Gary Larson, my favorite! The Far Side.

Ah. A sensible, pragmatic comment.

You are missing several facts. One is that milk contains LDL lipids, including Transfat. No
plants have LDL fats with the exception of Coconuts, so they are terrible for your cardio vascular system. Just a start. And, dairy in the modern world is full of puss, blood, antibiotics and all kinds of crap.

@Maestro - it's only terrible for your cardiovascular system if you're overdrinking milk, and I'm talking like a gallon a day. A glass of milk at dinner or with whey protein or with a bowl of cereal is not going to destroy your cardiovascular system.

Pus and blood in milk are simply scaremongering words as blood is filtered out during the preparation process. If there is too much blood in samples, the batch is thrown out. If a farmer tries to get contaminated milk into circulation, they would be fined heavily by the FDA.

Same deal with pus: if there is an increase in somatic cells (which is really just an increase in white blood cells but pus is the word of choice
used for scaremongering again) in tested batches, farmers are required to throw it out or get heavily fined by the FDA.

Milk in large quantities is not good for you. But neither is alcohol (or water for that matter).

No one needs to be fooled into thinking that drinking milk is a runaway train to bad health unless you're drinking a ridiculous amount of it (like a gallon of it) every day.

But I agree with the title of the article: you don't "need" milk

@Maestro sorry for the long post. Here's a concise way of putting it: you don't need milk. You also don't need a small slice of chocolate cake or a glass of alcohol. But consuming them all sparingly or in small quantities is not going to send you to an early grave.

Smoking and lack of exercise will do it first.

@LetzGetReal - I agree. Everybody's body is different so some foods are going to be healthier for them than others. We shouldn't harshly judge people on their food fare either.

@LetzGetReal Goats cheese is also problematic, goats tend to bear equal amounts of male and female kid goats, and the young males are sold at knockdown prices and sent in huge inhumanly maintained trucks to places like Spain where the leather is used... very sad stories.

Dairy doesn't make you fat...overeating it does.

You can be a vegan, clean eater and still get fat if you overeat clean foods

@Michael_D

"We’ve known that breastfed infants may be protected against obesity later in life for more than 30 years, but why? It may be the formula. Giving infants formula based on cow’s milk presents an unusual situation. Cow’s milk is designed to put nearly two pounds a day onto a growing calf, 40 times the growth rate of human infants (see Formula for Childhood Obesity)."

"The head of the Obesity Prevention Center at Boston Children’s Hospital and the chair of Harvard’s nutrition department wrote an editorial recently to the AMA’s Pediatrics journal questioning the role of cow’s milk in human nutrition. They stated the obvious: humans have no requirement for other animal’s milk; in fact, dairy may play a role in certain cancers due to the high levels of reproductive hormones in the U.S. milk supply."

[nutritionfacts.org]

@SkotlandSkye

Gaining weight and becoming obese has far more to do with energy balance (eating more calories than your body burns through activity) than whether you had breast milk or animal milk as an infant.

And I agree that humans don't need animal milk, but it's not the scary cancer causer fear-mongerors would have you believe if you drink it sparingly or even daily in small quantities.

And this study even shows that people that eat more dairy than others are at a lesser risk for cancer: [ncbi.nlm.nih.gov]

Bottom line, don't drink a gallon of milk a day and you'll be fine

@SkotlandSkye People don't drink as muck milk as a calf does. Overeating and personal metabolism makes people overweight. I agree that cow's milk is not required. I've been drinking it of late but hadn't done so for many years. I would like to find a good substitute to have with my Cheerios. I'm not a vegan but do not like the treatment of animals in the food industry.