Opinion on Cow's Milk and Milk Products

If you are comparing health, and strength eating dairy products and not eating dairy products, you might consider that many dairy products are not just a combination of different nutrients like calcium and proteins.

Dairy products have hormones from the mother cow in them because she had to be pregnant to begin lactation. There are many hormones designed to help a calf to grow, and any mammal's milk is a primary way to pass on immunity to various things. Yet these immune factors might be to things our human system does not get exposed to or is not susceptible to.

A calf grows to nearly a full-size cow in one year. Cow's milk is designed to do that. If you are wanting to grow, perhaps drinking a very large mammal's milk is a way to do it! However, I suspect that we humans as adults are finished growing upward, and end up growing outward!

Milk products might assist someone in regaining lost muscle mass, but I think is unnecessary to maintain it, particularly after adulthood. Our human bodies stop producing the enzymes needed to process milk proteins in adulthood, making milk increasingly harder to digest, and causing other problems.

Milk has residual medicines such as various antibiotics, anti-fungals, and pesticides from "cow dips" that they are dunked into to kill fleas and parasites. These might not be approved for human consumption, yet can be in the milk in residual form.

Milk has residuals of growth hormones and other things given to the cow to make her produce more milk. Also, the cow was bread to be physically capable of producing massive amounts of milk, consuming many extra calories to do this. It is possible that her lactation hormones are very strong and abundant, and could be present in her milk. There are some theories that breast cancer in humans is linked to these factors that milk producers have been using to increase milk production in cows.

Also, if the cow has an infection or inflammation of some kind, there is all of her body's responses to that in the milk. If the cow is stressed, there can be elevated stress hormones such as cortisol and andrenalin. There are many good sources of calcium and vitamin D that don't have all of these "biological additives." After all, we wean the calves from the cows very early so we can take the cow's milk. The calf then grows just fine without it. (Perhaps missing its mother, though.)