New Report Suggests Dairy Is 'Important' For Health And The Environment, Despite Contrary Evidence

A new report claims that dairy is beneficial for human health and the environment.

The report is titled “Balancing health and sustainability: The role of dairy in the UK diet,” and reviews existing research. AHDB, the organization behind the report, claims that dairy plays “an important role for both people and the planet.”

AHDB (the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board) is a statutory levy board sponsored by the UK’s Department for Environment, Food, & Rural Affairs (DEFRA). It says that the report was written by “independent nutritionists and AHDB experts.”

The report’s findings include that dairy is a “building block” of healthy, sustainable diets, that it is affordable, nutritious, and supports health “at every age,” and that its nutritional benefits are best considered as a whole rather than individual nutrients.

ProVeg International, an NGO working towards food system change, described the report as “another exercise in marketing over health and evidence,” and “quite in contradiction” with a “growing bank of evidence” that suggests the opposite.

New report described as ‘another exercise in marketing’

ProVeg noted that dairy is a source of essential nutrients, but “is not required in the diet at any life stage.” Dairy is unsuitable for people with lactose intolerance, who make up 70 percent of the world’s population. Dairy has been found to increase the risk of heart attack and stroke, prostate cancer, cancer mortality, and serious allergic reactions. Milk is also thought to be less healthy than soy milk, overall.

“The AHDB’s latest dairy report is another exercise in marketing over health and evidence,” wrote ProVeg. “Dairy is not essential for good health; plant-based alternatives can offer many health benefits which dairy cannot, and the environmental damage caused by dairy production far outweighs any proposed ‘benefits.’”

In 2025, ProVeg’s open letter to DEFRA and the AHDB challenged the latter’s “Let’s Eat Balanced Campaign,” which it described as being “at odds with established scientific evidence on healthy and sustainable diets.” The letter was signed by organizations representing more than one million healthcare professionals.

Dairy and the environment

Photo shows the milk and dairy section in a supermarket. A new AHDB report claims that dairy is beneficial for both human health and the environment, but food advocacy NGO ProVeg described the findings as "another exercise in marketing over health and evidence" — Adobe Stock Plant-based milk alternatives are significantly better for the environment than dairy

The new report made several additional claims about the impact of dairy on the environment. AHDB found that “well-managed” livestock farming offers “key environmental benefits,” supports natural resource management and ecosystem services, and makes “best use” of the UK’s available land for food production.

In contrast, ProVeg highlighted the disproportionate role that animal farming plays in environmental destruction and the climate crisis. It contributes two-thirds of all agricultural greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) in the UK, and methane, in particular.

Farming cows for meat and dairy drives water pollution, while factory farming – which accounts for 85 percent of all farmed animals in the UK – promotes catastrophic soil degradation and erosion, and biodiversity loss nationwide.

Last year, the Climate Change Committee (CCC) recommended a 20 percent reduction in dairy consumption by 2035. It also suggested an increased emphasis on plant-based alternatives, which all have a significantly smaller environmental footprint than traditional dairy products, and are free from animal cruelty.