Are human beings really the only the animal on the planet that requires the milk designed for another species' baby in order to be healthy?
We know that genetically we have changed very little in the last 100,000 years. We also know that it is only in the last 10,000 years that we have domesticated cattle and started drinking their milk. So we know that we have not evolved to drink milk, but it good for us?
Do we need milk for calcium? According to Eileen Kennedy of the US Department of Agriculture, “There's nothing against vegetable sources of calcium, but we have to fashion healthful eating around current habits". In other words we can get all the calcium we need from vegetables, but it is easier to get people to drink milk than to eat vegetables.
OK so maybe we don't need to drink milk, but isn't it still a good source of calcium? Not according to Neal Barnard, head of >Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, who says “It would be hard to imagine a worse vehicle for delivering calcium to the human body" (The Washington, DC-based PCRM is a non-profit advocacy organization, with over 100,000 members, that promotes preventive medicine).
Although milk's calcium and other nutrients do promote bone growth, confirms Dr. T. Colin Campbell, PhD, nutritional biochemist at Cornell University, other substances in dairy foods (certain proteins and especially sodium) actually leach some calcium from bone.
Perhaps this explains why a 12 year Harvard Nurses' Health Study involving 78,000 nurses found that those who drank the most milk, two or more glasses per day, had a slightly higher risk of arm fracture (5 per cent increase) and significantly higher risk of hip fracture (45% increase).
It may also explain the disparities between calcium intake and bone health that can be seen worldwide. People in countries that consume the highest levels of dairy foods (North American and northern European nations) take in two or three times more calcium, yet break two or three times more bones than people with the lowest calcium intake (Asians and Africans).
So milk is not an essential part of any diet, as we have been led to believe. But is it actually bad for us?
Epidemiological research suggests a correlation between milk consumption and at least two kinds of cancer prevalent in Europe and North America: breast and prostate.
In Asia, where many people drink no milk at all, breast cancer tends to be rare. In rural China among women aged 35 to 64, for example, Campbell found that breast cancer deaths averaged 8.7 per 100,000, as opposed to 44 per 100,000 in the US, about a five-fold difference.
In the US Physician's Health Study, researchers tracked 20,885 male doctors over 10 years. Those who consumed at least two and a half servings of dairy food per day were 30 per cent more likely to develop prostate cancer than doctors who consumed less than half a serving.
So what should you be doing to help ensure good bone health?
Research has shown exercise to play a more significant role in increasing bone density than dietary changes, so by all means ensure that your diet includes calcium-rich foods and vegetables (salmon, spinach and turnips are three good examples), but also make sure that you are getting enough movement, both quality and quantity in your body, and particularly your spine. And make sure that you are doing plenty of resistance exercise on a regular basis.
Subscribe to this comment's feed
