Rant from an indignant taxpayer

Some people don't want their tax money going to public health insurance, war, or social programs. As for me, I could do without subsidizing the stew of animal cruelty, obesity, and heart disease that is dairy management. Now, don't get me wrong: you know I don't want the country on "cheese" made from government-subsidized and Monsanto-frankensteinized soybeans (but most of those are used for feed, anyway). That said, here are some fun facts:

"Dairy Management spent millions of dollars on research to support a national advertising campaign promoting the notion that people could lose weight by consuming more dairy products, records and interviews show. The campaign went on for four years, ending in 2007, even though other researchers — one paid by Dairy Management itself — found no such weight-loss benefits."

In 2007, the department highlighted Pizza Hut’s Cheesy Bites pizza, Wendy’s “dual Double Melt sandwich concept,” and Burger King’s Cheesy Angus Bacon cheeseburger and TenderCrisp chicken sandwich. “Both featured two slices of American cheese, a slice of pepper jack and a cheesy sauce,” the department said.

Dairy Management, through the “Got Milk?” campaign, has been successful at slowing the decline in milk consumption, particularly focusing on schoolchildren. It has also relentlessly marketed cheese and pushed back against the Agriculture Department’s suggestion that people eat only low-fat or fat-free varieties.

In a July letter to the department’s nutrition committee, Dairy Management wrote that efforts to make fat-free cheese have largely foundered because fat is what makes cheese appealing. “Consumer acceptance of low-fat and fat-free cheeses has been limited,” it said.

Agriculture Department data show that cheese is a major reason the average American diet contains too much saturated fat.

[By 2004,]...Jean Harvey-Berino, chairwoman of the Department of Nutrition and Food Sciences at the University of Vermont...had found no evidence of weight loss. She said Dairy Management took the news poorly, threatening to audit her work. She said she was astonished when the organization pressed on with its ad campaign.

“I thought they were crazy, and that eventually somebody would catch up with them,” she said.

Her study was published in 2005, and at scientific meetings she heard from other researchers who also failed to confirm Dr. Zemel’s work, including Dr. Jack A. Yanovski, an obesity unit chief at the National Institutes of Health.

But in late 2006, Dairy Management was still citing the weight-loss claim in urging the Agriculture Department not to cut the amount of cheese in federal food assistance programs...

The campaign lasted until 2007, when the Federal Trade Commission acted on a two-year-old petition by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, an advocacy group that challenged the campaign’s claims. “If you want to look at why people are fat today, it’s pretty hard to identify a contributor more significant than this meteoric rise in cheese consumption,” Dr. Neal D. Barnard, president of the physicians’ group, said in an interview.

...Meanwhile, Dairy Management, which allotted $12.4 million for nutrition research in 2008, has moved on to finance studies on promising opportunities, including the promotion of chocolate milk as a sports recovery drink and the use of cheese to entice children into eating healthy foods like string beans.

On Oct. 13, Domino’s announced the latest in its Legends line of cheesier pizza, which Dairy Management is promoting with the $12 million marketing effort... A laboratory test...found that one-quarter of a medium thin-crust pie had 12 grams of saturated fat, more than three-quarters of the recommended daily maximum. It also has 430 calories, double the calories in pizza formulations that the chain bills as its “lighter options.”

Working with some of the largest food companies, Dairy Management has also pushed to expand the use of cheese in processed foods and home cooking. The Agriculture Department has reported a 5 percent to 16 percent increase in sales of cheese snacks in stores where Dairy Management has helped grocers reinvent their dairy aisles. Now on display is an array of sliced, grated and cubed products, along with handy recipes for home cooking that use more cheese.

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You may be wondering, or not, what giving up dairy has meant for me in terms of weight. I couldn't tell you--I didn't weight myself before I stopped consuming it two weeks ago, and I haven't weighed myself since. I mostly ate non-fat dairy anyway, so the above hardly applies. If there's a change in my weight, it would be because, on a handful of occasions, I've had an 'official' reason to just say no to junk food in which I might have otherwise partaken, just because it was there. But I haven't noticed a difference, and I'm not looking for one--I'm in this for other reasons, and I'm at a 'happy weight.' I won't complain if some of my 'old' clothes start to fit again, but holding out for that would just set me up for frustration. I can tell you that I like my food a lot better now. In fact, I have to run now because I've talked Marcela into accompanying me on a tour of "ethnic" markets in the area (we wanted to go to the Sackler, but couldn't find a time we were both free when it was open; in absence of Asian art, Asian food aisles will have to do).