It’s All in Your Head
Tags: Healthy Lifestyle, Milk, Dairy, Plant Based Diets, Vegan

Would you drink breast milk?

It’s a bizarre, slightly concerning question, but one that has perplexed me since my transition to a plant-based diet. Though, I will quickly add, not perplexing for the reasons you might think!

…but let’s come back to that in a little while.

The animal industry is suffering.

It’s estimated that five percent of the world’s population is vegetarian and three percent is now vegan — that’s up one percent, or a huge 78 million people, from 2019[1]. Even those who remain devoted omnivores are rapidly realizing that consuming less animal products is — at the very least — better for health. Milk, egg and meat sales are dwindling and the industry is panicking.

Milk marketing alone accounts for almost $60 million a year in the US alone. After the big “Got Milk?” campaign of the mid-90s, the ad spend has fluctuated up and down, but big bucks are still pouring in, with a consistent drop in consumption despite an equivalent growth in population (-/+ 0.01%) [2].

The dairy industry is continually funding studies in a bid to justify its continuation, yet other studies are equally finding mounting evidence to ditch the dairy.

While a recent study claims that a vegan diet can lead to more broken bones [3], another has shown a direct correlation between teenage dairy consumption and broken bones in later life [4].

Potentially encouraging cancer, osteoporosis, heart disease and much more — dairy is quite obviously not good for us, yet we still believe it’s healthy, it’s a good source of calcium, it makes for strong bones and more.

Likewise, we still stand by the dogma that meat makes us stronger, healthier and is an essential part of a balanced diet. But all of these ideas are either outdated or nothing more than clever marketing by the animal industry — and perspective is the world’s greatest persuader.

Every year, China’s Yulan Dog Festival takes place. Thousands of dogs are gathered up, slaughtered and eaten. It is — without any need to know the facts or see the images — quite horrific. But why?

The dogs are treated horrendously, they don’t want to die, they are cute, they are fluffy, they are ‘man’s best friend’. Western society signs petitions, donates to causes and rallies together to try and overturn this heartbreaking travesty of animal cruelty.

Behind closed doors, the same is happening on a far greater scale

Yet behind closed doors — in our very own countries nonetheless — the same is happening on a far greater scale to chickens, lambs, cows, turkeys and pigs — which, it’s worth noting, are more intelligent and mentally akin to humans than dogs.

Photo by Jo-Anne McArthur on Unsplash

Perspective tells us that killing a dog is bad, but killing a newborn calf is just fine. And now you see where I’m going with my question about breast milk.

The idea of drinking human breast milk is absolutely disgusting. With no reflection on its prodigious producers, you’d be excused for gagging at the mere idea of drinking a woman’s milk. Yet dairy drinkers do this every single day; the only difference is that the breast milk we drink is created for baby cows, not humans at all.

So drinking human breast milk actually makes way more sense when we view it logically.

Even omitting human milk, we’d never drink horse milk. Similarly, if we found the horrendously xenophobic cliche was true and our local Chinese restaurant had, in fact, served us the meat of stray cats, we’d be furious, mortified and probably scarred for life! Yet if we are going to eat meat at all, assuming that it all tastes fairly similar, what difference does it make what creature it came from — other than to our existing perspectives?

We can also flip this argument on its head. Veganism and plant-basing are often considered somewhat effeminate, or at least a bit soft and hippy-ish. ‘Real men’ eat meat, drink milk by the gallon and hunt in the wilderness, right? A plant-based diet can be unhealthy, it’s absolutely true, but so can any diet if not properly balanced. The few cases of anemia, malnourishment and “the friend I knew in high school who went vegan and got sick” are enough to build perspectives to discourage people from making the change and make them even more adamant in their meat and dairy consumption.

It takes a real man to overturn these perspectives in ourselves, and even more to stand against them from others.

Patrik Baboumian — not your average sick vegan weakling!

Veganism and, to a smaller degree, a plant-based diet, is founded on a belief system. We believe that it is wrong to exploit animals. There are many facts to back this up; we now know that animals feel pain, think, some even cry and mourn their family members, just like us. More facts are mounting every day — about health, the environment and the sentience of animals — to support this belief system.

But equally, studies are published to show the benefits of meat and dairy and the potential risks or downfalls of a plant-based lifestyle.

Perspective is our way of navigating this minefield of information, but it can also be the tripwire that lands us squarely on a mine. If we hold onto any perspective too tightly, we are unable to learn new information, greater truths or resounding facts.

Just as we always believed that drinking breast milk from a cow was the most normal, healthy and rational thing to do before discovering new perspectives, so too may we adjust our awareness of what plant-based foods we should be eating, what supplements we should be taking, or even whether or not we should continue.

…and vegans are the strange ones!

It was an incredible shock to me to realize just how skewed my perspectives had always been around meat and dairy and I firmly believe that my decision to live on plants alone was the right one. But I also know that I don’t know; I don’t know the results of long-term studies, I don’t know the expansive impact of my dietary choices, I don’t know the actions or affiliations of the companies who manufacture the food I eat or the greater effects of its ingredients.

I don’t know everything, and I’m always very quick to admit it… …but I’m always willing to change my perspective.

[1] https://www.futurekind.com/blogs/vegan/vegan-statistics

[2] https://are.berkeley.edu/~sberto/2009Got_Milk.pdf

[3] https://www.menshealth.com/uk/health/a34770110/vegans-weaker-than-meat-eaters-study/

[4] https://www.pcrm.org/good-nutrition/nutrition-information/health-concerns-about-dairy

Bryan is a ‘self-taught’ plant-based activist, discovering the benefits of eliminating animal products from his diet over 10 years ago. Since that time, he has advocated not only for a social shift in dietary and environmental awareness but also to reverse the construct that meat consumption is somehow tied to manliness and machismo.

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