Conscious Choice Seattle: Milk: The Not-So-Perfect Food

August 2005 | On Your Table

Milk: The Not-So-Perfect Food

Alicia Priest

From the perspective of the status quo, it was the kind of “news” that’s best ignored. So that’s exactly what most newspapers, radio, and TV outlets did—even though the revelation appeared in a respected, peer-reviewed science journal and the subject concerned the health of millions of children and young adults.

Earlier this year, the journal Pediatrics published an article titled “Calcium, Dairy Products, and Bone Health in Children and Young Adults: A Re-evaluation of the Evidence.” The scientists who did the review belong to the Washington, D.C.-based organization Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM). PCRM members are often dismissed as animal-rights advocates.

However you view them, you can’t knock their methodology. The scientists examined 58 published studies on the relationship between calcium, dairy products and bone health. After excluding studies that did not control for exercise, weight, puberty or vitamin D—all things that influence bones—they concluded there is “scant evidence” that dairy products promote bone health in children.

That conclusion contradicts everything we’re told about cow juice, first by our mothers and then by the government and dairy industry. The U.S. government recently boosted its milk recommendation from two cups to three cups a day for everyone above age nine.

Milk is touted as Mother Nature’s near-perfect food, but physical activity and vitamin D are just as critical as calcium to building bones.

True, there are few food sources for vitamin D and it is added to milk. The main source, however, is the sun on our skin, a good reason to spend some time outdoors every day, exposing the face and forearms for 15 minutes.

Being active and being outdoors could partially explain what’s known as the “calcium paradox.” That’s the puzzle of why societies that consume the most dairy also have the highest rates of osteoporosis and broken bones. People in Asia, for instance, drink almost no milk and have a very low incidence of bone fractures.

Dr. T. Colin Campbell of Cornell University headed a massive epidemiological study of the traditional Chinese diet, disease and lifestyle—called “The China Project.” From 1983 to 1990, Cornell researchers visited more than 10,000 people in 130 villages across China from the southern coast to the Gobi desert. They found a population that relied on plant-based sources for their calcium such as vegetables and whole grains. The population had much less heart disease, cancer, diabetes and obesity than North Americans.

“Dairy consumption in China was essentially zero for most of their history,” says Campbell.

And then there’s the argument that humans, like other animals, were never designed to drink milk—especially from another species—after they’d finished their mothers’ milk. If your ancestors came from Great Britain, Scandinavia, France, Germany or the Netherlands, you likely can drink cow milk without an unpleasant reaction. If they came from Eastern Europe, Russia, Greece, Italy or another Mediterranean country, you may or may not be able to. But if they come from just about anywhere else on the globe, chances are you can’t consume dairy without a loud protest from your body.

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