Got milk? Everyone knows the slogan from the dairy advertisements cleverly placed in magazines, newspapers and billboards. These advertisements, along with all the other information we hear about dairy products and their “powers,” encourage us to believe we need this substance in our daily diets. But where is the truth, because it sure isn’t in the milk moustache. Don Bennett points out in his health101.org article: “Not Milk! An MD Speaks Out Against Milk Products,” the $180 million-a-year ad campaigns are the suffering of our health and innocent animals. We frequently hear that we should consume dairy products for their health benefits—notably calcium, but we never grasp the actual truth of how dairy is detrimental to our health and causes unethical suffering to tortured cows.
Have you ever noticed that in nature no other animals consume the milk of a different species? You don’t see cows drinking buffalo milk. Or goats drinking human milk. Yet humans use nine million cows in the U.S. alone to provide them with milk to drink, as discussed in Why Animals Matter: The Case for Animal Protection by Williams and DeMello. All of a sudden, it doesn’t seem so logical and natural for us to be consuming the milk of another animal. Holly Brooks, 25, from England, has avoided dairy products for ten years and overcame many health issues by doing so. She shares the good logic, “We can’t digest cow’s milk because it is basically designed for baby cows.” To add to this, Dr. Douglas Graham states in his book The 80/10/10 diet, “Humans are most certainly designed by nature as suckling’s—but only for their first couple years of life, and only of their own mother’s milk.” This sure is common sense. Dao Earl, who has studied advance nutrition and physiology, looks at the caloronutrient values (carbohydrate, protein, and fat) of human milk and cow’s milk in an article of the summer 2009 Get Fresh! magazine. It is observed that human milk has a higher carbohydrate percentage and a lower protein percentage than cow’s milk. Humans develop mentally quicker than they do physically, as opposed to cows who quickly develop big and strong with rapid bone growth. A calf will gain approximately 40 percent of its full-grown weight in its first six months of life, while a human baby will gain only about 10 percent. Maybe it’s starting to look like dairy consumption is out of place and not in line with how the human body works.
The reason why the odd consumption of cow dairy gets overlooked seems to be down to the marketing and promotion of dairy products as being needed for our health. As Brooks says in her interview, “It’s just become normal to have dairy in the daily diet. So it seems abnormal to not have it.” Dairy is part of the USDA food pyramid, and it seems we need to consume it to be strong and healthy, and particularly ward off osteoporosis with the calcium content of dairy products. This couldn’t be further from the truth, as scientific evidence shows. The China Study, the largest comprehensive study ever undertaken on the relationship between diet and diseases, showed osteoporosis occurred the most in countries where calcium intake from dairy products was the highest. So what’s the deal? Dao Earl further explains in his article that the vast majority of calcium in cow’s milk is wrapped in a protein called casein. The only thing which can split casein is rennet, something which the human glands do not produce after the first month of life. This means calcium is hardly obtained from cow’s milk, and we have no evolutionary relationship with it. So we really can live healthfully without dairy. We know the strongest animals on earth eat a plant based diet and their own mother’s milk only at the beginning of their life, such as elephants and horses. Perhaps we should start to look at what our fellow animals are doing and how they remain strong and healthy.
