- Hey, it's Mike here, reporting for Plant Based News
and today we're gonna take birds eye view at dairy.
We're gonna look at the health effects,
the environmental effects, and some basic facts
about what dairy means for the animals.
In addition we're gonna look at the rise
of the plant based milk sector
and also explain how and why
the dairy industry's future may be compromised.
All of this in celebration of World Plant Milk Day,
which will be taking place on August 22nd.
All right, let's go.
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First things first let's talk trends of consumption.
In my country, the U.S.,
people have been drinking a lot less milk.
From the USDA we have seen about a 25% drop in
liquid cows' milk consumption over the last 20 years.
One response by someone in the dairy industry,
Tom Gallagher of Dairy Management Incorporated,
kinda sums it up, quote, "The numbers are devastating.
"At some point, milk could become an irrelevant
"beverage for the average consumer."
Of course he's talking about cows' milk
and not plant milk.
In terms of money U.S. cows' milk sales
plunged by $1.1 billion
between 2017 and 2018, that's just one year,
and one of the reasons could be
that people are drinking more plant milk.
Hey dairy industry, I heard you are having problems,
maybe you should try plant milk.
And according to data from a Nielsen Report
the plant milk industry has now cornered
about 15% of the total milk market,
so it's happening, it's going up.
Lucky for the dairy industry in the U.S. at least,
the U.S. government has really pampered them
and set up cushions for dairy industry failure.
For one rigging the whole system
to artificially lower the cost of milk
so people can buy more than they might otherwise buy.
From this 588 page report by the
Canadian dairy industry, on the U.S. dairy industry,
they found that about 73% of sales revenue
is subsidized in one way or another,
so about three quarters of milk sales are subsidized.
Can you imagine if nearly three quarters
of the cost of plant milk was subsidized?
A container of Oatly would be a dollar
and they'd probably give you soy milk for free.
I know that's not how math works
but that's how the math feels to me, okay?
And with lowering sales in recent years
the dairy industry has asked the
U.S. government to bail them out.
Back in 2016 they were like, daddy government,
give me 150 million dollars for my own failures,
and the government was like, no son,
your allowance is only 20 million dollars, here.
Free markets though.
And the dairy industry is of course
level 10 triggered by the rising plant milk sales
and have launched campaigns to make sure
that these plant milks can't be labeled as milk
because milk is only from cows.
A secret memo leaked what they want the changes to be
and they wanted soy milk to be called soy boy fluid,
and they wanted pea based milk to just be called urine.
Obviously I'm kidding, but they are
masking this campaign by saying that
consumers will be confused thinking that
things like soy milk might just be soy flavored cows milk
and accidentally buy plant milk
when they're trying to buy cows' milk.
But from the data they're clearly wrong,
note is appears about 90% of consumers
are not idiots, they're not confused by this,
and the remaining 10% probably thought
that cows' milk came from plants anyway.
Thankfully certain governments are finally
escaping the grips of the dairy industry and their desires,
which have previously influenced food guides.
No, this time, Canada Food Guide did not say
that milk was a requirement, you did not need dairy,
and they sight the reason for that
as cutting their ties with industry.
And while we're talking about health
recommendations let's move right along
to the health effects of cows' milk.
Firstly the notion, the common notion
that we require cows' milk to be healthy
is absolutely incorrect
and in many cases just industry propaganda.
Logically about 65% of the planet
is lactose intolerant and in certain ethnic groups
this can be as high as 97 to 99% of people.
So not only is it unhealthy for them
to be consuming lactose, but it can also be
kinda insensitive to those populations to say that.
And don't get me wrong, the adaptation
to digest lactose in adulthood
does not mean that you fully immune
to any negative effects of milk,
for example, saturated fat.
In the U.S. and likely other western countries
with similar dietary patterns,
the main source of saturated fat is dairy.
Despite what some low carb dieters would like you to believe
we have a large body of rigorous science,
controlled feeding trials showing
that the more saturated fat you eat,
the higher your cholesterol level goes.
And we also still have a scientific consensus
that LDL or bad cholesterol is causally linked
to atherosclerosis or heart disease.
Though there are a lot of blog posts
and dairy industry funded studies like this one
that undermine the scientific consensus,
it's not looking like dairy's good for your arteries.
