They are literally not bad. There's nothing at all wrong with eating meat, eggs, fish, dairy or oil. The number one cause of humans' deaths is directly tied to drinking water as well. Just because people eat meat, fish, eggs, dairy and oil and then die does not make those things bad.
People die from eating fatty food fried in poor quality oil every day of their lives, yes. That doesn't mean that oil is bad for you, it doesn't mean that fat is bad for you, it doesn't mean that you're at risk of heart attack if you have something that's fried every now and again.
Of course we have to eat things in moderation, but the idea that because overconsuming something is bad for you then any amount of it must be a little bit bad for you? That's bunk. That's just not true. Dairy is not bad for you, oil is not bad for you, sugar is not bad for you.
And there is, emphatically, absolutely nothing wrong with drinking cows milk.
I'm not going to give up eating meta, fish, eggs, dairy and oil just because you think that the effect of food on your health is linearly proportional to how much of it you consume.
Consuming saturated fat, hormones and cholesterol is literally bad for you. It affects your body in a negative way without any benefit in contrast to alternatives aka bad for you.
> The number one cause of humans' deaths is directly tied to drinking water as well. Just because people eat meat, fish, eggs, dairy and oil and then die does not make those things bad.
You could say that, and just because I worded something poorly doesn't change the facts that those particular things in meat, dairy and so on is never good for you.
> People die from eating fatty food fried in poor quality oil every day of their lives, yes. That doesn't mean that oil is bad for you, it doesn't mean that fat is bad for you, it doesn't mean that you're at risk of heart attack if you have something that's fried every now and again.
There is no health-benefit to consuming refined oil instead of getting oil in their natural package, but there are lots of health concerns, so yeah it's bad.
Fat is not bad for you, but saturated fat is bad for you when it's put into a package where it has too much of it compared to what else is in the package, which is the case for dairy, meat and so on.
By your logic, smoking is not bad for you either as long as you only smoke a little.
> Of course we have to eat things in moderation, but the idea that because overconsuming something is bad for you then any amount of it must be a little bit bad for you? That's bunk. That's just not true. Dairy is not bad for you, oil is not bad for you, sugar is not bad for you.
It is bad for you because you can get the same good stuff there is in it from other sources that doesn't have the bad stuff. What you are proposing is, that if you eat a little bit of something that is bad for you, it's not bad. But that is a complete fallacy. It's always bad for you. Will it have a negative effect on you in the long run? Not if you don't overdo it, but that doesn't change the fact that it is bad for you.
The only time that dairy, meat and so on is good for you is in the absence of alternative food so you would starve if you didn't consume it.
> oil is not bad for you, sugar is not bad for you.
Refined oil and refined sugar is always bad for you. It has no positives, only negatives. It's bad.
> And there is, emphatically, absolutely nothing wrong with drinking cows milk.
There sure is. For a cow to give milk, it has to be pregnant and it then has to give birth to a calf. But for you to drink the milk instead of the calf, the calf has to be taken away and be put on some other nutrition that is not it's natural nutrition (cows milk - yeah, that is what it is, growth food for a baby cow, not human food), or it has to be killed. The process is very traumatic for both the cow and the calf, and they will often be stressed and moan for weeks, except in the case of the calf that is often killed not many days old. For the cow to constantly give milk instead of only when it becomes pregnant naturally, it has to be raped by a human on a schedule so it never stops giving milk, and when the cow reaches 4-6 old, the cow is in so bad state it can't keep on producing the required amount of milk, so it is sent to a slaughterhouse and horribly killed and slaughtered. A cow will live to 20-26 years old in nature. There is nothing empathic about people thinking that cows milk is their right, even if it is killed in the most pain-free and lives with the least amount of suffering possible for it to be a dairy cow, which unfortunately is not true for more 1/10.000.000 dairy cows.
> I'm not going to give up eating meta, fish, eggs, dairy and oil just because you think that the effect of food on your health is linearly proportional to how much of it you consume.
I'm not thinking these things. Science is. The only reason it's still part of a normal diet in the way it is, is because of powerful lobbying done by the dairy, meat, egg and fishing industry, and because just like you (and me 5 years back) I couldn't contain the thought of not consuming these things, so I'd gladly ignore the problems with them. So do a lot of doctors and scientists and so on.
> There sure is. For a cow to give milk, it has to be pregnant and it then has to give birth to a calf. But for you to drink the milk instead of the calf, the calf has to be taken away and be put on some other nutrition that is not it's natural nutrition (cows milk - yeah, that is what it is, growth food for a baby cow, not human food), or it has to be killed. The process is very traumatic for both the cow and the calf, and they will often be stressed and moan for weeks, except in the case of the calf that is often killed not many days old. For the cow to constantly give milk instead of only when it becomes pregnant naturally, it has to be raped by a human on a schedule so it never stops giving milk, and when the cow reaches 4-6 old, the cow is in so bad state it can't keep on producing the required amount of milk, so it is sent to a slaughterhouse and horribly killed and slaughtered. A cow will live to 20-26 years old in nature. There is nothing empathic about people thinking that cows milk is their right, even if it is killed in the most pain-free and lives with the least amount of suffering possible for it to be a dairy cow, which unfortunately is not true for more 1/10.000.000 dairy cows.
You just did not answer the OP's question at all. Sure, animal cruelty is an important issue but its NOT the one you were debating with the OP.
Firstly, even though milesrout wrote `emphatically`, I believe he meant `ethically` since that is what I wrote which he answered to.
Secondly, and I'm not a native English speaker so I might be wrong, empathically, my comment is still valid. What we do to dairy cows can only be described as a product of a complete lack of empathy for the cows, nothing less.
