July 12th 2009 IV Antibiotics and milk

Well, my biopsy infection got worse yesterday, so I had to go to the ER and get IV antibiotics. Had to return today for round two, but the infection is much better. Due to circumstances, I couldn't workout today and I can't swim until this wound heals completely, but I will go for a bike ride and the gym tomorrow.

Yesterday's meal at Sweet Tomato's may have been too much of a good thing. Either that or I'm retaining water. Either way, I weighed in at 340.4 today. I have faithfully adhered to the vegan life change since the 7th of July. I know I feel better intellectually having made the switch, but I wonder if I'll feel even better in a week or so.

In preparation for an article I'm writing about Milk Advertising, I'm doing research which includes the following notations: In 2005, the estimated dairy market in the U.S. alone is 70 billion dollars. In "A Bigger Bang for the Milk Advertising Buck?" by James G. Pritchett, Donald J. Liu, and Harry M. Kaiser ( http://commodity.aem.cornell.edu/nicpre/newslet/vol3no2/index.htm ) states that in 1997 "The national dairy promotion program (1983) raised about $200 million per year, the assessment funds activities such as nutrition research, education, promotion, and fluid milk advertising."

In "COW'S MILK IS FOR CALVES," Michael Dye writes, "Doctors say cow's milk can lead to iron deficiency anemia, allergies, diarrhea, heart disease, colic, cramps, gastrointestinal bleeding, sinusitis, skin rashes, acne, increased frequency of colds and flus, arthritis, diabetes, ear infections, osteoporosis, asthma, autoimmune diseases, and more, possibly even lung cancer, multiple sclerosis and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma." Got Milk?
"...in 1974 the Federal Trade Commission felt compelled to take legal action against advertising claims made by the California Milk Producers. The ads claimed "Everybody Needs Milk." The FTC prosecuted the milk producers for "false, misleading and deceptive" advertising. A 1992 report in The New England Journal of Medicine also notes that cow's milk can contribute to juvenile diabetes and autoimmune diseases by impairing the ability of the pancreas to produce insulin."
http://www.all-creatures.org/cb/a-cowsmilk.html

According to an article on dairy, "Advertising's Influence: The Case of Dairy Products" By Noel Blisard, found at http://www.allbusiness.com/manufacturing/food-manufacturing-fruit/286506-1.html , stated... "In the early 1980's, dairy farmers were producing more milk and dairy products than Americans were consuming. Part of the surplus was due to high Government dairy support prices which kept milk production high, and part was due to declining consumption of dairy products among consumers... To stem the continuing decline in dairy product consumption, many dairy farmers participated in local advertising campaigns to promote the positive benefits of dairy products. Generic advertising is used by a cooperative, or group of producers.

... Congress passed the Dairy Production Stabilization Act of 1983 (known as the Dairy Act), which established a national program to increase consumption of milk and dairy products and reduce milk surpluses. This self-help program is funded by a mandatory 15-cents-per-hundred-weight assessment on all milk produced in the contiguous 48 states and marketed commercially by dairy farmers. It is administered by Dairy Management Incorporated (DMI), which is run by a board made up of dairy farmers to oversee the generic advertising campaigns. In 1996, $76.5 million was collected under the Dairy Act--a substantial increase over the $18.5 million spent on generic advertising in the year prior to the Dairy Act. The Fluid Milk Promotion Act of 1990 (called the Fluid Milk Act) established a second and separate dairy promotion and education program. In 1996, approximately $100 million was collected for the milk moustache campaign. Together, the Dairy and Fluid Milk Acts accounted for an estimated $179 million in additional fluid milk advertising expenditures in the 12 regions from September 1984 through September 1996. Generic advertising under the Dairy Act increased total U.S. retail cheese consumption by approximately 562 million pounds, or about 2% of total sales, from September 1984 to September 1996."
* The author is an agricultural economist with the Food and Rural Economics Division, Economic Research Service, USDA.3

Got Milk? Campaign history:
got milk? By Douglas B. Holt, L'Oreal Professor of Marketing, University of Oxford
http://www.aef.com/on_campus/classroom/case_histories/3000

In June 1993, Jeff Manning, Executive Director, was hired by the California Milk Processor Board (CMPB) to revive sagging milk consumption in California. A month later, he hired San Francisco ad agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners to create a new ad campaign for milk. "We weren't going to turn around a 15-year decline in per capita in one year, but we did believe that at least for certain portions of the population, we could flatten it out and start to move it up," said Manning. Following Manning's lead, Jeff Goodby, the agency's co-founder and chief creative, had worked with a team of planners and creatives at his agency to create got milk?, a campaign that became one of the decade's most popular and critically-acclaimed ad campaigns.

Concerned with long-term declining milk sales, California's largest milk processors voted to fund a marketing board that would be charged with creating advertising dedicated to selling milk. The processors agreed to finance the California Milk Processor Board (2) by contributing three cents for every gallon of milk they processed. This assessment allowed for a $23 million/year marketing budget. On a per-capita basis (California's population was roughly 20% of the US), this budget approximated those of the largest national auto, beer, finance, and pharmaceutical brands. Manning 's research showed that 88% of milk was consumed in the home. He and Goodby agreed that their milk deprivation ads would incorporate this reality. The ads would show people running out of milk when they needed it most, in their homes. "The whole campaign was based on somebody sitting at home thirty feet from the fridge with the TV on," said Manning. "We wanted them to feel the pain."

Market research confirmed what Goodby and Manning had hoped for. Respondents indicated that drinking milk was becoming a fashionable thing to do. "Suddenly, drinking milk was cool," recalled Manning. Manning and Goodby were as buoyed by their campaign's popularity as they were with milk's improving sales. "The response came in waves. The advertising community was first and they loved it. Aaron Burr won the Best in Show award at the 1994 Clio Awards, the advertising industry's equivalent of the motion picture industry's Academy Awards, or Oscars. In 1994, California's milk sales increased for the first time in over a decade, to 755 million gallons from the previous year's 740 million. Within months, the "got milk?" advertisements became famous. In 2006, the Got Milk? campaign went after a new demographic with a series of Spanish-language ¿Toma Leche?