Milk Advantages and Disadvantages
You distinctly remember your Dad intoning, “Nature’s perfect food,” when you were about eight years old. While your young mind was silently answering, “M&Ms!” chances are he was talking about milk. And, milk had a long hey-day. That’s for sure, but now whispers about your Dad’s NPF have become louder. Is it, even for the non-lactose intolerant, really the closest thing to perfection? Or it that only true if you are a baby calf? Gildshire wanted to learn and share what we learned with you, because that’s how we roll, with or without a milk mustache.
Facts About Milk
- One cow produces six and 1/4 gallons of milk per day on average. That’s 350,000 12-ounce glasses of milk in her lifetime.
- The average cow eats one hundred pounds of food a day and drinks fifty gallons of water.
- To get the calcium of an 8-ounce glass of milk without drinking the milk, you would need to eat 1/4 cup of broccoli, seven oranges, and six slices of whole wheat bread.
- The average cow produces 6.3 gallons of milk each day. That’s more than 2,300 gallons a year! But, the record amount of milk produced in one year by one cow was 6,896 gallons by a Holstein cow.
- Her name was Robthom Sue Paddy, pictured below.
- U.S. dairy farms produce 21 billion gallons annually.
- The average American consumes 25 gallons a year.
- A dairy farmer begins and ends the day by milking the cows.
- Fresh milk stays good longer when you add a pinch of salt to each quart.
- The milkman started delivering his wares in 1942. It was a fuel-saving World War II conservation measure.
Milk Advantages and Disadvantages: Champ milk producer, Robthom Sue Paddy
Side Effects of Drinking Milk
Ah, all is not well in our relationship with nature’s perfect food. It is known to cause digestive problems. These include gas, bloating, diarrhea, and constipation. These issues and concerns are due to milk’s heavy processing, leading to a digestive imbalance between the bad and the good gut bacteria, which is a form of lactose intolerance. The medical community now believes that we are all a little bit lactose intolerant, which can show up as a problem at any age. For some people, though, the intolerance is so mild as to go on unnoticed.
Can Milk Cause Health Problems?
You mean other than the ones shown above? Dairy products are the Number One source of artery-gunking saturated fat in our diet. Milk products contain cholesterol and saturated fat. Diets high these deadly three increase the risk for heart disease, the U.S’s top killer.
Doesn’t Milk Build Strong Bones?
You would think so. After all, the Dairy Board paid enough money for the TV ads that said so. But, the experts say it is a bit of a mixed bag.
Milk has calcium, a substance that aids in bone retention as we grow older. But, the research shows that dairy has little to no benefit for bone health. According to the British Medical Journal, most studies fail to show any link between dairy intake and fractures. Researchers tracked the diets of adolescent girls involved in sports, concluding that dairy products do not prevent stress fractures. Another study of more than 48,000 men found that the more dairy that men consumed as teens, the MORE bone fractures they experienced as adults.
So, what is Gildshire’s takeaway from all of this? are we saying that a Boston Tea Party milk dumping is in order? No, we are not. If you enjoy a glass without these side effects, we say drink up! But, your Dad didn’t know what we now know. A glass a day at the most supplemented at other meals by water. That’s the compromise for good health that makes sense to us. It will be healthy for you and would have given poor Robthom Sue Paddy a break. Alas, the poor thing was milked to death in 2016. R.I.P.
