Like how parents influence their children through everything they do which the kids in turn take take for granted in truth adverting in media is just as powerful and just as dangerous. It is no surprise that the media greatly influences what we think about certain things and in so shaping our view. But what seems crazy to me is the sheer number of the things I took at first glance to be true when they were really only made to compensate money.
One example is milk, not special milk, not "almond milk", or even skim milk which is water pretending to be milk, I'm talking about plain old milk, like the one you put in your cereal every day. The same exact milk that we're told will help keep us healthy and strengthen our bones and help us grow. But the fact of the matter is that thinking is false. So then why do people thing that milk is so good for them and necessary to lead a healthy lifestyle? Marketing.
In the first world war the government of the United States gave soldiers a lot of milk in order to stop cases of malnutrition from sprouting up. Due to this a lot of farmers decided to focus solely on dairy cows, and I mean a lot. After the war had ended it turned out that there were too many bottles of milk and too few people who wanted them. At this point farmers were too far into the dairy industry and put so much into it that they could not go back so to help the Government tried to step in.
They tried to tell the general public that it was great and they should have it but that fell short. Next they made it a rule embedded in the National School Lunch Program requiring every school to include milk as a part of their lunch but they still had too many bottles left. After this the government started buying the milk for two billion each year and distributed it to schools, armies, and as food aids to people in places of need but most of it was unused, abandoned in underground storage facilities.
Ronald Reagan finally decided enough was enough and stopped this federal spending which in turn greatly offended dairy farmers. In response they created a "dairy fund" which took donations from a small percentage of farmers incomes to fund a mass campaign for dairy. This led to the "Got Milk" ads and restaurant partnerships and more cheese dishes as well as milkshakes came up on menus to the modern food we know today.
So why not just change the guidelines? The dairy farmers bribe politicians with thousands of dollars each day to raise encouragement for the milk industry even though they know it is such a scam. So just remember that next time you drink milk to "grow taller" you're really participating in a nation wide scam to compensate with a centuries old waste.
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