Milk is bad, mmmkay?

I’ve decided to give up dairy products for a while. There are various reasons for this but mainly I just think it’s a really weird thing for humans to be drinking cow’s milk.

All female mammals (or at least the vast majority of them) produce breastmilk for their newborn until they’re able to digest solid foods themselves. Human babies feed on their mother’s breastmilk for a few months (or in the case of a friend of mine, 14 years). Little cow babies feed on mammy cow’s milk for a while too. But then they stop! They go off and eat grass and stuff afterwards. Humans are the only mammal to continue drinking milk after infancy. And they don’t even drink human milk. They switch to cow milk! It’s all very strange when you think about it.

In 2006, Ireland was the world’s third highest consumer of milk per capita. Which might explain the cattle attitude of the population!

Nowadays cows are pumped full of artificial hormones, antibiotics and steroids to make them grow bigger, produce more milk and produce milk for longer. These hormones are still in the milk after pasteurisation and homogenisation and get passed to humans. Some studies have linked these to various forms of cancer (link). And it’s not just the artificial hormones that get passed to humans. Natural oestrogen and progesterone from the cows gets passed in large quantities too which can be harmful to us (link).

Of course it’s not just milk, it’s all dairy products – butter, cheese, cream, yoghurt, ice-cream, etc.

Some links for you:

• godairyfree.org
• notmilk.com
• milksucks.com

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