Pushharder, what about the study I linked in the article about lowered T levels? Not enough of a deterrent?

Honestly, I think we could give you a dozen negative milk studies, but since you like milk and don't want to be wrong about it, they won't change your mind. And if you've been able to consume milk and build the exact body you want, then good for you. If not, then at some point you have to ask yourself if milk could be one of the things holding you back, slowing progress, etc.

If you're muscular and 5% body fat while drinking milk, I won't argue with you. If you're soft and kinda bloated most of the year, well, you gotta ask if milk is working.

Better yet, ask "Is it helping?" Because there's a difference between something "probably not hurting me" and "definitely helping me." If the T level study is true, then I can't see how any weight-training male can say his milk usage is "helping."

Now if you just say, "I like milk, it's yummy, and I'm too broke to buy protein supplements" that's fine too. Just say it and stop asking for more and more studies. (Not aiming that at you personally, push, but I see that reaction a lot.)

For me, cutting out milk was one of the big factors that's helped me get lean and stay lean, where before it seemed I was always stuck at the "not fat, but kinda soft" stage. It wasn't about studies, allergens, or hormones. It was about dropping milk and immediately not having to struggle so much with excess fat gain. Case closed... for me. As someone referenced above, you have to ask: Is it REALLY working... for YOU?

http://tnation.tmuscle.com/...working_for_you

Push, I'm hard at work on some other stuff now, so this is a closed topic for me. Just let me remind you of something you already quoted from the article. The whole "toxic" statement I made - it ended with a question mark. Look at it. I wrote a sentence representing both sides. The "toxic" one represented one extreme. Please note the punctuation.

And it all comes down to this: If dropping milk worked great for me, several studies have shown it to be less than ideal for a variety of reasons, and every physique-conscious nutrition expert I trust says to avoid milk... well, I'm going to do it. And I'm going to pass along that info to my readers. You do what you want with it.

What you won't do is DEMAND that I argue with you.

For those who may be shaking their heads and mumbling, "Push, Push, Push, why are you beating the living shit outta this horse," here's my answer:

For precisely the main reason that Chris advocates eliminating milk from one's diet, i.e., it'll help you get leaner, I'm suggesting milk can help (yes, "help" as in the opposite of "hurt" and "bad" and "toxic") an already lean person add weight. In fact, in my personal experience no other food or food supplement is better for weight gain.

Believe it or not, weight gain, and NOT weight loss, is the goal of many who visit this site. There are other ways to add cals to one's diet in simple innocuous ways, e.g., olive oil shooters and such as mentioned by Chris and others, but for the scrawny, hard-working, hard-lifting guy who has difficulty getting in enough cals in any given day and is desperately trying to gain weight, nothing in my personal opinion works better than guzzling whole milk, preferably spiked with heavy cream.

NOW if indeed milk is actually toxic or "baaaaaad" then I would have to say, like the others, stay away from it in all instances - you don't want to do something akin to inhaling asbestos, do you?

That's why I was earnestly looking for objective sources/studies that insisted that milk for the lactose tolerant was still somewhat poisonous. I'm not here to defend milk, I'm here to root out the "Well, shucks, everybody that's anybody KNOWS that man made global warming is a FACT and you are so passe if you aren't riding the train to utopia with us" crowd.

* I will concede that if the study cited regarding hormones in commercial milk is indeed valid that it should be good evidence that milk is undesirable. However, it IS one (1) study and it was conducted in Japan. I would think corroborating studies would be in order to establish firmer conclusions. Also, since I and 99.9% of the people reading this article don't consume Japanese cow's milk I'd like to see studies using American milk in their experiments.