Skip the milk

I thought I had posted about the many reasons that you should find alternatives to drinking cows milk, but it seems that I have not yet posted about this. There are many reasons not to drink milk. There are also many alternatives. I'll talk about both.

First, drinking cow's milk is just plain weird. That's right. Weird. It would be less weird if we drank human milk, but we don't and we even find that to be pretty disgusting (outside of feeding babies). I don't know why we don't think it is just as disgusting to drink cows milk. Even so, we really shouldn't drink human milk either. I just wanted to make a point. Cow's milk is for baby cows. Human milk is for human babies. What if I offered you some dog's milk to drink? I bet you'd think that was pretty weird and you'd probably say no. Most animals (including most of us) become lactose intolerant as we grow out of babyhood because we don't need to keep drinking milk after this point. "Human beings are the only species (other than house cats) to consume milk past childhood." [1]

Cows are killed to make that gallon of milk for you. A lot a vegetarians think it is ok to drink milk because "no animal gets hurt". This is just not true. Cows do not miraculously generate milk. They have to be regularly impregnated to produce milk (just like humans). Dairy cows are forced have a calf about 2x a year to produce this milk. These calves are IMMEDIATELY separated from their mothers (and the mother cows get very upset by this). If the calf is female she will be raised to replace aging dairy cows. If male, they will either be raised for beef, killed immediately for dog food, or sent to be shackled in a small crate for veal. Dairy cows, who would normally live to be about 20 years old, are sent to slaughter after about 3-5 years when their production wanes. They are killed for a hamburger. [2]

Dairy cows do not live an idyllic life in a nice green pasture. The cows you generally see in fields are usually beef cows. Dairy cows are forcibly impregnated and kept pregnant to produce over 100 pounds of milk a day[2]. They have been genetically modified to produce this much milk. This is stressful and they have a lot of mastitis infections, which causes all that pus in the milk that I posted about a few weeks ago. Dairy cows have a hard miserable life.

Oh, and they won't explode if you don't milk them. I don't know where this weird notion comes from.

Milk does not do a body good. Milk isn't very good for you. You can get calcium from other sources. Dairy consumption has been linked to numerous diseases including [1]: ovarian cancer, diabetes, prostate cancer [3], obesity, heart disease.

Alternatives - Any of these alternatives can be used in cereal, or used interchangeably in reciples that call for milk or you can just drink them. Experiment and see which one you like and see if you can remove milk from your diet:

Soy Milk
Rice Milk (tastes like skim milk)
Almond Milk
Oat Milk

Soy Creamer for coffee (Silk or Wildwood)

Other sources of calcium: broccoli, dark leafy greens (such as kale), firm tofu, soy milk, fortified cereals, blackstrap molasses, soy beans, white beans, cow beans (I think these are black-eye peas), sweet potatoes, bok choy, oranges, pears, raisins, dates, brazil nuts, hazelnuts, chestnuts, filberts, sesame seeds, tahini (sesame seed paste), sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, peas, amaranth, quinoa, oats and barley... [4]

Sources:
1 - http://veg.ca/content/view/139/110/
2 - http://www.factoryfarming.com/dairy.htm
3 - http://www.milksucks.com/index2.aspn
4 - http://herbalcollective.ca/calcium.html