A while ago I did a literature search into "do people really need dairy"? A paper says yes, fat-removed milk products add nutrients to the otherwise complete catastrophe that is the average american diet.
so we gotta keep sticking the band-aid on instead of maybe subsidizing some vegetables among all that corn and meat?
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@coldwave That seems like a weak counterargument "dairy is nutritious therefore we should have it in your diet" isnt a band aid for a bad diet, so much as a good argument for it to be a part of any diet.
The thing is, dairy provides several nutrients that would be hard (though not impossible) from even a diet with veggies in it, unless you are mindful enough to pick veggies that specifically carry the wanted vitamins and minerals. Regardless if you eat your veggies or not having nutritiously rich variety in any diet is obviously the ideal.
@coldwave Depends entirely on the details. If your primary goal is to argue that "cows are abused due to the milk industry and we shouldn't accept that", well I'd agree with you.
The environmental aspect is a little hairier, there are certainly bad environmental practices employed by the dairy industry, but there are also plenty of such practices employed in farming of vegetables. So that is less of an argument around "is it worth it for the environment" and more of an argument around "how do we make dairy more environmentally conscious"
@freemo I can't agree that it's hard or inconvenient to get nutrients not from milk, especially in a world where every bread, cereal, or plant drink on the shelves is fortified. and frankly eating the recommended 2-3 cups of yoghurt or (low fat) milk a day would seem like a bizarre and inconvenient thing to do if we weren't used to being told that, and most people "succeeding".
@coldwave Well hard is a relative term. for example mushrooms are one of the highest sources of vitamin D we have from plant sources. You would need to eat 36 medium white cap mushrooms to equal the vitamin D in one cup of milk.
So yea, milk certainly fills a nutritional role that is not easily replicated from other vegetable sources. vitamin D is the most striking but even just the potassium in milk is something that isnt terribly common in vegetables in high dose.
@freemo interestingly only low-fat milk adequately fills the nutritional gap. However the fat that is skimmed off turns into things like cheap pizza cheese, and is presumably eaten separately by the same population. (This isn't an argument either way, just a weird fact about the system)
@coldwave Thats sorta true in the sense that we obviously shouldnt be eating a shit ton of high fat food all the time.
But the truth is even ifyou look at whole-milk and look at the vitamin D per calorie it is outperforming in nutritional value to the vast majority of vegetables (in fact there is only one vegetable that is on part with the vitamin d per calorie of whole milk).
@freemo dairy is nutritious, there's nothing literally false about that. it's a case of asking an oddly narrow question - willfully not considered is whether its worth it economically or environmentally, and the bigger problem in the population's nutrition and the food supply chain.