The Case Against Dairy

There is a milk debate, although it is rather small because the people pushing milk on us as a culture are part of huge multinational corporations. The milk trade is BIG. We’ve been given manipulated statistics and poor studies to back them up and milk is so ingrained in our culture, we don’t think to debate its worth.

More recent studies show milk as the main cancer causing agent in the western diet. In The China Study Dr Campbell presents the evidence and it is compelling.  First, rats were exposed to aflatoxin (fungal carcinogen), then:

Rats fed a 20% casein (cow milk protein) diet suffered cancer 100% of the time.

Rats fed 5% or less casein protein in their diet suffered no cancer.

That study has been replicated several times. The other part of the study was of the Chinese as they are a culture of almost all one genetic pool, unlike much of the rest of the world with various multicultural people. Those living in areas with their traditional diet – 10% or less of animal protein (including but not limited to casein), suffered an extraordinarily low incidence of cancer. When those people changed diets to the 20% or more meat protein they suffered the same rate of cancer as those in the cities and western countries.

Stats like that cannot be ignored. Although there are those with vested interests trying very hard to sully his reputation and his method of statistic use, the fact is they are real statistics regardless of if they are used as propaganda or not. We can’t seem to battle cancer, yet as always we turn our backs on evidence like this because it is inconvenient. Who wants to give up bacon and eggs and a chocolate milk for breakfast? No many of us, I assure you.

However, my case against dairy isn’t to do with the casein issue. It isn’t to do with the antibiotics used in the cows that get in the milk, nor the hormones, nor the chemicals or the fact that it is pasturised or homogenised; it isn’t that such farming is destroying the planet or that pus, urine and feces is in most supermarket milk, or the torturous, heart breaking life and death of a dairy cow (see video below), or the fact that dairy is the biggest trigger for allergy of all known substances, or any of those reasons. It matters not to me that you get your raw organic milk from the healthy cow in your backyard. My reason is much more simple.

We are the only species that drinks the milk of another species.

But then again, we are the only species that does a lot of things and the planet ain’t thanking us for any of it.

No human culture sucks on the teat of another mammal.  There is no anthropological reference for such a practice.  Nature has boundaries for a reason, we don’t breed with other species and we don’t drink their milk, seems obvious to me but not so to others.  Perhaps as a breastfeeding mother I have a particular perspective about this, the obviousness of the topic.  I don’t think I would appreciate milk theft… and there is no way the cow can give her consent.    Most cows are tied up or penned into small pastures, or both.  The baby is taken from them, after lactation has been initiated.  Some “ethical” farms will keep the baby with the mother for a longer period, forcing the cow to grow a calf, AND give more milk for theft from humans.  This depletes the cows bodily reserves of minerals and all sorts of things, just the way it does a human lactating mother.

Cows are bovine, related to buffalo.  Buffalo wander miles and miles, and stick together with their young and with their group.  To think there is a way to “ethically” keep a cow is delusion.  To do so is depriving them of important instinctive behaviours.  It’s exploitation.  It’s abuse of your power as a member of a privileged species.

Simplicity is usually where we find truth.  It is helpful to ask, Do I have the urge to suck on the teat of another mammal?  No.  Other than extreme circumstances or fetish, neither does anyone else.  Simplicity.  To go further into any kind of science or debate seems ill fitting to me, seems to try to force the data to fit the conditioning.

Like meat that looks nary like road kill, all pretty in packaging so it looks nothing like a dead animal (because we are not carnivores, we are not turned on by the smell and look of roadkill for a reason), milk is also given in packaging, and the arrogance of a species taking such a sacred substance from another can be entirely ignored by us.

Milk, in ALL mammals, is for the young.  There comes a certain time when full solid food takes the place of milk for all mammals.  Adult mammals are not meant to drink any milk, our biology and digestion shifts after weaning to reflect this. let alone the milk of another species.

They tell us that the difference is in the fat, carb and protein content but that is not where the main differences lay.  Science is only just discovering the huge array of things in human breast milk, things like stem cells and special enzymes and anti-inflammatory chemicals and the list goes on and this is only the beginning. Researchers have admitted that there are things in milk they won’t be able to identify for years, maybe decades or longer because we haven’t reached that level of science yet! It is a complex substance.

Although cows and humans are both mammals, we are genetically rather different. Could be left unsaid, I recognise that.  Do we want stem cells and special enzymes and goodness knows what else that we can’t even identify yet from cows? Are you a growing calf, in need of bovine growth hormone?  Again, we are dicing with nature in her complexity and do not know what we are doing, although as usual we certainly think we do.

Most of us were deprived of human milk, the miracle juice that prepares our body for life in a way nothing else can, yet our parents thought nothing of putting cow, goat, rat, whatever milk down our neck. It makes so little sense.

The solution? Well, don’t eat dairy. However, for those who don’t want to let it go, there have been human milk ideas tossed around. Voluntary and paid donations of human breast milk for use in food. Do you know what the first objections were when this was brought up? “We don’t know what the woman would have eaten or what drugs she could have taken”. Can you believe that? These are people so very ignorant in the facts of what is in cows milk, they would have to be to say such a thing. The mind boggles. The second most popular response is, drum roll, “Breast milk is for babies”.

Oh the irony. And THIS my friends, THIS is what we are dealing with. I rest my case.

Here is a video on Ben and Jerry considering using breast milk in their icecream:

This is not recommended viewing, this video is required viewing if you eat dairy.  At least have the courtesy to be witness to these creature’s pain.