Is animal milk healthy?

Milk is healthy because it contains essential and abundant nutrients.

Question: Is animal milk healthy?
Position1 of 4›: Yes, milk is healthy.
Argument‹2 of 2: Milk is healthy because it contains essential and abundant nutrients.

Milk's nutritional contents make it healthy for consumption.

The argument

Milk is widely known as nutrient-rich, and this argument makes the case for it on the basis of what a single food delivers at once. Among the nutrients abundant in milk are vitamin B12, vitamin D, phosphorus, riboflavin and potassium, alongside plenty of protein and calcium — a combination rather than a single headline ingredient, which is what distinguishes milk from foods that supply one thing well. These nutrients are described as essential for biochemical body processes, meaning the body requires them and cannot manufacture them for itself, so they have to arrive through the diet. Their effects are spread across several systems rather than concentrated in one. Calcium and phosphorus aid bone structure, strength and density; the nutrients in milk also help regulate or improve muscle control and growth, the production of serotonin — a chemical in the brain associated with happiness — and heart rate, heart health and blood pressure. The claim is therefore not that milk is good for one purpose but that it contributes to processes ranging from the skeleton to mood. The argument's sharpest point concerns scarcity rather than quantity. Milk is especially high in vitamins that are rare in the food we eat, which means it supplies the nutrients most people lack the most. A food's value depends on what a diet is otherwise short of: something abundant elsewhere adds little, while something scarce elsewhere fills a real gap. That is what the position rests on. These nutrients are essential to our bodies, and on this argument milk is the best or, for some of them, the only practical way of getting them — which is why it is treated as healthy rather than merely harmless.

Premises

[P1]Milk contains an abundance of essential nutrients including vitamin B12, vitamin D, calcium, protein, phosphorus, riboflavin, and potassium. [P2] These nutrients are essential for vital bodily processes such as bone strength, muscle growth, heart health, and serotonin production. [P3] Milk supplies many of these nutrients in forms and quantities that are otherwise rare or hard to obtain in a typical diet. [C] Therefore, milk is healthy because it provides essential and abundant nutrients the body needs.

Counter-arguments

-Milk is not the only way to get these nutrients, or the best way. -Milk actually can decrease our bone’s calcium, not increase it. -Some of the vitamins in milk, such as vitamin D, are added by producers and not naturally occurring.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The nutrient list is accurate but not distinctive: each of these is available from other foods, and the vitamin D is generally added by fortification rather than naturally present, as the counter notes. [Rejecting P2] That nutrients are essential does not establish that the food supplying them is healthy on balance, which depends on the whole composition — saturated fat, and added sugar in flavoured products — and on what the alternatives are. [Rejecting P3] The scarcity claim does not hold generally: calcium comes from leafy greens, tofu, fortified plant drinks and small fish eaten with bones, protein from many sources — and most of the world's adults lack lactase persistence, so milk cannot be the food supplying what people most lack.