But could dairy cause other diseases
for example cancer?
While we're looking at the Adventist studies
we don't see super duper powerful data
but it at least hints that in terms of female cancers,
vegans have about 30% lower reported rates,
while lacto ovo vegetarians actually
had slightly hight reported rates
than people that eat meat.
And it might be because of the hormones
and many female cancers are receptive to hormones.
They might grow faster with a little bit more estrogen
and from this study that gave people cows' milk
we can see a statistically significant
rise in estrone, a type of estrogen,
and also worth mentioning about a 20% lowering
in testosterone, fun stuff.
And one piece of information that supports
this estrogen fed cancer notion
is this study which has a variety
of findings, some are statistically significant
some support dairy, some do not support dairy consumption
but one that was statistically significant
was that people who consume the most dairy
had about 58% higher risk of estrogen
receptive cancer.
In other words it's possible that
if you have an estrogen receptive breast cancer type
that the estrogen in milk could be fueling it
and from this study that did look
at Petrie dishes, they didn't look at
the actual human body, it's still worth
mentioning their findings that when they
dripped cows' milk on breast cancer
in a Petrie dish, it grew 30% faster
but if they dripped almond milk for example,
it actually grew 30% slower.
Mind blown, I'm gonna go pour almond milk
all over my body, you should too.
Interestingly though from this study,
butter actually had the highest level
of estrogen of any dairy product,
probably 'cause it's really just concentrated dairy.
This has inspired a new line of plant based butters
called "I can't believe it's not Estrogen"
now available only in my imagination, sorry.
But moving past estrogen and breast cancer
one type of hormone that everybody should
be concerned about with cancer is IGF-1
or insulin like growth factor one
because it fuels every stage of cancer growth
and the cancer spreading.
This is not just that it might boost IGF-1
because of the cocktail of things that milk is,
but also because it actually contains IGF-1.
From this study quote, "The IFG-1 may be either
"absorbed from milk, or stimulated
"by its ingestion or both."
We're talking about actual growth hormones
naturally occurring in milk,
which is why it's no surprise that
Canadian dairy farmers got busted
for saying their milk didn't have
growth hormones in it.
News flash, it does.
So elevated levels of IGF-1
are something we definitely don't want
and it's worth noting from this study
that vegans have lower levels of IGF-1
but those vegetarians hover right up
there around the meat eaters so,
because both meat and dairy raise IGF-1
it makes sense that the vegans
break away from the pack.
And regardless of the effect of cows' milk
on cancer, it's very clear that certain
plants, similar food groups to what
plant milks are made out of have a
very positive effect on breast cancer risk.
From this study, just a daily serving
of peanut butter, peanuts, nuts, or beans,
which includes other legumes and soy,
we saw a 68%, a whopping 68% reduction
in breast cancer risk for young women
and those results were true regardless
of a family history of breast cancer
which you know is a little slap in the face
to the whole genetics are inevitable thing.
But most importantly all of these plant milks
are made out of things like nuts and beans
and they appear to massively lower
the risk of breast cancer.
Moving onto man and cancers,
there's also several studies leaking
milk consumption and prostate cancer.
This study found that those who drink the most
first at least had a 34% increase.
This meta analysis of 11 case controlled studies
found that if you drink milk you're 68%
more likely to get prostate cancer
than those who don't.
And from this one, daily milk in childhood
appears to be the worst.
Drinking milk everyday in adolescence
led to 320% increased chance
of getting prostate cancer later on.
It's also worth noting that looking at vegans again,
the ones that don't consume dairy,
the only group that doesn't,
they have about 15% lower total risk
of cancer from this meta analysis.
It's also worth noting that dairy proteins
may trigger a variety of autoimmune diseases
because of their similarities to our
own proteins in our body, our immune system
thinks they might be part of our body
and then attacks ourself.
One example is how Type 1 diabetes
could be connected to a dairy protein
particular casein and that diary protein
butyrophilin is implicated in Multiple Sclerosis.
And there are a lot of other health effects
like for example how casein can also
be connected to sudden infant death syndrome
but we're gonna move on
and go to the environmental effects.
I think it's important to look
at a direct comparison of plant milk
to cows' milk in terms of how many resources they use.
