Milk Update

It’s now been a month since we tried our milk fast, so I thought I’d report.

I try to keep it real on this blog.  I feel like blogging can allow you to be a false persona in order to impress people or make it seem like life is wonderful.  In honor of keeping things honest, here’s an update on how the milk cutback has gone in the last month.  It was hard.

We are not huge milk drinkers.  Especially since we started trying to eat mostly whole foods, we consume less milk because of less cereal.  So the real challenge was what to give the boys for drinks.  I gave them almond milk this month.  They didn’t really notice a difference as far as I could tell.  They were pretty happy.  Cooking with almond milk didn’t seem to change the taste of most things, except for homemade macaroni and cheese, which was pretty nasty.  Anyway, we basically just used less milk and drank less milk.  But again, I felt weird just giving my kids water.  Creature of habit!

I never felt fully comfortable with the almond milk, I think because I read the ingredients.  It’s filled with a bunch of junk and at least high quality milk just has one or two ingredients.  Sigh.  Here’s the recurring theme of me being torn with what the right thing to do is.

So this week…I bought a gallon of milk.  We surprisingly have barely touched it.  But it is nice to know it’s there.  So, my experimental milk fast had mixed results.  Bottom line for now is that I am slowly cutting back until we don’t drink it and we don’t miss it.  I haven’t had a glass of milk in a while, but I DID eat some yummy granola with milk the other morning and it really hit the spot.

There you have it folks.  Here’s another milk article from the Times last week.  An interesting closing paragraph reads:  “Osteoporosis? You don’t need milk, or large amounts of calcium, for bone integrity. In fact, the rate of fractures is highest in milk-drinking countries, and it turns out that the keys to bone strength are lifelong exercise and vitamin D, which you can get from sunshine. Most humans never tasted fresh milk from any source other than their mother for almost all of human history, and fresh  cow’s milk could not be routinely available to urbanites without industrial production. The federal government not only supports the milk industry by spending more money on dairy than any other item in the school lunch program, but by contributing free propaganda as well as subsidies amounting to well over $4 billion in the last 10 years.”

More reports to come soon, but in the meantime I am not going to be too strict on this one for now.