Outweighing the Benefits of Milk Consumption with Unpopular Opinions

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Indeed, the objectives of boosting the dairy industry and promoting milk consumption may mean well but without further research fully implementing it to the country can take a toll on the health of people and the environment and ecosystem of the Philippines.

The Effects of Dairy Production System on the Environment

Land is one of the most vital resources this world has to offer and yet we choose to strip it of its nutrients and completely ignore its value for diversification. Because of the ever growing pressure to generate a constant supply of food to an ever increasing population of people and a major part of that food source is livestock and dairy, we have to.

Furthermore this level of demand has its consequences on the way that we use our land; almost half of the global land area is occupied by the livestock sector (Thornton, Herrero, & Ericksen, 2011). The “necessity” of meat in a healthy diet drives us to produce more of it, but to produce more we need more land and people find that in the forest. So we chop down the trees and clear it for pasture.

Land use and deforestation is only the tip of a gigantic iceberg. In order for us to uncover more we must tackle production and uses of meat and dairy products. It is a general rule that before consuming meat it must be cooked and in conventional cooking one cannot go without the use of oils.

Meat and oil, in fact, complimentary goods that to consume meat we need cooking oil as well. Palm oil comes from extensive monocultures. Thousands and thousands of hundred year old trees being cut-down, millions over millions of animals ending up homeless and left to die, and unknowingly the death of the water sheds which is the source of life over the region but that is not just the water that is being stripped off of its use by our demand for meat and milk. In Indonesia, extensive palm tree planting lead to clearing of rainforests and mass burning of already harvested trees to make way for newer plants to use (“INDONESIA: Palm Oil Expansion Unaffected by Forest Moratorium”,2013)

The worst and probably the controversial factor on environmental degradation is air pollution. The sheer volume of greenhouse gases that we emit everyday causes our ocean’s to warm, typhoons to alarmingly increase in power, our global temperature to rise, causing massive melting of our polar icecaps, and if the polar icecaps melt together with the rising ocean temperature we expect our sea levels to rise significantly. Leaving civilizations near shore to slowly sink and become remnants of the past. The same way the movie “Water World” portrays it. And all of these, because of the event scientists call global warming.

Global warming is an event due to the increase in concentration of greenhouse gas like carbon dioxide and methane in our atmosphere. These molecules receive, absorb, and trap heat from the sun. This greenhouse gases as “claimed” come from the industry, from burning too much fossil fuels but what they didn’t tell you is that animal agriculture contributes just as much. (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations , 2006). The threat is not the cows and their emission; rather those are “symptoms” of the real problem. This is much the same way we treat our ailments. We see fever not as a symptom but already as a disease that is why we have these anti-fever drugs called paracetamol that we take to get on with the day but the fever is only an indicator of your body saying that something is wrong and most of the time this involves fatigue and stress. In essence, solely removing the symptom would not cure our problem. The real problem here is we treat animal agriculture just as a food source and not letting those animals fully express their function in the ecosystem.

Cattles, as a herd, graze in a large area to keep away from predatory animals and to look for patches of grass to eat and water to drink. Their diet is heavily based on grass and if we look at the biology of grass they have a growth cycle that if they are not clipped or fed on they will automatically go into senescence but the herbivores function in correlation with the grass is to do just that, to clip the grass for the grass to sustain itself. But we humans intervene on those behaviors; we put the cows in an intensive diet to “beef” them up and make them grow faster, adding more stress on the grass, in doing so not letting the grass rest impedes exponential production making the system totally unproductive. (TEDx Talks, 2016).

Health Concerns

One pressing issue involves our health. Not many are aware that in order for cows to produce more milk than they normally do, a growth hormone called recombinant bovine growth hormone/somatotropin, rBGH or rBST respectively, is injected to cows. This does not have a direct problem with us humans but within the cow it encourages the growth of insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) which is innately present in both humans and cows. This growth factor regulates cell growth. Although several studies contended that IGF-1 would be eradicated upon digestion, the study of Kimura (Hansen, Halloran, Groth, & Lefferts, 1997)have found that it does survive digestion as it binds with the protein found in milk called casein. High, concentrated amounts of IGF-1 in the human body increases the risk of cancer such as breast cancer especially in premenopausal women (Hankinson, et al., 1998)

Calcium is a mineral needed by our body to help strengthen our bones and consequently strong bones helps from the prevention of osteoporosis by increasing bone density upon old age. Milk is advertised as rich in calcium which is true but it lacks a vitamin that is essential for the body to absorb calcium that it didn’t create; vitamin D. Naturally, cow’s milk lacks this vitamin or only contains trace amounts so it is added instead. Additionally, the link of osteoporosis prevention with milk is not connected at all. In fact, the results of the study of Feskanich, et al. (1997) concluded that it was not milk that was associated with preventing osteoporosis but it was vitamin D that lowered the risk of it. It means that you do not have to consume milk to be protected from osteoporosis when you age; you just need to consume vitamin D-rich foods and bask in the sunlight.

The Effects of Milk Production in the Country

With the aim of the Department of Agriculture to further industrialize the dairy industry, feeds must be obtained. The Philippines has a total agricultural land area of about 9.671 million hectares. With the growing population, the crops produced in that area is not enough to feed the population because