You may have been told since little how important is to drink milk. Moreover, this beverage has been considered throughout the years to be jam-packed with all the essential food groups as well as vitamins and minerals such as calcium. I’m sure some –if not all- of these phrases may sound familiar to you: “drink milk to make your bones strong”, “calcium in milk prevent you from osteoporosis”, “You need to drink milk to get enough calcium”, bla, bla, bla… I’m here to tell you that we’re dealing with one of the oldest, most entrenched myths of all time.
Once again, I am going to ask you to open your mind and listen to what I have to say. You are free to believe it or not but, anyway, I urge you to start doing your own research.
First of all, we are not physiologically “prepared” to drink cow’s milk and if you don’t think so; how do you feel about having a glass of dog’s milk? Cat’s milk? Giraffe’s milk maybe? I bet you agree with me that none of those animals’ milk is meant to end up in our mouth; so the same applies for cow’s milk.
When a baby cow is born it weights 50kg and gains approximately eight times it’s weight by the time it is weaned; on the other hand, when a baby human is born it’s weight is no more than 5kg and the baby won’t even get to 15kg within one year! So think about all the imbalances that cow’s milk can produce to the human body.
Just like every mammal in this planet, we have to drink milk form our mothers during the early stages of life. Human’s milk is the most nutritious food; just by itself it is meant to provide the newborn all the vitamins and minerals –found in the right amounts and proportions- the baby needs to grow and develop to its full potential. Once the baby is old enough, there’s no need keep drinking milk; nor from our mother, nor from the mother cow’s.
But with all that being said, we still find ourselves drinking milk at 20, 30, 40 years old. Why? Because society has repeatedly been saying that milk is our best source for calcium. Ok so I suggest asking the gorilla- known to be one of the strongest animals- that lives free in the jungle to start drinking a glass of milk a day to prevent osteoporosis. It doesn’t make any sense right? So why are us humans still believing the milk myth?
Let me explain you something; calcium is a mineral that is found in our bodies, 99% of the calcium is found in our bones and teeth. When we consume animal protein (i.e. milk, eggs, meat…) our bodies produce sulfuric acid (battery acid!) to burn/digest it; as a result, this causes an excess acid load in the body –which is meant to be alkaline. This situation triggers a biological correction; in order to neutralize the Ph acidity our bodies dispose of a mechanism for long term survival; and as we can not be acidic the calcium in our bones is pulled out to buffer all that excess acid load. So we end up losing a lot of calcium through our kidneys and leaving the body via the urine, so that the net result after the process is an actual calcium deficit.
This explains why the countries that consume the largest amounts of milk are also the countries with the most cases of osteoporosis and bone fractures (there’s hundreds of studies on that, go look it up for yourself).
So by now, we have uncovered the misconception about the (un)health reasons we have been told to consume milk but the many facts that make today’s milk such an unhealthy drink haven’t even started.
In order for a cow to produce milk it obviously must give birth and the calves are taken away from their mothers within hours after being born - in order to maximize profit- but hey that’s a completely different story I’d rather write about another time. In order to keep the lactating at maximum yields, cows are forcibly artificially inseminated year after year and live confined in primarily indoor operations, usually tethered by the neck inside barren stalls unable to practically move (click here for a visual). Cows are genetically modified, fed steroids and hormones to produce up 12 times more milk that they would naturally produce, in order to keep up –their bodies are working with such “extreme” unnatural conditions- the cows are fed antibiotics (55% of the US antibiotics are fed to livestock) and drugs. Moreover, those cows will only live up to 4-5 years instead of the 25 living in natural conditions. In other words: dairy cows are extremely unhealthy. Imagine someone sick; so sick that lives off antibiotics, pain killers and drugs and has a really poor nutrition. Now imagine this person giving birth. Do you think doctors would recommend her to breast feed? I don’t think so. Then, going back to the sick cow, why would someone want to drink that milk????????? Under current industrial methods, milk is nothing else than a toxic bovine brew of man-made ingredients such as pus cells, hormones, antibiotics and pesticides all of which are bad not only for us but also for the environment.
As when it comes to environmental facts about the dairy industry I won’t be that extensive because, I repeat, I’d rather let you do the research - so that you don’t think that I am trying to convince you with nonsenses-; let me just give you a glimpse of some data:
- Livestock and their byproducts account
for at least 32.000 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year, or 51% of
all worldwide greenhouse gas emissions.
- 1000 liters of water are required
to produce 1 liter of milk.
- The meat and dairy industries combined use nearly 1/3
(29%) of all the fresh water in the world today.
- Livestock covers 45% of the earth’s total land.
- A farm
with 2.500 dairy cows produces the same amount of waste as a city of 411,000
people.
- Cows produce 568 billion liters of methane per day.
- Throughout the world, humans drink 20 billion liters of
water and eat 10 billion kg of food each day; on the other hand: Worldwide,
cows drink 170 billion liters of water and eat 61 billion kg of food each day.
And the list could go on and on… but I’d rather stop here.
I want you to look at the big picture; it may have been a good idea some
hundreds of years ago to start drinking milk from another species in order to
survive, but nowadays it is more of a bad idea. Me, just like you, had been
drinking milk since a little kid without questioning the reasons; not even
thinking that it was unnatural for us to drink milk from another specie. Yet
nobody had ever told me the truth and the facts behind it.
And no, don’t worry about your cereal or your morning
coffee; there’re plenty of plant-based alternatives out there with hundreds of
different flavors. I know most of the people are afraid of change and it may
seem hard to replace something you have been doing for that many years but,
trust me, it’s neither hard nor difficult to transition and the good facts
about it overlook any other reason!!
Haz clic aquí para leer la entrada en Español.
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