A brief definition of apologetics:

Apologetics is the field of study concerned with the systematic defense of a position. Someone who engages in apologetics is called an apologist or an “apologete”. The term comes from the Greek word apologia (απολογία), meaning defense of a position against an attack.

(cited from Wikipedia.org)

For some time, I’ve been planning to write a regular series of posts about veganism and why I am a vegan. Well, there’s no time like the present, so I thought I would kick it off today. This edition is going to be short and sweet, and will briefly explain to you why I don’t consume dairy. There are various reasons why I don’t eat dairy anymore - and this BBC news article explains one of my reasons - it has a link to ovarian cancer.

Ovarian cancer is in my family - I lost my mother to the disease over 2 years ago. She fought a long, hard and extremely stressful and painful battle against it for 11 years before succumbing to it at the age of 62.

I think back to when my mother used to eat yogurt, have milk in her tea or cereal, eat desserts and puddings, have some cheese on toast - consuming these things because she thought they were good for her, when in fact they may have contributed to her death. Milk contains lactose, a type of sugar, which according to scientific research is thought to overstimulate hormone production and aggravate tumour growth.

So, apart from the fact that consuming the breast milk of other mammals is a bit weird - and come on, think about it, it IS weird - (and it’s only overwhelming conditioning by society from a young age that makes you think it ISN’T weird) milk really is NOT GOOD for me. I don’t want to be a victim like my mother was, and I’m pretty sure my mother wouldn’t me to be either.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 at 8:10 pm and is filed under Veganism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.