This Olympic Medalist Just Launched a Campaign Urging People to Ditch Dairy

Seven-time USA Cycling national champion, two-time Pan American champion, and Olympic silver medalist Dotsie Bausch has launched a 10-day challenge called the Plant Milk Challenge.

Participants pledge to ditch dairy January 10 through 20 and will receive daily inspirational stories, vegan recipes that swap animal milk for plant-based milk, loads of prizes, and more. The grand-prize winner will receive an Almond Cow machine.

The Plant Milk Challenge will encourage and guide participants with eight videos from Olympic medalists and other world-class athletes who thrive on a vegan diet.

The challenge is part of Compassion Champs, whose mission is to educate audiences worldwide on the immense, widespread animal suffering in our industrial food system. This campaign is incredibly important considering the dairy industry spends millions of dollars “sponsoring Olympic athletes to trick consumers into thinking dairy milk is important for health. This actually couldn’t be further from the truth.

Dairy consumption has been linked to increased cancer risk. According to a 2006 Harvard study, women with diets high in meat and dairy raised their risk of cancer by 33 percent. Dairy consumption has also been linked to prostate cancer in more than 20 studies.

What’s more, women who consume dairy products, such as yogurt, ice cream, and cheese, increase their risk of mortality from breast cancer by 50 percent, according to an extensive 2013 study.

But dairy isn’t just awful for your health. It’s also unspeakably cruel.

At dairy factory farms, cows are treated as mere milk-producing machines. They are forcibly impregnated and kept in terrible conditions. Shortly after they are born, calves are torn from their mothers. Male calves are killed for veal. Females are forced into the dairy herd, trapped in a cycle of abuse for years until they are considered “spent and sent to slaughter.

Heartbreaking, right? Just watch this undercover video from a Mercy For Animals investigation.


This blatant cruelty is precisely why the Plant Milk Challenge is so important.

If you’re still drinking cow’s milk, then it’s time you joined the millions who are boycotting this terrible industry by ditching dairy and other animal products. Click here to sign up for the 10-day challenge.

For a list of dairy alternatives, click here.