Calcium Consumption-Scientific Studies-Calcium Loss-Bone Health-Milk Myth

Debunking the Milk Myth: Why Milk is Bad for You and Your...

Debunking the Milk Myth: Why Milk is Bad for You and Your Bones -Excerpts from article linked above. Click the link or photo to read the full (interesting and informative) article. Also, I thought that photo was funny so I used it.

• Milk Depletes the calcium from your bones. Not only do we barely absorb the calcium from cow’s milk (especially pasteurized), but it also increases calcium loss from the bones.
• Cows milk is custom-designed for calves. Thanks to our creative ingenuity and perhaps related to our ancient survival needs, we adopted the dubious habit of drinking another species’ milk. Unlike humans, once calves are weaned, they never drink milk again. Each mammalian has it’s own “designer” milk, and cows’ milk is no exception.
  Cow’s milk contains on average three times the amount of protein than human milk which creates metabolic disturbances in humans that have detrimental bone health consequences.
• Scientific studies show that milk increases fracture risk.  Many scientific studies contradict the conventional wisdom that milk and dairy consumption help reduce osteoporotic fractures. Surprisingly, studies demonstrating that milk and dairy products actually fail to protect bones from fractures outnumber studies that prove otherwise.
  The 12 year long Harvard Nurses’ Health Study found that those who consumed the most calcium from dairy foods broke more bones than those who rarely drank milk. This is a broad study based on 77,761 women aged 34 through 59 years of age.
• Shocking statistics ignored by mainstream medicine. Amy Lanou Ph.D., nutrition director for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine in Washington, D.C., states that: “The countries with the highest rates of osteoporosis are the ones where people drink the most milk and have the most calcium in their diets. The connection between calcium consumption and bone health is actually very weak, and the connection between dairy consumption and bone health is almost nonexistent.”
• Milk is an acidifying animal protein. Like any other animal derived protein-rich food, milk has a positive potential renal acid load (PRAL) which triggers a protective biological reaction to neutralize all the damaging acidic protein before it reaches the kidneys.
  The body is designed for survival, so it sacrifices bone density to protect the kidneys and urinary tract because the latter are essential to survival. And the most readily available source of acid neutralizer is in the bones. So even though milk contains calcium, it ends up sapping your bones of that crucial mineral.
• Today’s milk is a processed food. Until the end of the 19th century in Europe and the beginning of the 20th century in the US, milk was consumed unpasteurized or raw. Later on, homogenization became the industry’s standard. These processes further alter milk’s chemistry and actually increase its detrimental acidifying effects.
  Nowadays, milking cows are given antibiotics and most are also injected with a genetically engineered form of bovine growth hormone (rBGH). A man-made or synthetic hormone used to artificially increase milk production, rBGH also increases blood levels of the insulin-growth factor 1 (IGF-1) in those who drink it. And higher levels of IGF-1 are linked to several cancers.

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