It's Time To Ditch Dairy. Here's Why.

The Truth About Dairy: Understanding the Impact on Health and Ethics

Due to corporate interests, lobbying, and widespread misinformation, few people know the truth about dairy. Luckily, recent scientific research reveals that the calcium in milk doesn’t build stronger bones but is actually too acidic for humans, causing calcium to leach out and creating weaker bones. More and more doctors and health professionals are starting to speak out against it. It has even been revealed that some of the food and nutrition ‘experts’ who created the Food Pyramid and Dietary Guidelines in the United States worked for, or were in some way employed by, the dairy and meat industries.

Walter Willett, M.D., Ph.D, the head of nutrition at Harvard’s School of Public Health, is one of the guidelines’ most vocal critics. He stated that its daily recommendations are “utterly ridiculous.” The food pyramid taught in American schools simply isn’t based on key scientific findings about health.

The Main Problems with Dairy

1. Acid Load and Bone Health

Cow’s milk has a positive potential renal acid load (PRAL), as do all other animal-derived protein-rich foods. In humans, drinking it triggers a biological reaction to neutralize all the damaging acidic protein before it reaches the kidneys and urinary tract. The most readily available acid neutralizer in the body is in your bones. Therefore, the body sacrifices bone density to neutralize all the acid, and milk actually ends up removing some of the calcium from your bones.

2. Bone Fractures

Drinking milk doesn’t reduce bone fractures. Contrary to popular belief, eating dairy products has never been shown to reduce fracture risk. According to the Nurses’ Health Study, dairy can actually increase the risk of fractures by 50 percent. Vitamin D appears to be much more important than calcium in preventing fractures.

3. Osteoporosis Rates

Countries with the lowest rates of dairy and calcium consumption (like those in Africa and Asia) have the lowest rates of osteoporosis. Countries with the highest consumption (US, England, Sweden, Finland) have the highest rates of osteoporosis.

4. Cancer Risk

Calcium from dairy may raise cancer risk. Research shows that higher intakes of both calcium and dairy products may increase a man’s risk of prostate cancer by 30 to 50 percent. Dairy consumption increases the body’s level of insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1), a known cancer promoter. High levels of IGF-1 lead to accelerated aging and disease.

5. Lactose Intolerance

Most people can’t even digest dairy. About 75% of the world’s population is genetically unable to properly digest milk and other dairy products, a problem called lactose intolerance. Even if you can tolerate lactose, why would you?

6. Saturated Fat

Dairy is high in saturated fat. It’s designed to make a baby calf triple its weight in the first year of its life. It is literally baby cow growth formula and naturally leads to unwanted human weight gain.

7. Other Health Issues

Dairy aggravates IBS (irritable bowel syndrome), allergies, sinus problems, ear infections, Type 1 diabetes, constipation, and anemia in children.

8. Contaminants in Pasteurized Milk

Pasteurized milk (the only kind you can buy at the grocery store) contains pesticides, hormones, antibiotics, and harmful effects from homogenization and pasteurization. These processes further alter milk’s chemistry and actually increase its detrimental acidifying effects.

9. Lactase Production

The majority of humans naturally stop producing significant amounts of lactase (the enzyme needed to properly metabolize and break down lactose, the sugar found in milk) sometime between ages 2-5. It is normal for almost all mammals to stop producing the enzymes needed to properly digest and metabolize milk after they have been weaned off their mother’s milk.

10. Incompatibility with Human Digestion

Human bodies weren’t made to digest cow’s milk. Many scientists agree that calcium, potassium, protein, and fats should be obtained from better food sources, like whole plant foods (vegetables, fruits, beans, whole grains, nuts, seeds, microalgae, and seaweed).

11. Hormones and Acne

The hormones in cow’s milk are the cause of persistent acne for many individuals. This includes added hormones due to modern agricultural practices to increase milk production and elevated hormone levels naturally found in all milk.

Ethical and Environmental Concerns

1. Animal Cruelty

Cows produce milk to nourish their young, but calves on dairy farms are taken away from their mothers when they are just one day old. Female dairy cows are artificially inseminated from the time they are one year old, kept continuously pregnant, and pumped full of antibiotics and hormones to make them produce far more milk than they normally would. This causes the cows to develop painful mastitis, leading to milk full of pus and blood, which has to be removed through harsh pasteurization methods.

2. Veal Industry

If you drink milk, you’re subsidizing the veal industry. Male calves are taken away from their mothers when they are as young as 1 day old to be chained in tiny stalls for 3-18 weeks and raised for veal. These calves live their entire lives terrified, suffering from diarrhea, pneumonia, and lameness.

3. Environmental Impact

Large dairy farms have an enormously detrimental effect on the environment. In California, America’s top milk-producing state, manure from dairy farms has poisoned hundreds of square miles of groundwater, rivers, and streams. Factory-farmed animals, including those on dairy farms, produce 1.65 billion tons of manure each year, much of which ends up in waterways and drinking water. The dairy industry is the primary source of smog-forming pollutants in California. A single cow emits more of these harmful gasses than a car does.

4. Manure Production

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) states that dairy cows produce more manure than beef cattle. A dairy farm with 2000 cows generates more than 240,000 pounds of manure every day. That’s nearly 90 million pounds a year, leading to agricultural runoff polluting nearby lakes, streams, rivers, and waterways.

Conclusion

For all of the reasons above, please ditch dairy and enjoy all of the amazing plant-based substitutions that are currently available!

Sources:

• “Case-Control Study of Risk Factors for Hip Fractures in the Elderly”. American Journal of Epidemiology. Vol. 139, No. 5, 1994
• Collier RJ, Miller MA, Hildebrandt JR, Torkelson AR et al. Factors affecting insulin-like growth factor-1 concentration in bovine milk. J Dairy Sci 1991; 74 :2905– 2911
• Daxenberger A, Breier BH, Sauerwein H. Increased milk levels of insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) for the identification of bovine somatotropin (bST) treated cows. Analyst. 1998; Dec; 123(12):2429-35.
• Grossman, Elizabeth. ‘As Dairy Farms Grow Bigger, New Concerns About Pollution By Elizabeth Grossman: Yale Environment 360’. N.p., 2015. e360.yale.edu.
• Michael Greger, M.D. ‘Dietary Guidelines: Advisory Committee Conflicts Of Interest | Nutritionfacts.Org’. Nutritionfacts.org. N.p., 2015.
• Mark Hyman, MD. ‘Dairy: 6 Reasons You Should Avoid It At All Costs - Dr. Mark Hyman’. Dr. Mark Hyman. N.p., 2010.
• Parodi PW. Dairy product consumption and the risk of breast cancer. J Am Coll Nutr. 2005; Dec;24(6 Suppl):556S-68S. http://www.jacn.org/content/24/suppl_6/556S.long
• Saveourbones.com, ‘Debunking The Milk Myth: Why Milk Is Bad For You And Your Bones’. N.p., 2015.
• “They Eat What? What Are They Feeding Animals On Factory Farms?”. Organicconsumers.Org, 2019, https://www.organicconsumers.org/news/they-eat-what-what-are-they-feeding-animals-factory-farms.