In that case, that slew of words simply demonstrates why there is also something, emphatically, wrong with drinking milk ethically and not only personal health wise, which is what we have been discussing.
It demonstrates that milk is bad in not only one aspect but two, and if we then account for how it is contributing to climate change as well, it is now bad in three aspects and, well, the dairy industry is looking very much like the devil, and people that consume dairy looks like stupid sheep and not modern, intelligent humans.
* The claim that cows have to be 'raped' to give milk is absurd. Milking cows is not rape. If you don't milk them they just about burst - have you seen their udders when they aren't milked?
* The claim that 'in nature' cows do something is also wrong: cows do not exist without humans and have never existed without humans. Cows are domesticated animals. They are biologically and physiologically distinct from any 'natural' animal, if such a thing really exists (everything everywhere has been affected by human activity). That's how artificial selection works.
Beef and dairy contribute to climate change, yes, but that wouldn't be a problem if they were priced correctly. If dairy and cattle farmers were required to pay off their externalities - i.e. to clean up after themselves and pay carbon taxes for all the methane - then beef and dairy would be priced such that it was consumed less, but still consumed, which is both healthier and better for the environment.
But the discussion is about human health, and the fact of the matter is that there's nothing wrong with it, for humans, in moderation.
> The claim that cows have to be 'raped' to give milk is absurd. Milking cows is not rape. If you don't milk them they just about burst - have you seen their udders when they aren't milked?
Cows only create milk to feed their young. Cows only have young if they are inseminated. Thus dairy cows are kept in a perpetual cycle of breeding to produce young (which are taken from them early) so they produce milk.
Half the young are male and thus useless; they are killed. Half the young are female and kept to replenish the dairy herds.
Right but it's still not 'rape'. The concept of rape doesn't apply to cows. Cows cannot and do not ever give informed consent to anything, because they are simply incapable of ever being informed of anything.
It isn't because humans decides so. But it's the same thing. Just like a child can't consent to sex, a cow can't neither. In Denmark, sex with animals is actually against the law, except if it's forced impregnation, because "we need our meat and milk", or some bullshit untrue statement like that.
> * The claim that cows have to be 'raped' to give milk is absurd. Milking cows is not rape.
As DanBC said, it isn't the milking that is rape. It's the forced impregnation. The milking is exploitation.
It's like saying if you go ahead and fuck a dog or another animal, that's not rape either. It might not be in your country, but in my country, Denmark, it sure is. By law, the animals are treated - in this case - like children since they can't consent to the action. Except in the livestock industry, where the practice is allowed because "we need our milk and meat". Now, even in Denmark, the word rape isn't used about such thing, but it's the same thing really.
It's rather short minded logic on your behalf too. There is nothing wrong, per se, with a cow raping another cow. That's part of nature. Things change though when it's a human that does it to a cow. Since the action is done by the human, who understands the action and the concept of rape, I think it's fair to classify it as rape, again, since the cow can't consent to it.
> If you don't milk them they just about burst - have you seen their udders when they aren't milked?
Yes, it's gross how we have bred these animals to become milk and meat machines. But actually, if you take a dairy cow out of the industry, it doesn't take long before it starts to only produce milk in natural amounts again, that is, only enough to feed it's calf, maybe a little more, but that's it. The reason they constantly produce so much as they do is because of breeding and continued use of different kinds of drugs and steroids to get that reaction. In other words, we are artificially creating the problems they have when not milked, so talking about the milking as something like "humans helping the cows so their udders don't get infected and shit" is a complete fallacy. We are exploiting them, torturing them and killing them, that's what we're doing to them.
> * The claim that 'in nature' cows do something is also wrong: cows do not exist without humans and have never existed without humans. Cows are domesticated animals. They are biologically and physiologically distinct from any 'natural' animal, if such a thing really exists (everything everywhere has been affected by human activity). That's how artificial selection works.
Firstly, there do live cattle freely in nature some places to this day, but yes, dairy cows for one is grossly overbred to produce the best meat and milk with no regard for their health. But a dairy cow do in fact have the capability to live until 20-26 years of age, if not kept as livestock where it's body is destroyed after 4-6 years old.
> Beef and dairy contribute to climate change, yes, but that wouldn't be a problem if they were priced correctly. If dairy and cattle farmers were required to pay off their externalities - i.e. to clean up after themselves and pay carbon taxes for all the methane - then beef and dairy would be priced such that it was consumed less, but still consumed, which is both healthier and better for the environment.
Indeed, if it were priced differently - not subsidised, for one - and the amount of dairy and beef produced were around say 1% of one is produced today, that would mean a lot of the climate, yes, and to peoples health.
> But the discussion is about human health, and the fact of the matter is that there's nothing wrong with it, for humans, in moderation.
Again, that is like saying that smoking is not unhealthy in moderation. That's a complete fallacy. Will it kill you if you only smoke one cigarette a week? Probably not. Is it healthy? Nope, still not healthy and never will be.
People die from eating fatty food fried in poor quality oil every day of their lives, yes. That doesn't mean that oil is bad for you, it doesn't mean that fat is bad for you, it doesn't mean that you're at risk of heart attack if you have something that's fried every now and again.
Of course we have to eat things in moderation, but the idea that because overconsuming something is bad for you then any amount of it must be a little bit bad for you? That's bunk. That's just not true. Dairy is not bad for you, oil is not bad for you, sugar is not bad for you.
And there is, emphatically, absolutely nothing wrong with drinking cows milk.
I'm not going to give up eating meta, fish, eggs, dairy and oil just because you think that the effect of food on your health is linearly proportional to how much of it you consume.