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| Thank you, Animal Voices Radio Show, for the sweet photo. |
I'm back today with another installment of One Good Reason. This time I'm talking about milk. A lot of people don't eat meat, but feel dairy is OK. I used to be one of them. I thought dairy was the lesser of the animal foods evils, but there's a lot of evidence proving that dairy, and particularly cheese, is the bigger bad bad guy, hiding behind a white mustache. Marketing can be a very powerful tool, and the dairy marketing people have had us all convinced, for a very long time, that milk does a body good.
The truth is, cow's milk does a baby cow's body good, but only until the baby cow is grown up. Have you ever seen adult cows drinking milk? No way. Or a baby cow drinking goat or whale or human milk? Bet not. Humans are the only species to drink other species' milk, and just because we can, doesn't mean we should. Think of milk as concentrated, liquid meat, packed full of saturated fat and cholesterol. Cheese is even more concentrated, and as I've mentioned in previous posts, literally addictive, because the casein in milk contains honest-to-goodness opiates. Oh, how I used to love cheese. It's powerful stuff!
Then there's the calcium myth. Get this - the countries that consume the most dairy and meat also have the highest rates of osteoporosis. Really. That's because animal products, including milk, create an acid system in our bodies, rather than alkaline. In order to balance out the excess acid, calcium is leached from our bones. Drinking milk and eating cheese actually do our bones more harm than good, but still the marketing goes on...
The good new is it's really easy to get all the calcium we need from plant sources like leafy greens, sesame seeds, almonds, broccoli, beans, figs, molasses, and many, many more. Don't take my word for any of this! Put down that hunk of cheddar (orange cheese? really?) and head over to Not Milk.com, where you'll find buckets of information on health, the dairy industry, and studies to back it all up.
When you're finished, you can easily whip up a batch of Nut Milk to go with your afternoon cookie break. Here's to your good health! Cheers!
