The biggest scam that you've never even heard of (how the dairy industry lied to the world)
What if I told you that everything you thought you knew about milk was a lie?
You see, we’re told that milk is important for a strong healthy body, and if you stop consuming dairy most people will turn around and say “wait, how are you going to get your calcium”? But everything we’ve been led to believe is a product of marketing, advertising and government collusion.
This is how the dairy industry lied to the world.
The consumption of milk began during the domestication of animals. However, for all of human existence before this point we didn’t consume milk from any other species except our own. However, cow milk consumption didn’t become a recommended staple of our diet until the early to mid 20th century.
During the First World War, governments sent powdered and tinned milk overseas for the allied troops. Due to this, significantly higher quantities of milk needed to be produced, and consequently many farmers began growing their dairy herds, breeding more animals into existence and turning their diversified farms solely into dairy farms.
After the war ended the demand for dairy products dropped dramatically, but the supply of milk remained just as high. However, instead of reducing the production of milk, the industry worked with the government to increase the amount of milk being consumed instead by creating the idea that milk is important and necessary for human health and development. This led to huge advertisement campaigns promoting dairy consumption and free milk for all children in schools.
In the US, the federal government recommended that children should drink four glasses of milk a day and brought in the National School Lunch Programme, which made a glass of milk mandatory with each meal. But despite this, there was still a huge surplus of dairy products, and so the government began buying products from the industry and storing them in vast warehouses. Then in 1977, the government set a new subsidy policy that poured $2 billion into the dairy industry in just four years, with the purpose of buying the huge surplus of dairy products - adjusted to today’s figures, that’s the equivalent of over $6 billion, all whilst the dairy industry was also being subsidised with even more money from the taxpayer. In essence, the unknowing taxpayer was driving down the cost of dairy production allowing for more milk to be produced, which perpetuated the problem of a surplus that was then bought back by the government using even more tax money.
To this day the US government still buys surplus dairy products from dairy farmers. In 1983, the dairy industry also lobbied congress to get them to change the rules so that they could create the dairy checkoff program. A scheme where dairy farmers pay in to a pot of money that, among other things, is then used for promotional campaigns and to work with fast food chains for them to use more cheese and dairy in their products, all of which is over seen and agreed upon by the USDA, the government department that also sets out the nutritional guidelines. How can it be right that the government department which works with and is lobbied by the agricultural industry, is also the same department that sets out the food guidelines?
Does anyone else think that something isn’t quite adding up here?
To make matters worse, in 2018, the US government bailed out the dairy industry with a further $1 billion of taxpayers’ money simply because the industry made less money throughout 2017.
So what is going on?
And we all know the slogans, such as ‘Milk does the body good’ - but on closer inspection does this actually hold true? A meta-analysis looking at studies with hundreds of thousands of participants and published in the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research found no overall association between milk intake and decreased risk of hip fractures in women, even at high intakes and Harvard researchers discovered that drinking milk could even increase the risk of hip fractures in men.
Another review of 47 studies including over one million participants showed that men who ate the most dairy products were up to 65 percent more likely to develop prostate cancer, whilst those on a plant-based diet were 36 percent less likely to develop it.
And a study following just under 53,000 North American women over eight years slightly less showed that those who were drinking two to three cups of cow’s milk a day, which the current USDA guidelines recommend, increased their risk of breast cancer by as much as 70 - 80%. Whilst replacing dairy milk with soy milk was associated with a 32% reduced risk of breast cancer.
We have been fed a lie. A lie that is killing humans, killing animals, killing the planet, and costing us billions in tax money at the same time. There is nothing in dairy that we can’t get from plants, with the calcium found in many plant foods, such as kale and broccoli, even having better absorption than calcium from cows’ milk. And why would we need to drink the milk from another animal who has to have a baby in order to produce milk, and whose baby we need to remove in order to get the milk? And why cows’ milk? Why don’t we need dog milk, or dolphin milk, or rhino milk? Is it not weird that we wean off our mother’s milk then and then wean onto someone else’s mother’s instead? Especially considering that around 65-75% of the world is lactose intolerant anyway, and those who are not intolerant are only so because of a genetic mutation.
Thankfully society is waking up and recognising the absurdity and horror of the dairy industry. In the US, milk consumption has declined by 40% since the 1970s and in the UK, the decline is 50% in the same period, with this decline accelerating in more recent years. This has caused great concern to the dairy industry, and so with a changing market and trends showing an increasing decline in milk consumption, how is the dairy industry responding? Diversifying and swapping to plant-based production? Oh no, instead they’re turning their focus to exporting more dairy to countries in Asia, the area of the world with some of the highest rates of lactose intolerance and who currently have among the lowest rates of breast cancer, prostate cancer, and osteoporosis.
The dairy industry doesn’t care about you or anyone else, they never have. For the past hundred years, the dairy industry has manipulated us, lied to us, and colluded with the government to make more money at our expense, the planet’s expense, and of course the animal’s expense.
But for the dairy industry, their lie has been found out and their days are numbered.
Got Milk? Not for much longer.
