Why I Don’t Drink Milk

I used to drink milk by the carton.  I loved it as a kid, and I would put it away so quickly during college that my mother would stock up in advance any time I came home to visit.

A few years ago, things changed.  I got slammed at work and stopped exercising regularly.  I gained weight, so I cut sugar from my diet.  I even cut milk, which has more sugar than you may expect.

Today, sugar is back (at least, in its natural form: I eat blueberries, which are loaded with sugar naturally, but shun ice cream, except on special occasions).

But milk is not back.

The reason?  The way conventional milk is produced today.  Natively, milk may be very good for you; the Maasai in eastern Africa still live primarily off of their cows’ milk and blood, and they do not have the problems with obesity, diabetes and cancer that we have in the developed world.  (Though they do have other problems that derive from their “traditional” lifestyle.)

But here, we don’t raise dairy cows like the Masai do.  Our milk cows no longer graze on grass, as they have for millenia.  Instead, they eat corn.

Why?  Because it’s cheap.  Because, due to federal agricultural policies, milk producers can buy corn from farmers for less than it costs to grow, and can feed corn to cattle that are cooped up in enormous, grassless feedlots, where they remain cramped together, wallow in their own excrement and eat corn out of troughs.

Doesn’t sound healthy?  It probably isn’t.  Cattle, treated this way, are prone to disease.  Their stomachs were not designed to handle corn, and as a result bacteria thrive in their digestive systems.  Their udders get infections.

Dairies use antibiotics to treat these ailments, but the antibiotics find their way into the milk we drink.  They also use hormones to make the cattle produce more milk, and there is evidence that these hormones also alter the milk we drink.

But Doug, Don't You Eat Stonyfield? Yes, But Stonyfield Cattle Are Not Raised Like the Cattle I Talk About Below.

I’d just rather drink something else.  Fortunately, there is soy milk, which in recent years has become very widely available and very drinkable.  Less sugar, lots of protein, no worries about antibiotics and hormones.