Important Message about Milk

Now that you have read the beautiful passages in the Bible dealing with the subject of milk, let’s discuss a concern that I have about the devaluing of milk in much of Western dietary habits and practices. It is amazing to me how faddist, superstitious, trendy, and ignorant thinking has jeopardized the most basic of foods that allowed humans to live and thrive at all! I cannot believe it when I see how even children, say nothing of adults, are being discouraged from drinking milk! And how of course, as to be expected, this then leads to children’s taste being changed so that they don’t crave milk as they used to. This is harmful beyond belief. When I read about schools cutting back on providing milk, or reducing it from whole milk to skim milk I could rend my virtual robe. Political correctness and incredibly stupid nutritional beliefs threaten the health and survival instincts of generation after generation, and people just can’t see it. Let me start by explaining how life was not all that long ago, in the 1940’s and 1950’s.


Fifty years ago everyone drank milk. It was the standard drink for not only children, but for adults too. It was a very common sight to see the very men who fought to save the world in World War II have a glass of milk with their meals. People did not drink fruit juices, sodas, and water like they do today. A glass of water was provided along with a glass of milk at a meal, not as the main beverage. Real men and women drank milk, and their children did too. The Bible records how for thousands of years milk was an essential component for a people’s survival and thriving. Wisdom teeth became a “problem” in modern times because people were finally getting enough milk in the more affluent post industrial society that they had their teeth growing to the maximum. Water and “energy drinks” are not milk substitutes! Given to children they do become an acquired taste that drives out the urge for milk. I remember children loving milk and drinking all that they could, and they became the healthiest generation we ever knew. There are many components to milk that stimulate the body to health. And again “soy” milk is not the same as real milk. My dad, a tough paratrooper, would have coffee, his beers and yes, glasses of milk! Milk not only provides nutritional needs, but it is essential for an effective immune system. The fact that so many people are becoming milk adverse or sensitive to milk ought to be a warning sign that something is missing, rather than a reason to stop drinking milk further.


I’m hopeful that this destructive trend is turning, and as I’m writing this, prices for milk are so high because supply cannot meet demand, due to droughts and farming issues throughout the world. For God’s sake, this means we should be continuing to promote milk drinking and mitigate the challenges, not come up with crazy “climate change” theories about cows and milk. Notice the following ideas are not in the Bible:


· Moses praised milk but then said it is a shame we will have to give it up some day because the cows fart and burp so much that the “climate is changing” and so we need to have less cows to “save” the planet.
· God said, OK, be prosperous, be a good shepherd, and have many flocks for milk, but that’s because you folks are just too primitive for me to tell you right now that you all really ought to be strict vegetarians, and thousands of years from now kids with tie dyed shirts will explain it all to you and urge you to give up your healthy nutrition “for the sake of the animals who are cruelly exploited.”
· Isaiah did not predict that someday women will be too selfish and lazy to home cook for their families, and that families will stop being active, so that kids and their families will eat excessive amounts of what should be “treat” fast food, and when they balloon in weight, the nutrition Nazis will take the calories out of children’s diets by reducing their milk consumption instead of the foods, drinks, and inactivity that is actually causing the problem.


The people of the Bible were smarter than the people today in so many ways, because they had to live by definition “without a safety net.” They lived in deprived harsh times, and as a result, they learned very quickly what foods were healthy and allowed their children and adults to thrive. Milk was a core, basic, backbone food substance for a reason, and not as a poetical or religious metaphor. It was such an obvious and overwhelmingly essential need and gift for life that use of the word became the shorthand for so many principles (such as spiritual milk) but that would not be so if it wasn’t recognized as one of the several essential staffs of life.
I remember when my Navajo friends’ children were young, back in the 1980’s, how important it was to them as they struggled with being very poor that somehow the youngest children got at least their “one glass of milk per day.” Often that was through the school. The children wanted, needed, and prized their milk. Sure they drank soda pop as a treat food, but they loved and their bodies needed milk, and they knew the difference at the youngest age. I cannot believe the irresponsible parenting that results in a generation of children who do not have such a taste for milk. And then people wonder when there are so many niggling health issues and mysteries that people cannot explain, yet run to the nuttier pseudo science and spirituality reasons rather than look at what has worked in human biological and health history. Sometimes I think people are getting too dumb to survive and are losing their survival instincts.


Well, I finished the current jug of milk in my fridge this morning, so I need to get some more. I hope that you find this nutritional nagging to be useful! Remember, children are born wanting milk and it is a lifelong benefit that should not be suppressed and squandered, for their very health depends on it, and it’s not a matter of popping another calcium pill! The micro quantities of the many nutritional components of milk are essential to a healthy body’s balance, provision, and immune system functioning.