Have you ever wondered? I mean, aside from the occasional “other white meat” advertisement - we see relatively few campaigns for whole foods. Eat Bananas? Consume Rice? No - you only see ads for milk.
Shouldn’t we all be asking why? As a general rule, you should be wary of health claims on food. Often it means there is something to hide. “Whole Grains” is code for: “people figured out our product was unhealthy, and we’re trying to make up for it”.
According to wikipedia, the Got Milk campaign was a response to two decades of slumping milk sales. I’m cannot say for sure why sales were slumping, but could it have something to do with the fact that upwards of 90% of certain ethnicities are lactose intolerant?
This article in Evolving Wellness asks the question: if milk prevents osteoporosis, then why do the US and Canada (some of the largest dairy consuming countries) have the highest rates of said osteoporosis? It also asks wonders about the reasons for pushing red wine, whole grains, chocolate, and salmon.
When someone tries to sell you a specific product, you understand that it’s their job. But when a whole industry tries to convince you to increase consumption of their product, little warning bells should go off. Maybe you should wash down some clean coal or high fructose corn syrup ads with your milk?
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Fantastic to bring this up from this angle!!! And thank you for adding a link to my article too
I was unaware of the fact that there were slumping milk sales, and now this makes even more sense! It is so true though, bananas need no advertising, neither do apples, etc. So what is up? Well just that - that when a product needs to be pushed it gets advertized. And when do products need to be pushed, when not everybody is buying into them.
And when it comes to milk, my compassion goes out to the dairy farmers, but if it was me, I would change my industry to provide people with something that actually does do a body good - just like some tobacco farmers did in the past.
You may want to see a great movie called “A Delicate Balance” where one of the things they do is dissect the truth behind milk and even have a fantastic interview from a dairy farmer who chose to leave the industry for no other reason that he saw on his own family the harm it was doing to their health.