I’ve met some people who seem to think dairy products are to be avoided at all costs, and there are numerous websites that embrace this notion. Said websites strike me as being long on hysteria and short on evidence. Objectively oriented sources, such as NIH, do not support the blanket condemnation of dairy foods. My question is why is there such intense denigration of them? It seems to have all the hallmarks of conspiracy theory.
I know some folks are lactose intolerant. They don’t hate dairy, they would like to consume it.
I haven’t seen any anti dairy info. Where have you read this?
Some people either never had or lose the ability to digest lactose or have allergies, leading to intestinal distress.
I’ve drunk milk all my life without problems.
Please note that lactose intolerance is not the issue here. Obviously folks with said intolerance should avoid dairy. I’m referring to people/sites who portray dairy products as unfit for any human consumption. Some examples:
We have a nutritionist at work and I asked her, “How come there’s so much bullshit in the world of food?” Without missing a beat she said, “Because there’s money to be made.” There are all sorts of crazy food ideas. Remember when eggs were bad for you? Soy feminizes men (and maybe turns frogs gay, I don’t know). Gluten is terrible for you for some reason even if you don’t have Celiac.
The most vocal opponents of dairy I’ve found have been vegans. They’ve been the ones to push the idea that all dairy is harmful to human beings. But then vegan “milk” options like oat, soy, or almond milk are a thing now and I don’t think most people purchase them because they’re vegan.
Okay, first, the three cites you listed all show a heavy bias.
The first is from a group trying to avoid any use of animals in science or food. The second is a Vegan food based blog/website. And the third is selling supplements. Not exactly what I’d call responsible, impartially based articles.
Now, I think there -IS- some pushback on dairy, but it’s part of a pendulum swing. Growing up, dairy was pushed by schools, by the “food pyramid” and other cultural sources as being far more essential than it actually is. We’ve had tons of threads on this, and how so much of that “food science” was formulated to drive sales of dairy, meat, and grains.
There’s nothing wrong with dairy, as long as your personal biome/biology allows it, you like the flavor, and aren’t morally opposed to it. But it’s far from essential in the way decades of propaganda made it out to be.
Indeed. IME, setting aside people who are lactose-intolerant or otherwise allergic to dairy products, nearly every person and source I’ve seen that has been stridently anti-dairy is either (a) aggressively vegan, (b) an animal-rights group, (c) an environmental group (cattle emit a whole lot of methane), and/or (d) selling woo-intensive foods or supplements.
As many of you may know, I work in advertising. I had the Milk Processors Education Program (a.k.a. “MilkPEP”) as a client for several years; they’re the quasi-governmental board which did the long-running “milk mustache” ads. And, yeah, while they promoted messaging around the nutritional benefits of milk, the ultimate goal of their advertising programs was to sell more milk and dairy products.
Food faddists are and always have been legion. Any food you can think of and some that would never occur to you have been made villains by cranks, fools, and grifters over the years. Dairy goes through cycles of acceptance and rejection.
Vegans are just one small corner of this universe. People who push paleo diets shun any food that wouldn’t have been part of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Others simply insist that food made for animals should not be used for humans. Raw foodists hate the thought of pasteurized milk. Some point out - correctly - that milk lacks some vitamins that are needed, a technical truth being used as a lie, since mainstream milk is always sold as vitamin D fortified.
Ideology, conspiracy theories, and scientific ignorance - although there is indeed evidence, though controversial, that milk has some correlations with negative medical conditions - are powerful drivers, but I agree that making money on a fad product usually works better if you can convince others that the alternative is in some way the equivalent of poison. The very existence of the Food and Drug Act in America stems from the claims of unregulated products touting their miraculous benefits and defaming the competition. OTOH, the dairy industry has always had a strong lobby that created government pressure for them and against alternatives: Every Body Needs Milk was a California’s group’s creation. Many midwestern daily states introduced rules that made the cheaper margarines unpalatable, including some demanding that it be dyed pink.
