What's wrong with using dairy products?

[Veggie4Life139]

What do you all think about milk? I know that you are all vegans, but do you really think milk is bad for you? Or do you think it's good for you but it's against your beliefs? (I'm not sure if that's true for any of you, I just want your opinion.)

Personally, I think milk is a gross pus that wasn't made for humans to drink...but I'm not a vegan yet. Do you feel the same way?

[Artichoke47]

Yes, I agree that cow's milk is not fit for human consumption -- or not deemed for human consumption, at least. The cow's milk is supposed to be drank by its calf, not stupid, selfish humans.

Some people claim that cow's milk is a good source of calcium. Unfortunately, these people fail to realize that you also need a certain amount of magnesium to absorb the calcium, which, to my understanding, is not provided by cow's milk.

What do I think of soy milk, rice milk, and oat milk? THEY ARE AWESOME AND DEFINITELY FIT FOR HUMANS!!!

[mattd]

what is taught in schools about milk is complete and utter BS, at least what they teach here in the US. as already stated, cows milk was designed for calves, not humans. the majority of adults have some degree lactose intolerance. and then theres the saturated fat and cholesterol thats in milk (and other dairy products).

as far as calcium goes, milk is not the best source. calorie for calorie, most green veggies have more calcium in them than milk. milk is also an acid forming "beverage". when you take in too much acid, your body takes calcium out of your bones to cancel it out (calcium is alkaline). so the best sources of calcium, those sources that your body can most readily use, are alkaline food. all animal foods are acid forming.

[Pooh]

>calorie for calorie, most green veggies have more calcium in them than milk.


Hi, can someone please explain what measuring a nutrient pr. calorie amount (as opposed to just measure the amount om mg) is all about? Sometimes a nutrient is measured in it's weight only, but I see the calorie-for-calorie thing often. I just don't know what it means.

[harpy]

I stopped drinking it primarily because of animal welfare considerations. However, from what I've read I think it's probably a good decision from the health point of view too.

The main selling point of milk seems to be calcium, but as someone else has said there are arguments against dairy produce as a calcium source, and there are plenty of alternative sources. It's good to make sure you get enough of those alternatives though, particularly if you're still growing:

http://www.vegansociety.com/html/food/nutrition/calcium.php

Also it's a good idea to avoid eating too much salt, because I think that can interfere with calcium absorption/retention.

[harpy]

Hi, can someone please explain what measuring a nutrient pr. calorie amount (as opposed to just measure the amount om mg) is all about?


I think they're just saying that, comparing foods A and B, you would have to eat a quantity of A equivalent to x calories to get a given amount of a nutrient such as calcium, and a quantity of B equivalent to y calories to get the same amount. If you know the amount of calcium per hundred grams of the food, and also the number of calories per hundred grams, you can easily work out the amount of calcium per calorie (but it's too early in the day for algebra ;) ).

So mattd was pointing out that if you chose to obtain your daily requirement of calcium from milk, you would have to consume more calories than you would if you got it from green leafy vegetables. (I think it's actually more complicated than that because we don't absorb nutrients at the same rate from all foods.)

[Roxy]

Before becoming vegan I didn't drink a lot of milk anyway. I think I might've been lactose intollerant because eating and drinking dairy products often gave me an upset stomach and gas.

Anyway, I didn't like the taste of full-cream milk - it was too creamy. I preferred skim milk.

Now I drink soy milk in my tea and coffee and the occaisional time I eat cereal, I have it on that too. I have found that So Good Soy "Icecream" (especially the vanilla flavour) tastes way better than icecream and doesn't leave you feeling like you want to throw up.

I understand that there is potentially a lot of unwanted additives in cows milk, including antibiotics that are fed to cows. Not only that, the stuff is full of fat and cholesterol.

Roxy

[lolamako]

Milk Sucks ... Dump Dairy unhappy cows dairy-free vegan vegetarian lactose intolerance milksuckers (http://milksucks.com/)

[cedarblue]

Personally, I think milk is a gross pus that wasn't made for humans to drink...but I'm not a vegan yet. Do you feel the same way?


yes.

[Aristarchus]

What do you all think about milk? I think milk is the greatest thing ever created... for calves.




I know that you are all vegans, but do you really think milk is bad for you? Or do you think it's good for you but it's against your beliefs? (I'm not sure if that's true for any of you, I just want your opinion.)

