“All the times that I cried, keeping all the things I knew inside,
It’s hard, but it’s harder to ignore it”. (Cat Stevens in Father and Son)
Often I hear people complain about the cost of living; at first glance it’s an easy to agree to argument. Let’s take the price of a litre of milk; here in Australia you can get a 1l carton for about $2.50. As a consumer on a tight budget you might think that’s a big price to pay. However, what is the real price of milk and other dairy foods and who actually pays the price?
I can tell you…. The real price of milk is death and is paid by calves barely a week old.
Shocked?
So you should be.
In Australia alone the reality of milk production is not just in the suffering of the dairy cows, but also the suffering of their unwanted (by the dairy industry) calves.
“The treatment of bobby calves has been a long-held secret of the dairy industry. For the sake of milk products, the Australian dairy industry discards some 700,000 unwanted week-old calves as ‘waste products’ every year”. (Animals Australia website)
TAKE ACTION: www.animalsaustralia.org/take_action/bobby-calf-cruelty
Maybe watching this video will break your heart, but it might just prompt you to speak up and take action. Because the good news is, that you do not have to consume milk or other dairy products. Just by stopping to buy these products, you can decrease the demand for them and save some precious lives.
More videos from Animals Australia
“Oh, but what about calcium, won’t my bones go brittle and break and I end up suffering from osteoporosis”?
“No you won’t, that is just a myth the food industry is perpetuating with their scare tactics”.
Even so dairy consumption has gone up, osteoporosis has not disappeared. You don’t need dairy products to grow healthy bones. Truth be told, you will do your gastrointestinal system and therefore your health a great favour by not eating them. Come on; stop thinking with your taste buds!
The protein in cow milk is not one that agrees happily with the human digestive system! If anything, keeping up a high dairy intake may even seep the calcium out of your bones.
Please read an easy to understand explanation here:
http://www.animalsaustralia.org/features/dairy-calcium-myth.php
So where can I get my calcium from? Here are some ideas
|
Food |
Calcium |
|
| Collard greens | 1 cup, boiled | 357 mg |
| Fortified soymilk | 1 cup | 368 mg |
| Black-eyed peas | 1 cup, boiled | 211 mg |
| Firm tofu (made with calcium sulfate) | 1/2 cup | 204 mg |
| Calcium-fortified orange juice | 177ml – 6oz | 200 mg |
| Blackstrap molasses | 1 Tbsp | 172 mg |
| Baked beans | 1 cup, canned | 154 mg |
| Kale | 1 cup, cooked | 94 mg |
| Chinese cabbage | 1 cup, raw | 74 mg |
| Oranges | 1 cup | 72 mg |
| Almonds | 28.35g – 1 oz | 70 mg |
1 cup = 250ml
How much calcium do I need?
Adults to 50 y o – 1000mg
Adults over 50 – 1200mg
Pregnant/breastfeeding – 1000mg
Children
|
Birth to 6 months |
200 mg |
|
Infants 7–12 months |
260 mg |
|
Children 1–3 years |
700 mg |
|
Children 4–8 years |
1,000 mg |
|
Children 9–13 years |
1,300 mg |
|
Teens 14–18 years |
1,300 mg |
(Above guidelines have been adapted from my lecture notes and textbooks)
There are many good websites which give recipes for dairy free meals, here is one of them
http://dairyfreecooking.about.com/od/dairyfreebasics/tp/MilkSubstitutes.htm
Not eating dairy foods is a choice you can make for your health; it is also a choice you can make for a kinder world. In a kind and compassionate world, mental health will also improve. A kind, compassionate attitude brought to life is not restricted to certain things or problems. Real compassion makes itself available no matter what the problem might be.
Related articles
- Cow’s Milk Is For Cows, Not You! (purposegiven.wordpress.com)
Due to other animal exploitations I have researched, I am not surprised but seriously disgusted by this. I rarely even drink milk anymore. As you say you can get the necessary supplements in other foods. But the cost to animals is too high.
Thank you for making others aware.
Yisraela
Dear Yisraela, thank you for taking the time to comment to support the animals, while you are having a tough time yourself!
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Not surprised by the cruelty but saddened and sickened. I hate that humans treat animals like objects. They get treated like disposable products instead of living, breathing, sentient beings. It makes me very ashamed of my species. Thankfully there are people like you and others (including myself) who do our best to avoid animal flesh and derived things like milk.
I hear you, I am also often ashamed of belonging to the human race, but as you say, we are not alone in caring. More people are comming on board, since Animals Australia has started campaining.
Aw, that’s good to hear there’s some positive stuff happening then!