Desperate Milk Marketers Plead: Please Drink Milk

The brainchild of the California Milk Processors Board, the Got Milk mustache campaign lasted over twenty years, from 1993 to 2014. In California, the milk producers spent the equivalent of one dollar for every soul living in the state. The results? Zilch. Nada. Despite years of mustache ads, milk sales continue to fall.

The National Dairy Promotion and Research Program and the National Fluid Milk Processor Promotion Program, responsible for milk marketing, blame weak sales on calcium-fortified juices and vitamin-enhanced beverages, which they say have “undermined” milk’s healthy image and are more available than milk “in many eating establishments.” No mention of the fact that today’s modern pasteurized and ultra-pasteurized milk tastes horrible and causes multiple intestinal disorders.

Fluid Milk Processors have tried everything to get people to drink more milk, and the government has helped them, shipping posters of mustache-wearing actors, sports figures, musicians and models to 60,000 U.S. elementary schools and 45,000 public middle and high schools. But the kids hate the reduced-fat milk sold in schools, often throwing it away.

The milk lobby has even tried to promote milk as a weight loss food—a claim not supported by a recent study, which found that drinking 24 ounces of low-fat or fat-free milk every day did not help women lose weight. Why would they expect such results from low-fat milk when animal scientists know that pigs gain weight on low-fat milk, but stay lean on full-fat milk?

This article first appeared in the Fall 2016 issue of Wise Traditions, the quarterly journal of the Weston A. Price Foundation.

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