sugar you might be unknowingly consuming.
Now, you might be sitting out there saying,
"Alright, what's the big deal?
I've got acid reflux.
So does my mom, my friend, my neighbor.
I take that pill, you know, that nexium, prevacid, prilosec."
Well, the pills, yeah, they can block natural stomach acid secretion.
But I got to tell you I don't think it works against the Niagara Falls of acid
that we're allowing in our human diet today
and what's going into our children.
I don't tell people to go on some freaky, completely dairy- and sugar-free diet.
We've got junk at my house. Okay.
What I do do is talk about common sense stuff:
Cut out the sugary crap.
Drink more water.
Okay, let's have dessert right after dinner, not before bedtime.
Okay, you can have your milk and cookies just not at bedtime and in moderation.
And it is through that that I have found that parents are actually open,
they're willing,
but that's just one person, so I need help,
and you're all going to help me fight the "milk and cookie" disease, okay?
So,
I believe that we have to do something different
because are we going to allow
young children who are on four, five medications every day
just keep taking medicines for the next 10, 20, 50, 70 years?
Who's going to take them off of medication and why?
Or and when, excuse me.
Well, we know why now.
I truly believe we can improve the health of this nation.
And we do that through conversations in a great form like this,
through education, collaboration, and policy change.
The "milk and cookie" disease is completely curable,
and it costs nothing!
That's the best part.
But imagine if we saved millions in healthcare expenditure
by getting rid of unnecessary doctor's visits.
Stop taking medicines we don't need,
and most importantly,
make ourselves healthy, and make our children healthy.
Thank you so much.
(Applause)