Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm somewhere between 100 and 100% sure that perception was manufactured by dairy industry marketing. It was a classic bernays strategy, create the perception that everyone is doing it than everyone will do it. The same strategy used to get people to both start and stop smoking 60 years later
that's not a correct point of view. Your theory would be valid, if this didn't happen in other european countries that had no marketing whatsoever or 'evil big milk' industry behind.... Almost all former communist countries, gave lots of milk of children, whenever they could as it was universally considered healthy and nutritional. Also Milk, yogurt and cheese are staples of most Mediterranean diets, since like forev…
These two claims are not in conflict. Just like saying "People have been smoking for thousands of years and tobacco companies were normalizing nicotine addiction" aren't in conflict. They can both be true.*
Milk advertisement surely isn't the only factor in dairy consumption.
It focused for decades on persuading parents to give it to their children using nutritional claims.
* - Also, I'm not using tobacco to imply a devious or malicious use by the milk industry or that their products are unhealthy. No. The two industries used many of the same marketing consultants in the mid-20th century and so ended up with similar campaigns ... that's really it.