Milk: Does A Body Bad, Say Scientists
By
Dave
on February 10, 2006 at 06:39 am
Chicago Tribune
This would certainly be big news. I'm obviously not a nutrtionist, but if this all checks out it might lead to a lot more people eliminating milk from their diet, which would cripple the dairy industry and prevent a lot of (apparently unnecessary) suffering. I'm already doing my part.
You know it like the Pledge of Allegiance: "Milk helps build strong teeth and bones."
But does it really? Or, as nutrition researchers from Harvard and Cornell Universities are radically suggesting: Have we all been duped by the dairy industry's slick, celebrity-driven "got milk?" advertising campaign?
(...)Last March, the journal Pediatrics published a review article concluding there is "scant evidence" that consuming more milk and dairy products will promote child and adolescent bone health. Some leading practitioners of integrative medicine, including best-selling author Dr. Andrew Weil, suggest eliminating dairy products from the diet to help treat irritable bowel syndrome, asthma, eczema and ear infections.
(...)But researchers Walter Willett, chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, and T. Colin Campbell, professor emeritus of nutritional biochemistry at Cornell University, say there is little evidence that shows boosting your calcium intake to the currently recommended levels will prevent fractures.
Willett, who co-authored "The Nurses' Health Studies," one of the largest investigations into the risk factors for major chronic diseases in women, found that women with the highest calcium consumption from dairy products actually had substantially more fractures than women who drank less milk.
Campbell, who like Willett comes from a dairy-farming family, found the same thing after spending several decades surveying health-related effects of a plant-based diet and death rates from cancer in more than 2,400 Chinese counties.
This would certainly be big news. I'm obviously not a nutrtionist, but if this all checks out it might lead to a lot more people eliminating milk from their diet, which would cripple the dairy industry and prevent a lot of (apparently unnecessary) suffering. I'm already doing my part.
