Anti-Milk Propagandist Hurts Her Cause

I received this email today.

Hello, I am a La leche member and we NEVER encourage new mothers to drink cows milk. It is highly allergenic and commonly creates many problems in newborns that often leads to mothers early weaning and babies lifelong problems with an induced milk allergy and or colitis, and diarrhea which is life threatening in babies. Please discourage all new mothers who are breastfeeding from taking any milk products. Children should also never be given cows milk. It creates muscus buildup leading to ear infections, etc and is usually full of hormones, pesticides, etc. Thanks for making this correction to your customers.
Tahnks, B.

I'm removing the sender's name out of kindness.

I can't imagine what kind of list she is sending this to. Obviously, I'm not the primary target. I don't have customers, and I'm not in the milk business in any way.

But let's suppose I was. It would still make no sense, because nobody in the world advocates the use of cow's milk for infants under one year of age. Nobody. And every major health and medical body including the American Academy of Pediatrics has been warning parents for years not to use cow's milk, but cow's milk formula, for infants. (Parents have been warned for years that soy milk is also not to be used for infants. Only properly fortified soy milk formula is safe.) These are issues that were settled long ago.

Why should mothers be discouraged from drinking milk products? That's a more contentious issue. Mothers with a known family history of dairy allergies may want to avoid milk themselves because it is possible for the cow's milk proteins to transfer to the baby through the breastmilk, making the infant more likely to develop a full-blown allergy.

There is no good reason for all mothers to avoid milk, though. Saying that is simply standard anti-milk propaganda. And obviously, anti-milk propaganda is what this email is all about, given the dire and incorrect warnings about, among other things, "muscus."

That's the real issue for me. The email is a horrifying collection of typos, spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and bad sentence structure. It shames the writer. It embarrasses me just to have to read it. Why would anyone listen to the semi-literate scrawlings of a ignorant propagandist? It discredits her entire cause, and makes any future, and more credible, discussions less likely to be read.

B. has hurt her cause by this rash act. It's a bad cause, so she may have done some good inadvertently. But I'd rather win through more accurate facts and more reasoned discussion.

Kids, leave propaganda to the professionals. It could thoughtlessly blow up in your hands, and leave you, well, thoughtless.