The Case Against Milk
Drinking milk is as American as Mom and apple pie. Until not long ago, Americans were encouraged not only by the lobbying group called the American Dairy Association but by parents, doctors and teachers to drink four 8-ounce glasses of milk, “nature’s perfect food,” every day. That’s two pounds! We don’t consume two pounds a day of anything else; even our per capita soda consumption is “only” a pound a day.
Sidney M. Baker, author of “Detoxification and Healing,” …adds “it’s worth noting that milk and other dairy products are our biggest source of saturated fat, and there are very credible links between dairy consumption and both Type 1 diabetes and the most dangerous form of prostate cancer.”
Mark Bittman’s full editorial.
I wonder what percentage of the population milk is healthy for? I don’t think milk is as bad as Sidney Baker thinks it is, but at the same time most people shouldn’t be drinking two pounds a day.
I’ve met people who have allergy-related sinus problems from dairy products. I’ve also met people who are lactose intolerant. By some estimates, more than three-quarter of people around the world are not able to digest milk after they reach adulthood. Yet, northern European and other cultures with a history of animal husbandry stored the nutritional value from milk in the form of cheese. It’s very interesting to consider whether milk is actually good for you; bad for you; or merely a way to produce and store the nutrition from milk over the winter months throughout history when calories were in short supply.
Milk and other dairy products can also be very fattening.
I would like to see someone make the case against soy milk, for which there has been a small controversy brewing for some years now.
Isn’t the concern over saturated fat the reason many people drink skim milk?
The milk industry has done a pretty good job at marketing all kinds of milk.
(Begin sarcasm)It tastes bad so it must be good for you.(end sarcasm)
A New York Times columist opines about a link between milk and various dreaded diseases. He doesn’t even bother to specify the link.
“Very credible” doesn’t exactly sum up the evidence that shows up from 15 minutes on Google Scholar. It suggests that we don’t know because the study results are all over the place.
For a contrary opinion, see Pickering and Gallacher (2010) who summarize their overview of the evidence with “the number of cohort studies which give evidence
on individual dairy food items is very small, but, again, there is no convincing evidence of harm from consumption of the separate food items. In conclusion, there appears to be an enormous mis-match between the evidence from long-term prospective studies and perceptions of harm from the consumption of dairy food items.”
Hopefully the New York Times hasn’t handed Mayor Mike Bloomberg a new food regulation to consider to protect New Yorkers from themselves! Perhaps a mandatory NYC menu warning: “We can only serve you 1.9 lb or less of dairy products per meal ordered” will suffice for purposes of legal liability.
Sid Baker MD and I are colleagues in environmental medicine. We both have treated very severe food allergic patients with immunotherapy so they can successfully tolerate milk again. I do this every day. It is definitely best nutritionally, psycholog-ically and medically that an abnormal immune response is turned off. A child can then eat milk products, which are ubiquitous, with joy not fear and simply “be a kid.”
Milk and dairy products may be a huge source of saturated fat, but I for one will never stop drinking milk and eating dairy products. Of course, everything must be done in moderation.
Interesting post. Similar controversies have sprung from time to time about several food items, including eggs, beaf, wheat, etc. One day we hear such and such food is good for health, and the other day someone says one should stay away from it.
@Dorothy, I could be mistaken, but isn’t lactose intolerance the NORMAL immune response?
Milk allergy is an abnormal immunologic response, most frequently hereditary. The treatment is avoidance or specialized immunotherapy, which allows the treated patient to drink milk.
Lactase deficiency is a deficiency of the lactase enzyme needed to properly digest milk, most frequently hereditary. Absence of a lactase persistence allele is extremely prevalent worldwide, as noted by the previous commentator.
The first step in the differential diagnosis between milk allergy and lactose intolerance is a trial of lactase supplementation.
Both these problems present along a very wide spectrum.
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