Why we say no to dairy

This will be a quick personal opinion post. I was just on Facebook, and this video on how big government colludes with big dairy came up:

For years, we've been told milk is essential. It's not. Subscribe to our channel! http://goo.gl/0bsAjO Vox.com is a news website that helps you cut through the noise and understand what's really driving the events in the headlines. Check out http://www.vox.com to get up to speed on everything from Kurdistan to the Kim Kardashian app.

I was going to re-post it, but my repost started sounding like a novel, as I got bogged down with other reasons why I feel conventional cow milk does more harm than good. 

As a new mother and student at the Institute of Holistic Nutrition, I can’t help but feel nauseated when I see people offering conventional dairy to their babies. When I see it on the ingredient’s list of almost every formula brand out there. And when I was pregnant, I couldn’t stand it when some (not all!) doctors urged me to drink milk because I needed to make sure my baby was getting enough calcium. 

Well here’s some news for you. According to more recent studies, drinking/eating the 2-4 servings of milk and milk alternatives that is recommended by the Canadian and U.S. food guides can actually LEACH calcium from your bones. A quick synopsis: pasteurized milk acidifies in your body, drawing out one of your body’s greatest acid neutralizers - calcium - from your bones. Once calcium leaves your bones, it exits the body in urine, resulting in a calcium deficit.

You can read more about this here:

• http://saveourbones.com/osteoporosis-milk-myth/
• http://www.pcrm.org/health/health-topics/calcium-and-strong-bones

Another reason why we don’t have milk in our household is because of the whole hormone (and to an extent, the antibiotic) thing. We’ve all heard it a million times before. Though in Canada, adding hormones in milk is forbidden, and cows undergoing antibiotic treatment are pulled away from the milking process until they’re fully recovered and their milk is clear of antibiotics (which is why I said - to an extent when it came to antibiotics), but even raw, organic milk contains hormones intended to grow calves at their typical rate of 70-80 lbs (32-36 kg) per MONTH. So you can imagine what those hormones do to the human body.

If you're still worried about getting enough calcium, check out the infographic to the right for alternate sources: