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Comment by fredsir | Hacker News Reader

Lots die suddenly from strokes and heart attacks (and other diet-related stuff) in their 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s too. I get it when you're 70, but when there's a real chance of it happening already at 30 and increasingly from that point. That realization is what made me switch my unhealthy habits out what healthy ones that I've come to enjoy just as much if not even more since I'm now also much healthier and can enjoy much more cool stuff that I couldn't before.

Said another way: if food is your measure of happiness in life, you should branch out and try something other than eating, and even then, food is not good because there is meat in it. A good dish is a good dish in any case, and there are thousands of good dishes containing no animal products what so ever.

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Nah its not the measure I'm not that shallow, but I have a mentality where I think playing the short game when it comes to consuming whatever makes me happy makes my life better than depriving myself out of fear of an early death.

It sounds dark, but I would genuinely rather die suddenly while enjoying my life to its fullest instead of clinging on and trying to extend it at the detriment of my fun (puffs cigarette and swigs from a bottle)

;) ;)

I get that, but I find that the silver lining is to find something you enjoy just as much or even more that also makes you live longer and enjoy it for a greater extend than the unhealthy thing.

5 years back, I loved BBQ rips, steak, cows milk and cows cheese, and thought I couldn't live without it. Today I still love the taste of those things, but I have stopped consuming them and have found alternatives that I like just as much or better with the added benefit that they don't kill me, which adds to me liking them even better.

You make it sound like steak, milk or cheese are bad, but they are not. It's all a matter of balance. Low carb diets are popular for a reason, carbs and sugar are usually seen as more unhealthy than fats and personally i also consider physical activity as an important factor for balance.

They are literally bad. Low carb diets is a fad that makes it easy for people to lose weight, but carbs are important, it's literally our bodies favourite type of nutrient, and all populations through history that has done well for themself has been high carb, and people wouldn't have to cut out carbs if they cut out all the actually unhealthy stuff they choose to eat instead. Fats are important, carbs are important and so on. Saturated fat, cholesterol, hormones, refined oil, refined sugar and so on are never healthy to consume.

You shouldn't ignore the fact that the number one cause of humans deaths (cardiovascular disease, heart disease, type 2 diabetes and some types of cancer) is directly tied to eating meat, fish, eggs, dairy and oil. Especially dairy. Dairy is arguably the worst of the culprits, but the others are not healthy either, not by any measure. Less bad does not make good. Not in any big or small amount. And yes, you might not get sick from eating them if you eat less of them, but that doesn't make them healthy, and since they also are the single biggest cause of climate change (because of the way they are produced), and that consuming those things when we don't need to at all is ethically corrupt, there is really no good reason to do so.

I myself try to limit my meat and cheese consumption but i like joghurt and other dairy for example. But i also cycle 60+km every week at a fast pace, have normal weight and would consider myself to be pretty fit. I don't disagree that a lot of the biggest killers are related to eating habits, but i think it's mostly because people don't eat a balanced diet and on top of that have not enough physical activity. I have a lot of South American (Brazil/Argentina) co-workers and friends who sit in front of a computer all day and hardly doing anything physical, They also consume tons of meat, cheese, fried stuff, eggs and its a culture where it's almost seen as offensive if you don't eat meat and vegan options in those countries are super limited. A lot of them are also pretty overweight, which shows that they don't really have a balance and it's clear to me that some of them will get problems when they get older but many people just don't care too much, same with smokers or people that drink a lot on weekends.

So i believe the number one killers are all mostly lifestyle related and can't be attributed to some specific type of food so easily.

Indeed, lifestyle (including diet) is the biggest problem. But when you then see what the problems in the diet is, the biggest one in for example America is dairy and then meat and oil.

Again, you can be healthier than others eating those things, but if you were in that case, not eating it would make you much healthier than your previous self. And not forgetting that as little as the amount of dairy in three glasses of milk a day increases you chance notably of getting prostate cancer, colon cancer, cardiovascular disease and heart disease. A big portion of yoghurt often have more than that. Exercising doesn't decrease those chances by much if at all.

If that would really be the case, we should see huge differences for people with lactose intolerance, shouldn't we?

I don't believe so. The problem isn't dairy per se, it's what's in dairy. If you just replace the saturated fat you get from dairy with saturated sat from meat or coconut milk or whatever, the result is the same.

Then please stop saying dairy is the problem but saturated fats.

That's like saying I shouldn't say smoking is bad because it's not the action of smoking that is bad for you, it's what is in the smoke that is. Dairy is bad because dairy is a package consisting of too much saturated fat, and cholesterol and hormones which you don't need to consume at all. It's also increasingly consisting of antibiotics and other drugs which are also bad for you.

Not all dairy products contain fat. And antibiotics aren't a problem of dairy alone, but of industrial farming in general.

You make it sound like eating dairy is always unhealthy, similar to smoking. But I doubt that's the case and I don't know of any evidence supporting that.

Alright, some dairy products have less fat because producers spend money on making the product less unhealthy. But it still has cholesterol, and hormones and other bad stuff, and what are the benefits to consuming dairy over all the alternatives there is that has none of the bad stuff? There is none. Why take something like dairy and spend money and energy on producing those and making them more healthy than they really are, when you can get all the other benefits from other foods that also has even more benefits and none of the bad stuff, and also contributes to climate change much less, and doesn't need to include the exploitation, the suffering, and the murder of animals, when we don't need dairy and actually have to go out of our way to make it so it doesn't kill those consuming it?

And yes, antibiotics and other drugs is also a problem for meat products. I'm also against producing and consuming those, if you were wondering.

> But it still has cholesterol, and hormones and other bad stuff, and what are the benefits to consuming dairy over all the alternatives there is that has none of the bad stuff?

