Deceptive Dairy

A few days ago I was shopping at a grocery store that doesn’t carry my preferred products, and browsing the butter section I was disappointed to find no other obviously good options. Frustrated, I grabbed a butter from a brand I recognized and finished shopping. It was only when I got home that I actually looked at the label, because why should we have to look at the nutriton label of butter? It’s just butter. Isn’t it?

“Natural flavors,” was an ingredient, next to butter. Why in the world would butter, which is butter, need flavor added?

Dairy must be produced with high quality in order to taste good and be nutritious, and without good farming practices dairy can be very gross, poor in nutrition, and even sometimes dangerous to consume (because of bacterial contamination). Flavor isn’t just something for emotional satisfaction. Our tongues taste flavor to identify good nutrition. When food industries fake those characteristics of food, they trick you into consuming things which may not actually have the nutrition your body needs.

Over the last several decades the dairy industry has imploded, and profits for dairy farmers have plummeted, making it difficult to survive in the industry. This has often been attributed to the rise of alternative milk products and anti-dairy dietary fads, but in reality the decline of the dairy industry is the fault of the dairy industry because of practices which have compromised the quality of dairy products.

One of the biggest reasons for the decline of the dairy industry was the introduction of milk with less fat. Growing up our fridge only ever contained 2% or 1% milk, and very often even skim milk when my mother was on a diet (which was more often than otherwise). When I finally started buying whole milk as an adult, I couldn’t for the life of me understand why my parents ever bought anything else. Reduced fat milk is fucking disgusting. Skim milk is even dangerous to drink, because one of the purposes of fat in milk is to help the body (of a mammal) handle the high amounts of calcium and phosphorus it contains, and drinking skim actually causes high amounts of metabolic activation without the protection of oxidation-resistant saturated fat to keep cells structurally intact. Over time, drinking too much low-fat milk makes your brain associate milk with discomfort, so a person then naturally begins to resent it. Since they were drinking skim milk to avoid fat, they won’t return to the higher fat milks, and stop consuming dairy.

But the dairy industry themselves were one of the biggest promoters of reduced fat milk, because in the short term it made them more money. Why sell a gallon of full-fat milk for $5 when you can sell the skimmed version for $5 and use the extra fat to make more butter, cream, and sour cream and sell those also for an additional $5? I get the business appeal, but adulterating a product to make more money will only lead to consumer dissatisfaction, and come back to hurt your business in the long run, which it has. Whey is also a product of dairy deception, because whey protein is a byproduct of other products (such as cheese making) that was just discarded, and so it got shopped onto unsuspecting consumers as a body-building supplement, when in fact it is the least nutritious portion of dairy, where casein is far more healthful but casein was already used to make cheese. Whey in isolation can actually cause a lot of metabolic problems, because it is absorbed too quickly (yes, there is such a thing), and doesn’t have an optimal ratio of beneficial amino acids to those which are more associated with stress pathways (I recommend using casein or pea protein as protein supplements). Instead, the diary industry should use whey for other commercial purposes, such as fermentation for the production of supplemental B vitamins, or other industrial bacterial uses or novel but honest practices.

Another factor which has made milk less satisfying was the breeding of cattle to produce larger quantities of milk. American holstein and other cows which were hybridized to produce a high quantity of milk also had the effect of changing the amino acid composition of milk, where a mutation that allowed this increase in volume also resulted in the replacement of a proline animo acid with a histidine amino acid (this is the A1/A2 debate, if you are familiar with A2 milk). Histidine is required by our bodies to be alive and healthy, but it is also used to make histamine, and many bacteria produce histamine as a side effect of their own metabolism, most commonly the Lactobacillus varieties also widely promoted as probiotics and used in products like yogurt. This increase in histamine due to the increased availability of histidine from A1 milk consumption causes irritation in the human body and an increase in mucous production in the oral cavity, so people who are susceptible to this histamine end up disliking dairy or eventually avoiding it altogether. A sister of mine has a severe reaction to dairy for this very reason, and as such actively avoids it (she refuses to listen to my health advice) and also doesn’t give it to her children. Because of this mutation in these varieties of cattle which was done for reasons of profit, my sister and her three children do not consume dairy, and this same chain of events duplicated in many families across the last several generations is the reason for the decline of dairy. The rise of alternative milks only occurred to take advantage of the vacuum this exodus from dairy opened, not the other way around.

Until a few years ago organic dairy was a default safe haven from most of the adulteration practices common to the industry, but I was extremely disappointed to find my favorite brands adding emulsifying gums to products like cream, to fake its thickness and cheat us out of well-made products, and complaining to them was met with a condescending, dismissive form response. Joke’s on them, though, because I used to buy their milk, cream, and butter two or three times a week, and have not bought a SINGLE thing from their brand in the last four years. Gums which are frequently added to dairy products, even organic brands which have nice labels and product packaging, cause large production of gas in the digestive tract so people who consume dairy with added gums get gassy from the gums but think it’s the dairy, and the industry further sabotaging itself in the name of short term profits. Carrageenan is another additive in industrial food production which is actually toxic and potentially carcinogenic that is often added to dairy products like chocolate milk and ice cream.

Many of the problems with dairy are often a result of the diary industry and deceptive manufacturing processes, and not necessarily dairy itself. In order to avoid these potential liabilities, YOU, the consumer, must spend time paying attention to labels and knowing what goes into your food. Support only those brands which maintain high-quality standards of production. Flavor is added to products like butter by dairy operations that do not feed their animals good diets, and keep them confined in small, indoor pens where they cannot get vitamin D and sunlight and spend their lives stressed and undernourished. Such animals do not make high quality dairy, and those products are low in nutrition and a waste of your money. Butter should be naturally yellow, because of the presence of dietary carotenes they get from eating grass (in the winter it may be more pale because of reduced pasture access). Some dairy companies artificially add color like annatto to butter without even putting that on the label, tricking you into buying something that does not have the nutrition you think it does. Complain to government regulatory boards and politicians about these deceptive products. Run for office to help promote a high standard of food production. The only reason this happens is because people like you don’t do anything about it. You’d think the industry would know how their own behavior has led to the decline of their industry, but the kinds of people who make these decisions and run these companies don’t want to hear about their own mistakes, so it becomes self-perpetuating and does not change until others demand it.

Good dairy is amazing and can be very useful in supporting good health and nutrition. The only reason dairy consumption has declined is because of the deceptive practices of the industry, and it would experience a renaissance if the industry would stop being dishonest and return to focussing on quality. One brand I love which produces very high quality milk, butter, and ice cream is Strauss Creamery. But their products are increasingly being pushed out by deceptive, cheaper brands who use these dishonest practices to make their products cheaper.

Diary can be very healthy, but it is not a perfect food because there is no such thing as a perfect food, and one of the problems with dairy is that is doesn’t have enough oleic acid required for adult nutrition (it’s great for kids, though). If you’re a farmer, obesity and metabolic disease is also often a problem in the industry which can be addressed through healthier farming practices.