I’m not an expert on this stuff so I can’t exactly reply directly to the experts quoted here.  But, I do know that my grandma has always felt that milk was an important party of a healthy diet.  She talks of growing up on the farm her parents homesteaded here in North Dakota and getting milk all the time.

Also, my nephew was very sickly when he was a youngster.  So skinny and so frail.  So the doctor recommended whole milk as part of his diet to help him get healthier, and it did help quite a bit.  He’s still pretty skinny, but he’s also a starter on the high school basketball team.

So, anectdotal evidence to be sure, but I don’t think anyone should stop drinking milk over this.

"Crippling the dairy industry”.  Is that your real agenda, Dave?  You’re such a libertarian!

Here is an article on another study in 2003 by the same guy:

Harvard University researchers denied this week the charge that they omitted material information from a study they used to scare the public about soft drinks causing diabetes.

Study author Walter Willett told the Washington Post last August, “The message is: Anyone who cares about their health or the health of their family would not consume these beverages. Parents who care about their children’s health should not keep them at home.”

He said the same thing about Soda.  So which is worse Dave?  Why don’t you focus on the evils of Coca Cola and Pepsi first, since last time I checked, the reason we are called mammals is the “mammory glands” that lactate and produce… what the hell do they produce again?  Perhaps milk from cows is not as healthy as milk from say, YOUR MOM (not yours specifically but any hypothetical mom since I have never sampled your mom’s milk--well except that once), but it sure is healthier than a can of Coke.

And before you ween us off the dairy teet, you might want to check and see if babies and children have been drinking milk since, oh, say the time when they started calling us mammals.

Good point about the history of the researcher.  If you want to find out what dieticians say about milk, visit http://www.eatright.org--the website of the American Dietetic Association.

You can get a heck of an argument either way on dairy.  Most non-caucasians can’t take it after about age 5 very well.  Many caucasians cannot, either.  On the other hand, the balance of minerals found in milk matches that in bones--so at least for children, it’s ideal.

There are any number of other arguments based on protein leaching, alternative sources, and exercise--which has far more to do with bone density than diet, for what it’s worth.  Use your bones and they grow stronger.  Sit on your duff like I’m doing now and they weaken, no matter what your diet.

So is dairy necessary?  No, but keep your cotton-pickin’ hands off my Breyer’s!  :^)

I’ve been saying for years that milk is unhealthy. 

Milk may contain calcium, but it also contains a lot of fat (good recommendation for the skinny kid to drink it). 

Here’s some more annecdotal evidence:  did you ever notice that fat people - especially kids - drink a lot of milk?  I used to work in a grocery store where I saw fat people buying rediculous amounts of milk, and I was also in a boy scout troop where I watched fat kids guzzle milk like water.

In addition, humans are the only animals that drink the milk of another (cows), and we’re the only ones that drink it beyond infancy.

Like the others, I’m no expert on the subject, but that’s just something to think about.

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.

This is the problem with correlation studies: what is the causation?  Did higher calcium intake cause these women to have bone density loss or could it be that their doctors told them to take more calcium after they started having bone fractures?

Sure, Ilove the occasional milkshake as much as the next guy, but otherwise, I’ve never been much of a milk drinker.

A baby needs a lot of fat for brain development, but after that...?

Once my kids hit two, I cut them down to one glass a day. They seem healthy to me!

robert108 wrote:

“Crippling the dairy industry”. Is that your real agenda, Dave? You’re such a libertarian!

One of my key libertarian beliefs is that the free people making free choices (ie, not the government) is all that is needed for unethical companies to go out of business.

For example, if Wal-Mart wanted to start hiring 10-year-olds to stock their shelves and pay them 10 cents an hour, I wouldn’t want the government to tell them they couldn’t. Why? Because it wouldn’t be necessary. Consumers--the free market--would stop shopping at Wal-Mart, crippling their child-labor industry. The free market will have done its job.

That’s all I’m saying abou the dairy industry. The liberal perspective would be for the government to intervene and shut them down. The libertarian perspective (at least, the animal welfare libertarian perspective) would be to hope enough people turn vegan to make dairy farms unprofitable, and thus close down.

I’m sure McDonalds wants Burger King to go out of business, because that will increase McDonalds’ sales, but I highly doubt you’d call McDonalds liberal, would you?

Tonikem: We’re also the only animals with thumbs, and that domesticate other animals. I daresay that if various other animals had any way to do so they’d happily drink the milk of other species, as an efficient means of energy acquisition.

Until other species manage domestication, however, this is unlikely to occur.

(My point being that “humans are the only animal that...” is no real argument for or against whatever it is we uniquely do.)

I don’t care about milk drinking, but I do care about cheese. Sweet, delicious, life-giving Cheese, proof of God’s existence and benevolence…

Can someone please explain to me how to use HTML tags? I could do it on the old system..... :(