Dairy is Scary

DAIRY IS SCARY

When I was very young, I was told by my family that I should drink plenty of milk, so that I could grow taller and have stronger bones. I happily obliged and developed a keen taste for milk, especially the full-cream, pasteurised kind. 

By the time I was 10 years old, however, my father started telling me that milk was actually not a healthy or ethical product at all and that I should avoid dairy altogether. I found these contradictory messages confusing, and decided not to follow my father’s advice; after all I liked milk so much. 

Over time, though, as my father shared more information about dairy, I started having doubts about the benefits of milk, wondering how this love for milk exists everywhere in the world, even though it is a liquid that is meant for the baby of another species of animal. My curiosity brought me back to the dawn of the agricultural revolution about 12,000 years ago and has taught me more about the power of story-telling and propaganda than I had ever imagined.

The history of milk 

According to various studies, ancestors of the modern cow were first domesticated about 10,500 years ago in Southwest Asia (Scheu et al., 2015). By 7,000 BCE, there was a mass migration of farmers from the Middle East to Europe, whereby they brought along domesticated cattle. Thanks to a genetic mutation in this population, these farmers were able to drink milk in larger quantities, helping them to survive the harsh natural conditions in which they lived. Consequently, they thrived and spread the ability to digest lactose among the populations in Western and Northern Europe in the following millennia (Schulz, 2010).

Milk: miracle beverage or biohazard? 

If so many people are lactose-intolerant, and with increasing reports saying that it is bad for our health, I started to wonder why milk is so popular, and why does everyone keep drinking it? The reason for that wasn’t hard to find; the goal of the dairy industry is to make as much profit as possible and they will do what it takes to make people drink milk. 

At the start of the industrialization of the milk industry in the late 19th century, the dairy industry faced the problem of high infant mortality, which was thought to be connected to poor and unhygienic milk production processes and storage. By the 1910s, however, pasteurisation of milk became standard practice, and this would be complemented by high-temperature processing (1940s) and ultrahigh temperature processing (UHT) from 1975 onwards (Currier & Widness, 2018).

The most famous advertising campaign of all was Got Milk?, which was started in 1997 and featured many famous actors and singers, including Beyoncé. However, even though this campaign was quite popular, it did not increase consumption of milk much. This was partly due to the fact that a lot of people still remain lactose-intolerant, but also because more research came out showing that milk did not improve bone health (Bolland, 2015) or had other specific benefits at all. A 1997 study from Harvard debunked the myths created by the dairy industry (Boodman, 1997), and in the following decades, more and more research has shown that lifelong consumption of high-fat milk and other dairy products (except yoghurt) causes an increased risk of several chronic diseases, such as certain types of cancers (Dagfinn et al., 2014), and acne children and teenagers (Juhl, 2018) due to its saturated fat and cholesterol content (Ference, 2017).

The fight for the truth, and a confused consumer 

The global size of the dairy market was US$ 944.7 billion in 2023 (Imarc, 2023). No wonder that the stakes are so high in the fight for the consumer’s trust. This is why the dairy industry is using all kinds of strategies to convince the consumer to drink more milk and consume other dairy products. Apart from the aforementioned ad campaigns, the dairy industry also spends hundreds of millions of dollars to lobby with governments to support their industry and to prevent policies that harm its interests (InfluenceMap, 2024). 

Furthermore, the dairy industry also influences scientific research by funding, directly or indirectly, studies by researchers. Even when an average consumer makes the effort to delve deeper into the ‘science’ of nutrition, they often find themselves confused by the information in science journals. With the help of my father, I looked at a number of studies and came to realise that most of the studies that conclude that dairy is not bad or even good for us as part of a balanced diet are sponsored by the dairy industry (Kongerslev, 2016). What’s more, the pharmaceutical industry, which makes money by selling medicine to sick people, has joined the fight in support of the dairy industry (Rozenberg et al., 2016). I understand now that such studies can be dismissed, as they are contaminated by commercial interests.

Ethical and health concerns 

Apart from the health concerns, I have become aware of the suffering and injustice that is happening in the dairy industry on a daily basis. The milk that we drink almost always comes from industrial production, not from small family farms where you can drink the milk almost straight from the cow. Because of this, before we drink a cup of milk for breakfast at home or at school, a lot of awful things have happened that we don’t see.

• Semen collection: the farmer uses an artificial vagina to coerce the bull into ejaculation; another popular method is electroejaculation, whereby the farmer sticks a long electrical probe into the rectum of the restrained bull and electrical pulses (8-16V) are releases until ejaculation (Napolitano et al., 2020). In other words, the bull is raped. 

• Artificial insemination (AI) of the cow: the farmer inserts a palpating arm into the rectum of the cow, then inserts the AI catheter all the way into and through the cervix and then deposits the semen into the uterus of the cow (Thomas & Andersen, 2021). In other words, the cow is also raped. 

• After the cow gives birth to her first calf, she starts to produce milk. In the dairy industry, the calf is taken away from its mother within the first 24 hours of birth. In other words, the cow sees her baby being kidnapped and she will never see her baby again. This causes severe trauma to the cow (SPCA Montréal, 2022). 

• The calf is taken away from its mother to be raised for milk production or for meat. If the calf is a male, they are slaughtered for their flesh from the age of five days onwards. Some male calves do reach adulthood, but then they are slaughtered for their meat (Animals Australia Team, 2021).

• Three months after the cow gave birth to her calf, she is artificially inseminated again. From the age of 13 months until she dies at the age of 5 or 6, the cow is impregnated against her will every year; and every year, her baby calf is taken away from her. 

• The natural lifespan of a cow is more than 20 years. However, in the dairy industry a cow starts producing less milk after 5 years. At this time, she is taken away to be slaughtered for meat. In other words, a cow’s life is cut about 25% into her natural life span. For a human, that would mean at the age of about 20 years (Hanson, 2023). 

• Industrial milking machines cause bovine mastitis, which is an inflammation of the nipples of cows. Farmers add antibiotics to the cow’s feed to mitigate this (Cheng & Han, 2020). As a result, antibiotic residues end up in our milk. This low-level ingestion of antibiotics causes certain bacterial strains in our body to become resistant to antibiotics. This is dangerous for human health, as more than 1 million die as a result of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections every year (Oxford University, 2022).

Conclusion 

In view of the available scientific evidence that shows serious health risks related to dairy products, and the fact that ethically horrible things happen in the production process of milk, I now believe that dairy is indeed quite scary. 

There are a lot of alternatives for dairy on the market, such as soy milk and various nut milks. Yoghurt can be made from coconut, soy and other products. And plant-based cheeses can be found on the market as well. These alternatives are not associated with increased health risks and do not raise ethical concerns. 

It is time to try them out.

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