The BBC did just that and using data
from this study they came up with these figures.
Looking at greenhouse gas emissions you can see
that cows' milk tops the chart there.
In terms of land use all of the plant milks
are way, way, way lower and finally the water use
as well is much lower in all the plant milks.
And in this comparison, at least, it appears
that oat milk is the most eco friendly.
And a lot of people say, oh well almonds
they totally sucked all of the water
from California and they totally caused their drought.
Well the reality is that California
produced 80% of the worlds almonds
using about 10% of California's agricultural water,
while California produced a small amount of the worlds
meat and dairy using nearly half
of their agricultural water.
So not even comparable.
Now it can be a little bit difficult
to tease out the specific effects
of dairy cows on the environment
because a lot of studies are just
on cattle in general or animal agriculture in general
but looking at the figures about one quarter
of all bovines on earth, 270 million of the billion of them
are dairy cows.
And by now you probably know that
cows emit massive amounts of methane
and Bill Gates put it pretty well when he said that,
"If cows were their own county
"they would be the third largest
"emitter of greenhouse gasses."
But I bet the authors of this report
by the World Watch Institute would argue
that actually the methane effects
are more than people realize
because everyone's looking at 100 year timeframe,
how powerful that greenhouse gas methane is over 100 years
while over 20 years, which we care about,
we care about the near future,
it is much more powerful about 72 times
as powerful as CO2 for example.
And when it comes to dairy cows
they're just pretty productive poopers.
From USTA data it's clear that the amount
of solid waste created by dairy cows in the U.S.
exceeds the amount of waste by all humans.
A dairy farm of 200 cows produces about 7,500
humans worth of nitrates
and that is a nutrient of concern
because it's very effective at fertilizing algae
and leading dead zones.
We have about 500 periodic dead zones
around the world including in Europe
and Africa, and Asia, and so forth.
Now let's take a quick look at how
dairy affects animals and by now most
of you are probably familiar with
the brutality of factory farming and so forth.
And if you wanna know more about that
you wanna watch the details on that check out
Dairy is Scary and we'll maybe link that below.
But I wanna focus on something different
and that is math.
In particular that if you wanna produce dairy
for any reasonable number of people
that it is mathematically impossible
to not act unethically by most peoples ethical standards.
That's because it is a biological fact
that in order to continually produce milk
year after year, you need to impregnate
these cows, they need to be pregnant
to continue producing milk.
Means that even if you're trying
to treat these cows as perfectly
as possible there's no room on that farm
for especially the male calves, and especially considering
that they're consuming your product.
And from this USDA paper, 97% of calves
are removed from their mother within
the first 24 hours of life,
which is very traumatic for them
and it's even considered more ethical do it faster.
And the male calves especially tend
to become veal, even with the best intentions
and a perfect example of that is looking
at the case of Blue Hill at Stone Barns,
a farm to table restaurant,
that set off to make the perfect most ethical
dairy farm for their restaurant.
- Conventional veal's white,
it's blanched white because they have cancer anemic.
I can't eat that kind of veal,
I mean I just like (groans).
So I started to really look,
okay I gotta get with this veal if I really wanna
support the farm and the milk.
And what John and I decided was
to push this for the menu,
to create a revenue stream for the farm,
and to humanely raise a truly delicious extraordinary veal.
He's kept these calves on their mother
throughout the course of the day.
The highest order of humaneness produces
the best flavor.
- And pretty soon with all of the extra
calves, they were serving veal at their restaurant
which is, I would like to say,
not an ethical thing to do,
probably by your standards.
Taking babies away from their moms and cutting them up
and feeding them to people, not nice.
So the dairy industry is the veal industry, but thankfully
and awesomely, you don't have to be a part of that.
You don't have to contribute to that, you can just eat
dairy alternatives, plant based milks,
plant based all of this stuff.
Plant milks are everywhere now days
and they are much healthier,
better for the environment,
and way better for the animals than cows' milk.
And that's why World Plant Milk Day was made
and so feel free to share this
in the spirit of World Plant Milk Day
or if it's after that, share it anyway
just if you want to.
All right, feel free to like and subscribe
to this channel and also my channel,
Mike the Vegan, comment down below
what your thoughts are.
This has been a Plant Based News report,
Mike the Vegan signing off.
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