Personal Narrative: My Two-Week Health Challenge

For my two-week health challenge, I chose to not drink any cow’s milk. In the past couple years, I have seen several documentaries and short videos about the dangers of dairy. However, no matter how dangerous dairy is I will never be able to forgo cheese, sour cream, and butter, it's all just too good! Liquid milk always kind of disgusted me, the thought that we drink something that is meant for a little calf, born weighing 75lbs, that turns into a 1000lb beast always freaked me out. The hormones required for a baby calf to grow to that size are found in milk, and we drink it! The documentaries talked about how many of those hormones are thought to help cancer cells grow faster.

When I was growing up, my family had a goat and we mostly drank goat milk. Goat milk is much easier for humans to digest and it is meant for a small baby goat that’s born weighing approximately 8lb to turn
I won't be as strict as I was during the two-week challenge, I will still occasionally have milk. Even if I have one or two cups of coffee per week it will be a significant improvement from the previous one or two cups per day. In general, I will be more mindful when it comes to drinking milk. For example, previously I would sometimes have a warm glass of milk when I was sick, I won't do that anymore. Also, I used to have milk with cereal a lot, because it was a convenient food to have when I didn’t want to cook (I know it's not really food). I will still sometimes have cereal with milk but will be much more conscientious of how often I have it.

This experiment made me think a lot about nutrition in schools. I work at a school and during lunch I notice they are always given milk. In fact, a huge portion of their school lunches have diary in it, fake cheese in their sandwiches, cheese sticks, very sweet yogurt, etc. I wonder who decided milk was a healthy drink for kids. Why don’t we offer lightly sweetened tea to the kids