As the author of a book called Milk Is Not for Every Body - about lactose intolerance and in no way anti-milk in general - I’m sensitive to the history and the current place of milk in American society. The anti movement is real, although not very coherent. Mostly, though, it’s tiny compared to other movements, like those against sugar or meats.
I drank milk in my childhood without problems. In later years, I’ve been drunk most of my life, also without problems.
This is an anecdote, not a parable. 
ETA: On a factual basis, lactose intolerance is certainly a medical thing, but there may also be ideological aspects to some of the claims, and the two are very different and should be distinguished as such.
My vegan daughters tried to gross me out by telling me cow’s milk is full of pus. Nice try, kids—but it didn’t work.
Sure, milk does contain somatic cells, mostly leukocytes (white blood cells), especially if the cow has mastitis (an udder infection). That sounds gross in theory—and if my glass of milk contained, say, a million such cells, that would be udderly disgusting. But the FDA sets a strict legal limit of 750,000 somatic cells per milliliter in milk sold commercially. So… bottoms up! And pass the cookies, kids!
I haven’t drank a glass of milk in many years. It’s not a beverage that I crave.
But, I eat cereal with milk regularly.
I like Sour Cream and cheddar Cheese.
I can’t enjoy eggnog anymore. It started tearing up my stomach. Same with egg custard. I used to make it regularly. Tears me up now.
I was allergic to cows milk and my mom had to substitute goats milk. That went away by age 4 and I’ve never had problems with milk since.
I worked on a dairy farm for six months when I was 18. The fact that I still drink milk is proof that I cannot be grossed out by anything.
Because there is this one weird trick with dairy products that dieticians would hate you to know about.
I have a dairy protein allergy.
Butter doesn’t bother me and I can handle small servings of cheese or sour cream
But a glass of milk or a dish of ice cream? I get spasms in my esophagus, and overload of mucus, and difficulty breathing. It lasts for over an hour and is scary as hell. People near me can hear the sounds my throat is making. I’ve joked that if I were ever planning to kill myself I’d head to the Dairy Queen.
The anti-dairy crowd would use my case to push their agenda. But that’s ridiculous. For every person with my symptoms there are millions more who can consume dairy with no problems.
Also, or maybe this is the same thing, articles titled ‘Milk is neither the very best nor the very worst foodstuff’ don’t get clicks. Everything has to be POISON! or MIRACLE FOOD! - and over time, the people consuming the articles have been conditioned to expect all of the food news to be polarised like that.
I remember my middle school cafeteria (early 1970s). We were all encouraged to bring our own lunches, but the caf would provide things like soup, donuts, ice cream bars, and potato chips to supplement. Healthy, yeah!
But nothing to drink but white milk, chocolate milk, and orange drink. No soda pop, and water was available from a drinking fountain. Because the school board and our parents felt that milk (even chocolate) and orange drink was healthy for growing children.
If there’s a hate for dairy, I’m not seeing it. Not in my circles anyway. I love cheese, and from time to time, I still love a glass of white milk and chocolate-chip cookies.
There is an anti-dairy crowd, but as others have mentioned, it seems to be connected with the vegan crowd more than anything else, where it’s connected at all.
It isn’t any crazier than people vehemently anti-meat, or opposed to eating pork or any of 1,000’s of other food hang-ups, customs, whatever.
I suppose that if the OP is seeing a lot of this online, he’s managed to provoke the algorithm into feeding him bunches of it.
I agree it’s all hysteria and grifting. But I personally see zero evidence of it online. Because I haven’t provoked the Content God to start sending it to me en masse. Lucky me.
Instead I get ads and “recommended for you” articles for stuff I’d rather not mention here. Lest you too be infected with it. 
I never heard the demonization of dairy. I do seem to recall Michael Pollan saying something about “no other species drinks another species’ milk,” and “the purpose of milk is to quickly fatten a calf.”
But I just thought it was pretty high in fat, it is easy to eat more cheese than is good for you, and milk certainly is not the heath food previously pushed.
It’s not “some folks”, it’s 75% or so of black and brown people and up to 90% of asians. Dairy is just not consumed by grown ups in a lot of the world.