My entire life doctors have been telling me I need more calcium. When I was a child, I had a glass of milk with every meal. But as I reached adulthood and research began on cows’ milk being best for baby cows, I drank less. For eight years I was a vegetarian, and still the doctors implored me to consume dairy products. And when I got pregnant, I was practically ordered to increase my dairy intake, ostensibly to protect my teeth and bones. Finally as I got older, being “a skinny white chick,” as my OB/GYN described me, I had to increase my dairy intake to strengthen my bones in preparation for later life.
Now, as Mother Jones reports, it turns out all that calcium could have been bad for me, and at best would do no harm. A 1997 study by Dr. Walter Willett determined that calcium intake does not significantly decrease the risk of hip fracture in either women or men. In fact, one of the most recent studies showed that women who drank two and a half or more glasses of milk a day had a greater risk of fracture than women who drank less than a glass of milk a day. More troubling for men, eating too much dairy may increase their prostate cancer risk.
Inflammation is a big culprit in any kind of cancer or body imbalance, and for some reason, one of the components of lactose seems to trigger inflammation.
Now the suggestion is to consume no more than two servings of dairy a day, one of which should be yogurt, because its probiotic bacteria breaks down that demon lactose.. Two servings a day? Even that seems too much. But not to the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, jampacked with ties to the dairy industry, which seems more concerned with the industry’s bottom line than the health of the American public. Wondering why that is? Let Mother Jones tell you.
