Kirsten: why do you "have to shake your head at the comment made by splinters"? Everything that splinters says is true. There is nothing remotely natural about human beings drinking the lactic secretions of non-human land mammals. Roughly 80% of adult human beings are lactose intolerant, in fact, and the costs of overlooking this fact and continuing to drink milk and eat dairy products anyway generates millions and millions of dollars per year in entirely preventable treatments for stomach, esopageal, and intestinal diseases and cancers, as well as diabetes.
This is not "animal rights" propaganda either, but is backed up by a plethora of sceintific evidence arrived at through research that was motivated purely by experimental interest and not by an antecedent AR agenda. Check out the website of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (www.pcrm.org), or read The China Study by T. Colin Campbell (a Cornell research scientist whose lab has earned the equivalent of over 75 years worth of National Institute of Health grants for his work on the links between diet/nutrition and public health). Campbell marshalls an overwhelming amount of evidence for the conclusion that animal products are a direct cause of most of the worst diseases of affluence afflicting our country today (and RUINING our medical system, due tot he fact that we spend over a trillion dollars a year treating these diseases that (a) are preventable and that (b) can't be fixed with medications and surgeries that only treat symptoms and don't get to the root cause (which is TOO MUCH ANIMAL PROTEIN).
Human health, moreover, is barely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the irrationality of supporting the dairy industry. The cruelty that these animals are made to suffer is unspeakable (repeated artificial insemination on an annual basis, the administration of bovine growth hormone, the forced ingestion of GMO corn feed laced with chicken feces (bovine animals are grain intolerant, by the way, so forcing them to ingest corn (a) causes them tremendous discomfort; and (b) creates tremendous amounts of methane, a green house gas), the total restriction of their natural instincts, the shortened life span, the inability to graze on grass pasture (which is what their chambered digestive system evolved to eat). I haven't even mentioned the most egregious wrong of the dairy industry, which is that it is directly respnosible for the veal industry. Cows don't lactate unless they give birth, and a full one half of the births are males (which, of course, cannot give milk). Guess where the males end up? Veal crates and beef stockyards--some of the most brutally cruel locales on planet earth. Don't take my word for it: read the industry manuals themselves. You can find summaries of them in work by Peter Singer (he stitches his account together from citations from industry standard manuals).
As for megmeg's suggestion that cow's milk deliver's nutrients that other mammal lactate can't, I'd like to hear the scientific basis for that one. The fact of the matter is that none of us would find milk remotely appealing if we hadn't been raised to think that a totally unnatural and unhealthy substance was somehow wholesome. This fact has more to do with the influence of the dairy industry (who incidentally provides nutrition curricula "free of charge" to public school districts) than it does with the wholesomeness of milk. Recent studies have shown (many of them are cited in the T. Colin Campbell book listed above) that milk has no positive effects whatever for keeping bones strong, and that actually leeches iron and other nutrients from one's system. Leafy green vegetables are much better sources of the right kind of calcium than milk, which has the devasting health drawbacks listed above.
As for dead_red_eyes's "damn fine cheeses and butters", I agree that they taste delicious. The problem is that our aesthetic preferences are neither here nor there when it comes to determining whether a particular action is morally justified. The fact of the matter is that it is impossible to produce cheese and butter without being implicated in morally unjustifiable practices. When one adds to this that eating damn fine cheeses and butters are costing us hundreds of billions (indeed, up to ONE TRILLION) of dollars annually in medical expenditures related to heart disease, esophageal and intestinal cancers, and adult onset diabetes, the claims that milk is "natural" and "healthy" start to look pretty ridiculous.
Kirsten: why do you "have to shake your head at the comment made by splinters"? Everything that splinters says is true. There is nothing remotely natural about human beings drinking the lactic secretions of non-human land mammals. Roughly 80% of adult human beings are lactose intolerant, in fact, and the costs of overlooking this fact and continuing to drink milk and eat dairy products anyway generates millions and millions of dollars per year in entirely preventable treatments for stomach, esopageal, and intestinal diseases and cancers, as well as diabetes.
This is not "animal rights" propaganda either, but is backed up by a plethora of sceintific evidence arrived at through research that was motivated purely by experimental interest and not by an antecedent AR agenda. Check out the website of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (www.pcrm.org), or read The China Study by T. Colin Campbell (a Cornell research scientist whose lab has earned the equivalent of over 75 years worth of National Institute of Health grants for his work on the links between diet/nutrition and public health). Campbell marshalls an overwhelming amount of evidence for the conclusion that animal products are a direct cause of most of the worst diseases of affluence afflicting our country today (and RUINING our medical system, due tot he fact that we spend over a trillion dollars a year treating these diseases that (a) are preventable and that (b) can't be fixed with medications and surgeries that only treat symptoms and don't get to the root cause (which is TOO MUCH ANIMAL PROTEIN).
Human health, moreover, is barely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the irrationality of supporting the dairy industry. The cruelty that these animals are made to suffer is unspeakable (repeated artificial insemination on an annual basis, the administration of bovine growth hormone, the forced ingestion of GMO corn feed laced with chicken feces (bovine animals are grain intolerant, by the way, so forcing them to ingest corn (a) causes them tremendous discomfort; and (b) creates tremendous amounts of methane, a green house gas), the total restriction of their natural instincts, the shortened life span, the inability to graze on grass pasture (which is what their chambered digestive system evolved to eat). I haven't even mentioned the most egregious wrong of the dairy industry, which is that it is directly respnosible for the veal industry. Cows don't lactate unless they give birth, and a full one half of the births are males (which, of course, cannot give milk). Guess where the males end up? Veal crates and beef stockyards--some of the most brutally cruel locales on planet earth. Don't take my word for it: read the industry manuals themselves. You can find summaries of them in work by Peter Singer (he stitches his account together from citations from industry standard manuals).
As for megmeg's suggestion that cow's milk deliver's nutrients that other mammal lactate can't, I'd like to hear the scientific basis for that one. The fact of the matter is that none of us would find milk remotely appealing if we hadn't been raised to think that a totally unnatural and unhealthy substance was somehow wholesome. This fact has more to do with the influence of the dairy industry (who incidentally provides nutrition curricula "free of charge" to public school districts) than it does with the wholesomeness of milk. Recent studies have shown (many of them are cited in the T. Colin Campbell book listed above) that milk has no positive effects whatever for keeping bones strong, and that actually leeches iron and other nutrients from one's system. Leafy green vegetables are much better sources of the right kind of calcium than milk, which has the devasting health drawbacks listed above.
As for dead_red_eyes's "damn fine cheeses and butters", I agree that they taste delicious. The problem is that our aesthetic preferences are neither here nor there when it comes to determining whether a particular action is morally justified. The fact of the matter is that it is impossible to produce cheese and butter without being implicated in morally unjustifiable practices. When one adds to this that eating damn fine cheeses and butters are costing us hundreds of billions (indeed, up to ONE TRILLION) of dollars annually in medical expenditures related to heart disease, esophageal and intestinal cancers, and adult onset diabetes, the claims that milk is "natural" and "healthy" start to look pretty ridiculous.