What’s The Deal with Milk and Dairy?

GROWING UP DRINKING MILK

So I grew up with the encouragement to drink milk daily at breakfast time. Milk was also encouraged for me to drink at school during lunchtime. Well, I did drink milk but not excessively. I was a typical milk drinker. I usually had milk when I made myself a bowl of cereal. My mother did not like milk but purchased it for the rest of the family when she made groceries.

The fact that my mother did not like milk prompted me to ask her why not? She expressed that as a child she never liked milk because she was lactose intolerant. Milk was something she would not drink. As I got older I pretty much had milk only when I ate my cereal. I began not to eat as much cereal as I grew older.  It became something I used only when I needed it as an ingredient for a recipe.

MILK PROMOTION CAMPAIGN

Sometime during the early ’90s, there was this big milk campaign promoting the drinking of milk. There were tons of celebrities taking pictures with their milk mustaches and consciously telling people that milk was cool.  This insinuated that people needed to drink milk.  However, these promotions did not affect my attitude towards milk consumption. Now let’s fast forward from the ’90s to 2016.

LEARNING ABOUT MILK

As I became more familiar with social media, I became more involved with Instagram.   There I learned about what milk really consisted of. From these eye-catching memes, I saw that milk actually had blood and pus in it. As a result of those memes, I began to do some research on the computer.

I was appalled that this was actually true. There was also the question in my head of why as people do we drink milk from a whole other species. This thought never came to mind before. I just did what I was lead to do and that was to just drink milk.

During this last year, I made the decision to change my eating habits.  As a result, I vowed to completely take out cow’s milk from my family’s diet.  However, I had a child who resented my decision to cut out the cow milk and my child proclaimed that he was still going to drink it.  

I did not try to convince him to stop drinking milk but I quickly informed him that I was no longer going to buy it. He was more than welcome to buy the milk himself.  Well, that was the game changer for him because he did not want to spend his money on milk. Fortunately, my family began to accept my plant-based diet and the fact that I chose to buy almond milk.

I came across an article written by Dr. William Willet. Dr. Willet is an American physician and nutrition researcher.  According to Dr. Willet, who has conducted many studies on dairy, listed below  are researched based facts about milk and dairy:

-Dairy products are linked to prostate cancer.

-Milk is full of saturated fat and is linked to heart disease.

-Dairy causes digestive problems for 75 % of people with lactose intolerance. (People who can not properly digest milk and other dairy products.)

-Dairy aggravates irritable bowel.

-Milk does not benefit sports performance

There is also research that states that cows are mistreated and are in a state of disease more times than not and they are pumped with antibiotics.  These antibiotics are going directly to humans who drink cow’s milk. All of these findings have helped me to unregretfully walk away from milk and anything that contains dairy.

According to Dr. Willet, if you eliminate dairy from your diet,  you will have more energy, fewer problems with your sinuses and headaches.  In conclusion, we as people should treat our bodies well.  Be cognizant of what you ingest. As the saying goes, you are what you eat.