As you said yourself: Not all alternatives are better. Some of them are even worse. You'll have to take a closer look to what's inside, that's why I don't like the generalization "Dairy is bad!".

That's not what I said. All the alternatives I'm advocating (plants) are better.

Three glasses of milk a day us a little???

It is the amount of the saturated fat, hormones and cholesterol (and antibiotics and so on) in three glasses that is the important thing. Many people drink at least one glass of milk and put at least one glass on their cereal too. And then they eat cheese on a lot of their food, which is concentrated and contains a lot more of everything than milk does, so many people consumes a lot more than what is in three glasses of milk every single day.

I don't know, i saw other studies that suggest whole-milk actually has benefits in regards to cardiovascular disease and heart disease. There is so much conflicting information out there, it's really hard to take anything too serious if you are not a scientist yourself who has the time and knowledge to go through all of that.

There is really not conflicting data out there if you go directly to the research instead of people who cites them, and when you check the research out, be wary of the research funded by the dairy (and meat and egg and sugar and so on) industry, and be wary of people funded by the industry too. You don't want to get advice on how healthy milk is from someone who's salary is paid by selling you milk.

All the claims that dairy (milk) is healthy that I'm aware of and that is still well regarded (peer reviewed and hasn't later been debunked), is research that says stuff like "you need this much protein, you need this much calcium, you need this much that and that", and then they conclude with stuff like "and if consume this much dairy, you get all those things", but that is focusing on the good stuff in a vacuum and completely neglecting all the bad stuff that is in dairy, and that you already get all the good stuff if you simply eat any proper diet, but some diets, like a plant-based one, avoids the bad stuff.

OK I'm curious: what is the bad stuff in Milk, really? Could you please cite some of the research you talk about so I can look it up? Honest question.

Hormones that give man-boobs, infertility and all kinds of crazy shit. Here is a couple of studies, but there is lots: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4524299/, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11392381, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12477510, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24636397

Saturated fat, which is the reason people gets type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and heart disease. I don't believe I need to link you any sources for that, since it's common knowledge and agreed about. In dairy, the amount of saturated fat is really high. It's why oil (when taken out of it's natural package like olive oil is taken out of it's natural package: the olive) is also bad for you. It's 100% saturated fat instead of in the natural package where for every gram of oil you were also getting some fibers, some carbs and so on.

Cholesterol. Same with saturated fat, although it's less bad. But the thing is that humans need to consume no cholesterol what so ever, so for every mg of cholesterol you consume, you simply add to your overall amount of ldl (also called bad) cholesterol, which has the same effect as saturated fat. All the cholesterol we need (hdl cholesterol) is something we produce our self.

As little as the amount of dairy in three glasses of milk a day (which many get by drinking one glass, putting some on their cereal and then eating a lot of cheese too) is also found to increase ones chances of prostate and colon cancer.

And the thing about dairy is that it is a complete scam. We learn as children that we should consume milk to build strong bones and get protein, but it's just not true. If you eat enough (varied) food (as in a completely normal proper diet), you will never be deficient in neither calcium nor protein. And studies show that you can't just consume more calcium to get stronger bones, it doesn't work like that, so drinking more milk to get even stronger bones is also completely fallacy. The dairy industry want us to believe milk is the raw power of nature, but in fact the only milk humans should consume is the milk our mothers produce, and when we are done we that, we don't need to consume milk anymore, especially not bovine milk. Cows milk is liquid growth food for a calf, that's it. There is nothing good in milk that you can't get from a better source, but there is a whole lot of bad stuff.

If you are interested, I suggest these two[1] sources[2]. Those sites are obviously biased towards plant-based diets, but with good reason and they cite all their facts to scientific sources that you can check out with a simple google search using the number of the research paper, so you can check what they are saying out for yourself. I've never found it to be wrong.

If you are even more interested and like to watch documentaries, you should check out Cowspiracy[3] and What The Health[4]. They are great, and all facts used are available on their respective websites with links to the sources and explanations and so on.

[1]: https://nutritionfacts.org/?fwp_search=dairy&fwp_content_typ...

[2]: http://www.pcrm.org/health/diets/vegdiets/health-concerns-ab...

[3]: http://www.cowspiracy.com

[4]: http://www.whatthehealthfilm.com

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.

> They are literally not bad.

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.

I believe I did.

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.

Emphatic != Empathetic

Ah, good to know, my bad!

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.

Take it or leave it.

What you said is quite incorrect.

* 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.

>They are literally bad. Low carb diets is a fad that makes it easy for people to lose weight, but carbs are important, it's literally our bodies favourite type of nutrient, and all populations through history that has done well for themself has been high carb

You're going to have to argue with the multitude of people who have had success beyond "losing weight" on low carb diets.

The days of calling low carb a "fad" are waning.

> You're going to have to argue with the multitude of people who have had success beyond "losing weight" on low carb diets.

Their success is feeling great, not preventing sickness. They are gonna get them too, at some point, probably, but they might feel great until then. You can feel great on almost any diet, but only few helps preventing these diet-related sicknesses.

> The days of calling low carb a "fad" are waning.

Low carb is gonna come around and bite people in the ass. High carb is so important for a good balanced health (science agrees about that), and has no negatives except if you also want to eat 2000cals of eggs, meat and cheese a day, in which case you are gonna get fat, and then cutting out the boring carbs is the choice people are choosing, instead of cutting out the eggs, meat and cheese, a choice which is gonna give them diabetes type 2, cardiovascular disease, heart disease and cancer in the long while.

i have been eating dairy a lot and have stopped is there something i can do to reverse the adverse affects of eating dairy for so long thanks

To my knowledge, just stopping, as you've done, is the most important thing, and then continue eating healthy, exercising and so on, but you've already done the hardest part. The important thing now is that you stick with it

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