Dairy is a leading contributor to heart disease—the NUMBER ONE KILLER of Americans. Milk and other dairy products are the top source of artery-clogging saturated and trans fats in the standard American diet. These fats constrict blood vessels and slow blood flow to working muscles, causing hypertension and wreaking havoc on the cardiovascular system. Cheese is especially dangerous since it is typically over 50% percent fat!

Multiple studies have linked dairy to increased risk of terminal cancer.

More Dairy = More Ovarian Cancer Deaths
Research published in 2021 looked at over 3 million people (!) across 34 studies and found that women who consumed more dairy increased their risk of dying from ovarian cancer by 32%.

More Dairy = More Prostate Cancer Deaths
Harvard researchers found that men consuming the recommended 3 daily servings of dairy had a 141% higher risk of dying from prostate cancer.

Studying over 200,000 people, Harvard researchers found that replacing the “recommended” three daily servings of dairy with whole grains, nuts, or beans (like oat, almond, and soy milk) cuts the risk of dying early by over one-third.

Dairy products are among the most harmful inflammatory foods–especially for the 65 percent of people globally who are lactose intolerant. Inflammation is the one underlying comorbidity linked to most chronic disease.

Industrial dairy farming contributes to ecocide—the widespread anthropogenic climate change that is causing a global environmental crisis.

The waste from a dairy farm of 2,500 cows is equivalent to the waste from a city of 411,000 people, or 110 million pounds of waste a year. What’s more, animal agriculture makes us 1/4 of the global water footprint, 19% of which comes from dairy cows.

According to Science.org, water use is much higher for cow’s milk: 628 liters of water for every liter of dairy produced, compared to just 28 liters of water used for 1 liter of soy milk.

Communities are suffering from extreme air pollution and contaminated drinking water due to harmful greenhouse gasses and runoff from nearby dairy farms. Not to mention the loss of land and soil degradation from careless handling of fertilizers. A study by Oxford University found that producing a glass of dairy milk every day for a year requires 7,000 square feet of land – ten times more than oat milk.

For decades, BIG DAIRY has manipulated research and nutritional science to construct billion-dollar marketing campaigns through its marketing arm, MilkPEP. They are responsible for some of the most popular and misleading advertising campaigns in history.

The Dairy Checkoff Program is an industry-funded federal program that has a profound impact on what Americans choose to consume. Prompted by the dairy industry, Congress created the National Dairy Promotion and Research Board in 1983 whose sole purpose was to promote dairy products by way of marketing and “nutritional education.” To fund this effort, dairy farmers agreed to pay a small fee based on the weight of the milk they sold.

This program is responsible for targeting low-income communities with some of America’s most craveable (and least healthy) food products including Pizza Hut’s Stuffed Crust Pizza and Taco Bell’s Quesalupa and Quesarito. The Board has worked with dozens of companies to promote dairy-heavy menu items, resulting in 40 percent more cheese on Domino’s pizzas, more milky drinks at Starbucks, and larger cheese slices on Egg McMuffins.

Of course, the dairy industry doesn’t kill “productive” dairy cows. That would be very unprofitable for them. However, after the cows have spent years being forcibly impregnated, having their babies repeatedly stolen, and enduring constant physical and psychological abuse, ALL dairy cows are killed and “processed” into beef products–years before their natural life expectancy.

The dairy industry is inextricably linked to the meat industry. Male calves are considered by-products of dairy farming and are sacrificed so that milk can be harvested from their mothers and sold. At these facilities, female calves will likely become dairy cows themselves. But male calves are confined and sold for veal, or simply killed. To BIG DAIRY, their lives are worth nothing and their suffering is just part of the business.

In many cases, when dairy cows are considered “spent,” producing less milk as a result of repeated pregnancies and births–or due to a prolapsed uterus–they are sold for cheap cuts of beef, many ending up as fast-food hamburgers.

The majority of the world’s population is unable to digest the lactose in dairy, with 70-95 percent of Blacks, Asians, Native Americans, Latinx folk, and Ashkenazi Jews suffering from lactose intolerance. Lactose Intolerance is a debilitating condition that causes gas, bloating, nausea, cramping, diarrhea, stomach pain, and in severe cases, vomiting. And yet BIG DAIRY continues to market milk and other dairy products to people of color.

Since its inception in 1946, the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) has encouraged children of color to take a carton of milk with their lunch. This is an unjust form of structural racism called dietary racism. And we think it’s time BIG DAIRY and their collaborators (like the USDA) stopped discriminating against people of color.

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Is Dairy the New Tobacco?

At the top of this page, we suggested that BIG DAIRY had taken a page out of BIG TOBACCO’s playbook–hiding behind slick marketing and lies.

Truth is, like tobacco, dairy is a stone cold killer.

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Remember the female athletes sponsored by the Dairy Industry, flexing and smiling on a billboard in the heart of Times Square? The copy on the billboard beside them read “Join Team Milk.” On the surface, it certainly seemed like a noble effort—promoting women in sport and apparently calling for an end to the disparity between male and female athletes. But BIG DAIRY essentially took a page out of BIG TOBACCO’s 1929 “Torches of Freedom” campaign playbook—an attempt to make cigarettes a symbol of female emancipation.

The Dairy Industry’s efforts to “Nikeify” milk deserve scrutiny, because “Milk Hurts.” It hurts the people drinking it. It hurts small farmers and our environment. And, obviously, it hurts the cows who are trapped and exploited by the industrial dairy machine.

And while BIG DAIRY certainly wants you to feel good about drinking milk—with their slick ad campaigns, paid for by YOUR tax dollars through the U.S. government dairy check-off program—most people will be literally sick to their stomach and suffer numerous other health problems after consuming dairy–up to and including death.