I think cow and goat milk for people is bad for the cows and goats. It has nothing to do with what I think about me. How can a creature be forced to live in a place that I have to hold my nose just to drive quickly by?

[amritab@yahoo.com]

I was raised on 4 cups (yes 4 cups) of goat milk a day plus 1 cup yogurt, in India. The minute I left home, I gave up milk, I was plain tired. My father had kidney stones due to over consumption of dairy, though our diet , growing up, was largely based on fish(chicken/goat meat was a once a week thing). Milk makes me sick now. I took one sip of a milk shake from DH's milk shake and was bloated and sick. I know yogurt and cheese agree with me but there are countries like China and Japan where dairy consumption is very low. Between choosing to eat dairy and eat meat, (theoretically), I would eat meat. Prolonging the life of cows isnt something I would choose to do. I get my 1000mg calcium from some fortified drink(soy/oj), dark leafy veg. I am not vegan/vegetarian any more(I am not opposed to eating seafood) and I was thinking I would give tinned sardines a try maybe. I actually prefer to use fish as an escape route if there is nothing else in the restaurant, or if I need a break (which is rare), but I do love to live free of dairy and the other meats (bird and upward). Its not tough to get DV of calcium. You should look into DV of calcium in other countries being much less than US, factors like excess protein(meat), excess sodium(processed foods),low activity levels will increase your calcium reqs. I still think its safe to get the required value of calcium, just not through dairy.

[animalsvoice]

I believe in this: http://www.4.waisays.com/ And it's not a vegetarian who wrote it..

[cedarblue]

excellent article! also i think excessive protein consumption depletes calcium from the bones.

[Buzzola]

Milk grosses me out and goes against my beliefs. It's also damn unhealthy. I gave up dairy the moment I learnt about the cruelty involved so the health benifits are just an added bonus.

[animalsvoice]

excellent article! also i think excessive protein consumption depletes calcium from the bones.

Yeah. Some people think it(that article)'s bullshit but to me it sounds probable. And one can just look at the statitics.....
Me and my mom quit taking calcium supplements when we found that article.. But it's so difficult to know what to believe.

Yes protein decreases the calcium intake.

[animalsvoice]

Milk grosses me out and goes against my beliefs. It's also damn unhealthy. I gave up dairy the moment I learnt about the cruelty involved so the health benifits are just an added bonus.

Same here!!

[Kiva Dancer]

I've heard that US's RDA levels for calcium were set where they are because of pressure from the dairy industry and that 1,000 mg is far too much to be consuming.

There's a couple of studies that I've read saying that says 350-500mg is closer to what we should be reaching for.

But um, no. I don't like milk at all. It's an inflammatory and it's an irritant. If there were no cruelty issues existing at all I would still not drink milk. I don't believe it's healthy for a person and as a result, I won't touch it.

[eve]

Even if there were NO cruelty involved anywhere, I would still not drink milk. I don't believe it's healthy for a person and I won't drink it.
And even if it WERE healthy, I wouldn't drink it because it doesn't belong to me but to the calf; and there is the ghastly cruelty to the mother cow to consider.

[Kiva Dancer]

True. No matter how you add it up, drinking milk is a bad thing all around.

[phillip888]

Here are some interesting things to consider with cow dairy:

Casein is digestible by ruminants. That means mammals that have a multiple chambered digestive system that evolved to digest coarse vegetation, grains, and grasses. The human digestive system is not capable of digesting casein properly. Even if you haven't eaten dairy for years (and still have a low fiber diet), chances are there is still casein in your colon. Casein can be mixed with lye to glue, weatherproof, and paint wood and stone.

Lactose is difficult to digest or completely indigestible for all humans over the age of four. People of northern european descent are the ones most likely to be able to digest lactose in small amounts, most others simply can not.

Lactose is a simple sugar. It has no unique properties that are beneficial to humans over the age of four.

Lactose is a highly allergenic substance. Most people over the age of four that consume it suffer IBs and gas. Many suffer asthma and skin disorders.

Milk is acidic. It has a pH of 6.4 and sometimes lower. The human body has a pH of 7.4. This means that every time you consume dairy, you lose calcium to restore your blood pH to 7.4.

Milk begins to denature as soon as it hits ultraviolet light. It Also decays rapidly, as soon as it leaves the cow. Milk is an ideal breeding ground for bacteria, including pathogenic bacteria. Pasteurized milk still contains pathogens and carcinogens.

