Dairy: The Hidden Enemy

...Or not so hidden, depending on how you look at it. For me, dairy was not an obvious antagonist. It took me quite a while to actually figure out that my face wasn't breaking out because of hormones. It wasn't breaking out because of stress (what stress?). It was the damn dairy. Fatty indulgences for me often included pizzas with extra cheese, or iced coffees at Tim Hortons, both of which included a frighteningly amount of dairy. I was looking around the internet one evening, checking out my favorite vegan food blogs (before I was vegan) and noticed a blog about a mom whose child had never had milk before. Once the child started chugging the stuff down constantly, she noticed abnormal behavior from him. He was gassy, he was sniffling constantly with a runny nose, he was just overall not feeling well.

And then someone apparently suggest to her that it was the milk that was doing it. At first I kind of rolled my eyes because I wasn't educated in the ways of milk, or why it could possibly be considered "bad." Why should I? I had been drinking milk for years because everyone kept jamming it down our throats that "milk does a body good" and builds strong bones. Nothing could be further from the truth with this.

If you even stop to think about milk for just a moment, and where it really comes from and what it's for, you might start to think it's strange to be drinking it. A manatee doesn't drink the milk from a fox. A fox does not drink the milk from a human. But a human drinks the milk from a cow, something they naturally produce (like all mammals do) for their babies. The babies nurse on it, and then they stop once they reach a certain age. Yet we still give it to our children long after they are done nursing, and encourage them that it's good for them. Why?

From milksucks.com:

"Will drinking milk make you greasy, grimy, and pimply? Some doctors suspect that the fat, animal protein, sugar, and hormones in milk irritate the skin, causing break-outs.

Dr. Jerome K. Fisher conducted a clinical study of 1,088 teen-age patients over 10 years and reported to the American Dermatological Association that milk was a principal contributor to some patients' acne. Dr. Fisher found that their acne tapered off as their milk consumption did.

Dr. Fisher noted that dairy products often contain large amounts of butterfat and milk sugar, both of which, he believed, aggravate acne. He also suspected that the high volume of hormones produced naturally in the milk of pregnant cows may break down into androgen when consumed, which in turn stimulates the production of sebum, the waxy substance secreted by the sebaceous glands that clogs pores and creates acne when the pores become infected."

Screw you, dairy. Screw you a million times, because my face was doing so well until I ate some non-vegan pizza in an effort to be more easy-going. Never again! If someone wants pizza, I'm going to explicitly insist that it's either soy cheese or just cheeseless all together. It really grates on my nerves when people scoff at me and say I'm being selfish for requesting such things, but how is it selfish to not want to exploit a cow and not torment my face? I think it's pretty selfish for someone to not try to find something that won't give me gas and enough acne that would make a fourteen year old girl look clearer than a sunny day.

I also found out that cheese isn't vegetarian, either. Vegetarians need to be really careful about which brands they are buying, because most of them use a product called rennet. Rennet is from the stomach of a baby calf - raised for veal in those awful crates (that were just banned in Maine, so go Maine!). I also found other interesting tidbits, that vegan buddhist monks were fond to have the same bone density as non-vegans, and that dairy actually encourages osteoperosis.

So, why are we still drinking milk? I honestly don't know why we do, when there are things such as hemp, almond and soy milk readily available in the store. The benefits from drinking soy, hemp and almond milk far outweighs dairy milk.
Hours after cows are born, they're taken away from their mothers and sent away to become veal. The milk that the mother produced for her baby is then produced for us instead - the same stuff that leads to acne, breast cancer, prostate cancer, mucus and countless other ailments. Most people think they seemingly feel fine after consuming dairy, but it might also be because they're just so used to living with mucus and gas that they don't even realize anything could potentially be wrong.

I know this post sounds angry, and it's probably because I am - my face has broken out because of this stuff, and it infuriates me to think that most people would rather guzzle down a milkshake because it brings them five minutes of happiness. Meanwhile, other living things are miserable for much longer than five minutes when there are other things out there we could be eating.

And you know what? Soy ice cream is pretty damn good if I do say so myself.

Oh, and my husband and I drove past some fields that had a large group of cows, grazing in the sunshine. I saw three calves chasing each other, playing. It was the most adorable thing I had seen in quite a while, calves chasing each other in fields of grass. Some were happily suckling on their mothers, but the group of three that were frollicking was an image that's going to stay with me for a long time. And I'll conjure up this image whenever I start to become tempted by a pizza with cheese on it.