I’m kind of boggled to see this article about milk and calcium on a mainstream media website. For years, pretty much everyone has fallen in line with the dairy-industry-promoted tagline “milk does a body good”. But there has been lots of proof, for years, that milk, in fact, doesn’t do a body good at all and that the animal fat proteins in milk outweigh the good you get from the calcium.
I came across this same information years ago when I was diagnosed with a dairy allergy and started researching the dairy industry to maybe try and find out why (as I was also diagnosed with some chemical sensitivities, the doctor wasn’t sure if the allergy was the milk protein casein, or something else like antibiotics that might be in the milk). I came across lots of articles and studies touting the party line of milk being such a wonderful food. But in almost every case, the piece could be traced back to the dairy industry, which, it must be noted, have a HUGE vested interest in wanting people to equate their product with good health.
But the more research I did, the more I discovered other studies and articles (and yes, some of them – but not all – were paid for by the soy industry, who have a vested interest in people turning away from milk) that indicated that humans really don’t need cow’s milk at all, that we can get enough calcium from other sources.
Isn’t it odd that humans are the only animals that not only continue to consume milk after being weaned, and it’s the milk of another animal? The fuss over the London ice cream parlour serving breast milk ice cream clearly reveals a level of hypocrisy that is downright pathetic. People are squicked by eating the food that nourished them as babies, but will happily eat the same product from another animal. It’s just weird.
Certainly, people who like dairy products shouldn’t stop eating them, but we definitely need to re-examine how much of these foods we eat and stop relying on them for nutrients that they’re just not giving us.