Finding Skinny Bitches

Jane Austin drank milk and she turned out okay.
I hear she looked a lot like Anne Hathaway.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a computer in possession of a good internet connection must be in want of a crazy person.  Hence, you get dark corners of the web where this is considered normal.

One of the strangest areas of disagreement on the net involves dairy.  There are those who absolutely love milk and those who absolutely hate it.  Depending on what you read, milk either strengthens the immune system or "damages the human immune system."

The one fact that all anti-milk campaigns keep coming back to was well-stated in the popular amateur diet book, Skinny Bitch:

We are the only species on the planet that drinks milk as adults. We are also the only species on the planet that drinks the milk of another species.

They're not entirely right.  There are certain birds and feral animals that have been documented as stealing milk from nursing mothers.  But they are mostly right, humans are the only mammals on earth who habitually drink milk into adulthood, and who drink the milk of other animals.

And if you don't really think about it, that sounds like a very bad thing.  If we are the one exception, chances are we're doing something wrong.  You never hear about lions being in and out of the hospital with intestinal bleeding, or southern wright whales complaining of arthritis and swollen joints.

Ow, my back!

But a couple of moments of reflection reveal some serious logical flaws in this argument:

1. We are the only mammals who consume the milk of other mammals, and into adulthood no less,
2. Thus, we are wrong.    

Note the logical fallacies of:  Appeal to Common Practice; Appeal to Popularity; Begging the Question (in a suppressed premise); Misleading Vividness; and a delightfully tart Red Herring.

They all add up to the same thing:  The fact that only one group does something is not evidence that it is right or wrong.  It is not evidence of anything.

Oh, everybody's getting married today?
Well, I hadn't planned on it, but ...

The question is whether milk is healthy for human adults.  The answer cannot lie in how other species feel about milk, or in how alone we are in using dairy.  It can only be found by examining what milk does for the human body.

There are, of course, plenty of things that would fit in the "Skinny Bitch" quote that show how illogical their argument is:

1. We are the only species on the planet that has ever gone to the moon on purpose.
2. We are the only species on the planet that tries to predict the weather a week in advance.
3. We are the only species on the planet that can write diet books without first receiving a formal education in nutrition.  

Would the authors of "Skinny Bitch" say that we shouldn't be going to the moon, predicting weather, or writing diet books without an adequate grounding in human physiology?

The truth is that there is a good evolutionary reason why cow's milk is a growing part of the human diet - and why fermented milk products like sour cream and cheese are even more important.

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