Dairy products and calcium



Milk is heavily promoted by the dairy industry as a source of calcium and therefore, one is supposed to conclude, beneficial or even essential to bone health. It is easy to refute these nonsensical claims, since the incidence of osteoporosis is positively correlated with dairy consumption: Europe and America have the highest incidence, while Asian countries where most adults consume no dairy products have much lower rates. This is not due to genetics. Asian-Americans born in the U. S. have osteoporosis rates similar to those of other Americans.

Drinking milk will not somehow make calcium soak into your bones, in fact the animal protein in milk increases calcium excretion. The physiology of calcium in the body is complicated, and many factors govern its uptake and excretion. Animal protein and salt increase calcium excretion, so avoiding them is a plus for your bones. By reducing the amount of acid produced during digestion, a nutritarian eating style greatly decreases calcium excretion.

There is ample calcium in a nutritarian diet, in particular, leafy green vegetables such as kale and collard greens contain signficant amounts. Your closest biological cousin, the gorilla, eats a nutritarian diet, and has plenty of bone strength. To be safe, it is advisable for anyone in the developed world to take a daily supplement of 500 mg calcium (but not more than this) with 800 IU vitamin D and 200 mg of magnesium, a mineral that plays a key role in calcium absorption. Adequate levels of vitamin D are essential for calcium absorption, and many people need even more supplementation. Vitamin D deficiency so common that as discussed in the section on vitamins and other supplements, it is critically important to be tested and to find the amount of vitamin D supplementation that will maintain a 25-hydroxyvitamin D level of at least 35 ng/ml.

Besides a healthy diet and adequate vitamin D levels, a critical factor to maintaining bone strength is weight-bearing exercise (that is, exercise in which the bones must support the full weight of the body), especially exercise involving impact. A varied exercise program that includes core strengthening and impact not only strengthens bones, but also helps maintain balance for agility and avoidance of falls.

If you are worried about your bone health, the best things to do are to avoid caffeine, added salt, and foods containing animal protein, eat lots of green vegetables, get enough vitamin D, and do a lot of weight-bearing exercise. That is, pretty much the same things that are best for your overall health.

So milk won't help your bones, but is it a good food anyway? It's a great food for a growing baby cow, but it is biochemically quite different from human milk, and has a lot of deleterious effects on human infants. For human adults, it is a harmful food. Animal proteins are not very good foods in general, but milk proteins stimulate cell growth, which makes them cancer promoters in adult animals. Commercially produced dairy is laced with hormones and other substances given to factory farm cows. Whole milk is very high in saturated fat, and lacks the many micronutrients of the healthy plant fats in seeds, nuts, and avocadoes. As for butter and cheese, they should not even exist (for adding a cheesy taste, try nutritional yeast). Dairy is just very bad food.