Dairy: The American Dread

Feb 04, 2021

"The American dream is a killing machine"
-Falling In Reverse,
"Drugs"

Health

One of the greatest overlooked issues with our food system, and dairy's prolonged existence as an "essential" food group, is that it completely disregards the fact that the majority of the human population is lactose intolerant or allergic to dairy.1 Having just one type of edible product be labeled as necessary to human health is illogical and nonsensical because there is no single food any human needs to survive: if you're allergic to soy, you have many other legumes from which to choose; if you're allergic to wheat, you can have whatever other grains you want; if you're allergic to celery, there are a multitude of vegetables to eat instead.

Dietary Guidelines

It wasn't until this year, 2021, that the USDA, though there still remains a dairy category on the dietary guidelines, announced that plant-based dairy alternatives are adequate substitutions.2 Except that's a lie because dairy-free products are far superior to anything made from dairy, just for the health benefits alone:

Dairy contains casein, a carcinogen3; casomorphins, an addictive substance, even more concentrated in cheese, meant to draw babies back to their mothers for sustenance4; pus, often due to mastitis from being milked three times a day for several years; urine and fecal contamination, as the cows are forced to stand in their own filth, which drips down their legs and udders and into the milking machines; and high levels of IGF-1, a growth hormone that promotes cancer development.5

Additionally, dairy is the top source of saturated fat in the Standard American Diet (SAD), and it, like all animal products (and zero plant products), contains cholesterol; scientific studies have widely shown that diets low in saturated fat and cholesterol are beneficial for human health. Because animals used in agriculture are often preemptively fed antibiotics to prevent the swift spread of disease through densely-populated factory farms, antibiotic resistance, in both the animals and the humans who eat them and their secretions, is possible.6

Soy

One of the only well-known arguments against non-dairy foods is that soy -- just one of many plants used to create alternatives to traditional dairy products -- contains estrogen, thereby promoting cancer development and other hormonal issues, but this too is false.

Soy contains phytoestrogen, which has no relation whatsoever to animal estrogen, and has been shown in numerous studies to actually be beneficial for women with breast cancer by either prolonging survival or preventing it altogether.7 This is because phytoestrogens "act as estrogen-blockers and block the binding of estrogens, such as estradiol, to breast cancer cells."8 Dairy, on the other hand, contains heightened levels of genuine bovine estrogen, which has a positive correlation with the development of various cancers, as well as our other leading killers.

Humanitarianism

The US government -- and almost all other governments with similar agricultural and economic systems -- is intentionally making us sick and killing us by continuing to promote dairy consumption. And then they make us pay, often with money we don't have, for these preventable illnesses they have forced upon us because of both their own ignorance and their own greed. This isn't a partisan issue; they're all responsible for this. And if our society and/or species manages to survive long enough to achieve a vegan future, this massive injustice against all of humanity will go down in history as one of the greatest atrocities of all time, only second to how we've treated literally everything and everyone else.

Institutional Racism

Last year, I detailed the myriad reasons why animal agriculture, and dairy specifically, is a racist system. For one, non-white persons are much more likely to be lactose intolerant or have dairy allergies compared to white persons, but dairy is still included as an essential food group, even though it makes most of the population sick. For another, due to decades, centuries even, of discrimination and oppression, many non-whites live in areas, known as food deserts, where their only viable options for sustenance are fast food chains and other unhealthy foods.

As we learned in The Game Changers, the USDA's reliance on animal-based sources of nutrition dates back to the 1890s and hasn't changed much since. We are still dealing with very real, tangible forms of systemic racism in our society, and the food system is the single greatest contributor, killing non-white people at far higher rates than white people. (Please see "Institutional Racism & Its Impact on the Food System" to learn more.)

Marketing

Even more despicable, the industry features black athletes, like Sloane Stephens and Al Horford, in some of its Built With Chocolate Milk advertisements to promote milk to the black community as a health drink, citing "real science" to back up its claims. Regardless of the racism, saturated fat (of which diary is the top source) is the most pro-inflammatory food component, and dairy also increases mucus production, which can lead to respiratory problems, so it certainly should never be consumed by athletes.6,9 (For more information on the racism of dairy and the negative health implications, check out Switch4Good's "Dairy Does a Body Bad" scientific report.)

Future USDA Guidelines

Even if dairy is eliminated as a food group by the USDA in 2025, that's still only a very small win. Dairy will continue to be a standard in people's houses, and I have little faith that the government would support anti-milk campaigns to warn people, and minorities especially, of the negative health implications of dairy. (This is particularly unlikely because the industry receives millions in taxpayer subsidies each year.) Our economic system is dependent on the oppression of humans and nonhumans, and businesses are more valuable than actual lives.

Environment

Cheese, along with cow and lamb flesh, is one of the food products with the highest methane emissions, as it comes from cows, who are ruminants and produce much more methane than non-ruminant animals.10 Each dairy cow produces about 120 pounds of waste per day, amounting to over 1.1 billion pounds every day from all dairy cows; to put this into context, 2,500 lactating cows produce the equivalent waste of 411,000 humans.11 Each mother cow used in the dairy industry drinks between 35 and 40 gallons of water per day, and overall, it can take 300 to 1,200 gallons of water to produce just one gallon of milk.10

The responsibility for this waste of resources and destruction of the planet does not fall on the cows; it falls on each individual consumer who purchases 604 pounds of dairy products per year.10

Animals

Just like humans and all other mammals, cows must first be impregnated to begin lactating, but because humans want to drink their milk, their babies are taken away minutes or hours after birth; they are never reunited. Males are often killed on farms through blunt-force trauma, as is permitted by animal welfare laws, or they are raised and killed at six months old for veal and expensive leather. Though illegal in many places, veal farms often keep the babies locked in small hutches, unable to produce too much muscle so their flesh remains tender.12 (Often, paying fines for breaking laws is less expensive than altering farms' infrastructure to be more "humane.")

Females are placed back into the system, raised alone until they are old enough to be impregnated. This process can be done in various ways, though the most common is by the farmer penetrating her with his arm and inserting the semen (often collected through electroejaculation) with a long rod. The mothers are impregnated again within months of giving birth and continue to be milked while pregnant with their next child.13

Mutilations

Babies are "debudded" by having their horns cruelly chopped off and the bloody stumps cauterized. Males are castrated, though some are left in tact to be used for sperm production. All are branded or have large holes ripped through their ears for tags. In cases, such as on smaller farms, where mothers cannot be separated from the babies, spiked rings are inserted into the babies' noses to prevent them from drinking the milk meant for them.14 These practices are performed without anesthetic, which often results in additional trauma as the calves thrash around in agony.

Oh, the Humanity

These are standard industry practices performed even on "humane," "grass-fed," and "organic" farms, and all mothers are slaughtered when their milk production declines. Since they are continuously impregnated, many are pregnant when slaughtered, so the babies are removed from the wombs and killed separately, their blood extracted to be used in scientific research. Their flesh is sold to cheap meat or companion animal food companies, their skin to the leather industry, and their bones and muscles and hooves are turned into gelatin for human children's candies.14

If you find any of this disturbing, please choose to not consume dairy or any other animal products, as all animals used in all industries are treated with similar contempt.