Chapter#5: Cow's Milk Consumption and Health

There is this documentary called Forks Over Knives (2011) by Lee Fulkerson, and this documentary was basically based on how people should start eating an all-plant based diet because of the tremendous health benefits. One of the key points in the movie, was to remove milk from peoples diet because studies conducted on rats showed that intake of regular cow’s milk was linked to a higher risk of getting cancer. It also showed how in the Philippines, when milk was starting to be produced, the number of children getting liver cancer or other disease associated with the liver rose to a noticeable amount. The link they believe to cause it was milk since that was the only aspect that changed. Other studies in China also showed the link to milk and a higher risk of getting cancer. The reason why milk was becoming bad to consume was because of the hormones given to the cows. The cows are injected with hormones so they won’t get sick because the diet they are given is bad for them and they were deprived of nutrients for lactating year round. What people were drinking wasn't milk but chemicals.

 There are a lot more interesting claims and evidence in the documentary to back up the claim made, but the moment I read about milk in Chapter 5 and the benefits of growth, hormones on milk, and how some milk was like to diseases, this was the first thing to popup in my head. 

I found this information so profound because in the chapter, Philippines and China was a couple of the places mentioned where milk was linked to better growth, yet in the video they were one of the places with increasing health problems. The sources used in the chapter are older than when the documentary was made, so it is possible that more information is now available on milk. The thing is people are still drinking milk every day if it wasn't for the documentary I saw I wouldn't have known what is really going in the sense of milk and its affects. The information is so different in these to resources, what are people supposed to believe? Why don’t more people know about this? Can all the milk we drink now come back to hurt us?