Americans today consume over 6 billion gallons of milk per year, but that was not always the case.i In North America, dairy was unknown until the Europeans arrived, as Native Americans didn’t milk animals and therefore did not consume any dairy. Although early American settlers kept a cow in their yard in order to produce their own butter and cheese, the act of drinking fresh milk did not become commonplace until the mid 1800’s. At this time, Americans were moving from the countryside into the cities, and families began to feed fresh cow’s milk to their infants as a substitute for breast milk. Surprisingly, the rise in milk drinking did not take place in the green pastures pictured in today’s dairy ads, but rather in the burgeoning industrial cities of the 19th century.ii
In many ways, milk is a complete food, since it supplies nine essential nutrients.iii In its unprocessed or raw state, about 88 percent of milk is water and about 12 percent is milk solids.iv Milk solids include protein, milkfat, minerals and lactose (or milk sugar).v Whole milk is a major source of calcium, as well as vitamins A and B12, potassium, riboflavin, niacin, phosphorus, folic acid, sodium, and iron.vi Since the early half of the 20th century, vitamin D has also been added to the milk supply to combat bone disease.vii Together, milk’s nutrients can help build strong bones and teeth, strengthen and repair muscle tissue and our immune and nervous systems, and help us maintain healthy vision, skin and blood pressure. So, like the slogan says, "Milk. It does a body good."
Or does it? That depends on whose body we’re talking about. For instance, most people worldwide do not have the enzymes that digest lactose, which means when they do consume it, they are likely to suffer from gastrointestinal problems like diarrhea, stomach cramps, constipation, and flatulence.viii The reasons for this could be that dairy has not historically been a staple of most diets outside of Europe. To this day, about 74 percent of Native Americans are lactose intolerant.ix Asian, African and Latin American peoples also show significantly higher rates of lactose intolerance than people of European descent.x
The potential health benefits of milk, especially for most infants and children that can tolerate milk well, are hard to argue with. The problem with most of the milk you find in today’s supermarkets, though, is that it contains much more than what nature originally provided. Some of what’s added to it, (like vitamins D and A), makes milk healthier, but traces of pesticidesxi or antibiotics,xii or even pus from sick cows that have been dosed with artificial growth hormones,xiii clearly do not.
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