When you consume dairy, you're consuming the pesticides the cow consumed. Not in the same volume you would from eating the cows food, but in even higher concentrations.


Of course there are plenty of ethical issues (besides the unethical act of feeding dairy to humans), but I'm pretty sure people know what those are, veal is dairy calfs, cows did not evolve to be pregnant and lactating so they have very short lives (4-6 years instead of 24+). Dairy cows are often in poor health from confinement, udder enlargement, and poor diet. Many dairy calves are sent directly to slaughter or die on site.

[Korn]

This (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=1797491&dopt=Abstract) study of incidence rates of diabetes in persons between 0 and 14 years of age and cows' milk consumption in various countries support that cows' milk may contain a triggering factor for the development of diabetes ('Insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus'). After this was discovered, mothers in Norway (where I come from), have been recommended to avoid cows' milk if a substitute for mothers' milk is needed.

[Hasha]

I suffered from constipation for, well, I don't know how long, but for quite a bit of time. My well-meaning parents advised me to drink more milk, saying it would help. And I listened, kept drinking milk, in larger and larger quantities, convinced that it was somehow helping, and the reason that I wasn't seeing any results must've been the fact that I was eating too many apples, or that I was drinking too much tea (which I tried to balance by adding milk to it), or that I just had really bad genes. Then at some point, I felt that I'd really had enough and really needed to do something about this problem, and so I did a bit of web research. One of the things that came up was this study that showed that when cow's milk is replaced by soy milk in the diets of children with severe constipation, the symptoms disappear. Apparently, these children's constipation was a result of a severe milk allergy. Now, I'm not a child and my symptoms weren't quite as bad as those described, but I still thought I'd give it a try. I quit milk. And guess what? I've been doing great ever since. It's just so amazing not to feel as though I'm about to explode all the time! Now, to be fair to milk, I did make certain other changes in my diet at about the same time (quit coffee, which was largely a result of my quitting milk since I only ever liked coffee with milk; started drinking less tea; and started taking some vitamins). So I suppose it's possible that it's really those other things that made the difference. I'm inclined to think not. I'd experimented with these other changes earlier and it never made any major difference. So I think it's the milk. I never want to have another cup in my life.

On the ethical side, yeah, I'd been feeling rather uneasy about milk for a while. Because I'm really a lot more bothered by the raising of animals for meat/milk/eggs than by the simple killing of animals. Farming bothers me a lot more than hunting. Which isn't to say that I'm advocating hunting, far from it, but of the two evils, I think farming is worse, or crueler anyway. So I started to find it increasingly difficult to explain to myself why I was drinking milk but not eating meat. I tried to make myself feel better by buying organic milk, thinking that the cows on organic farms were better off than their relatives on the conventional farms. Which is probably true, but I knew that didn't make it okay. I guess the reason that I didn't give it up earlier was that I liked it too much, and more importantly, that I needed it (or so I thought) to stay healthy. It just took so long before it occurred to me that milk was actually making me sick. So when I decided to quit eating dairy, it was primarily for health reasons. I then I decided to stop eating any animal products whatsoever because, well, the hypocrisy of continuing their use became a little too apparent to ignore, plus, if I was already quitting milk, then giving the rest of it up just didn't seem like a big a deal.

Korn said at some point that veganism is frequently portrayed as a disease. I guess I used to think of it in that sort of way. I kind of wanted to be vegan because I found the treatment of farm animals to be devoid of any humanity, but I thought I couldn't stay healthy without any foods of animal origin. I thought that, if I were to go vegan, it would be my sacrifice to the animals. Well, now I think that I'm doing the best thing for myself by doing what's best for the animals, and that I'm doing what's best for the animals by doing what's best for me. What more could you ask?

[Artichoke47]

The title to this thread should be "cow milk" considering all of the plant-based varieties available, just so we know what we're talking about. ;)

Cow milk is for calves. It is beyond my comprehension where someone got the idea to take from and abuse and then murder animals.

[Korn]

The title to this thread should be "cow milk" considering all of the plant-based varieties available, just so we know what we're talking about. ;)

Done!

[eve]

Milk grosses me out and goes against my beliefs. It's also damn unhealthy. I gave up dairy the moment I learnt about the cruelty involved so the health benefits are just an added bonus.

I'm with Buzzola. :)