The Osteoporosis Myth

For years we've been told to drink our milk and eat dairy products to build strong bones and teeth. There have been many cute campaigns telling us how milk

does a body good and celebrities with the infamous milk mustache asking us if we "got milk." But the sad truth is, milk does no body good, well only baby cows, the ones cow's milk was intended. When we look at osteoporosis, we are told it is caused by a lack of calcium so we should drink up (of cow's milk) in order to prevent this condition later in life. This may lead one to believe that osteoporosis is a calcium deficiency. Yet the United States, Sweden and London have the highest levels of cow's milk consumption and they also have the highest rates of osteoporosis worldwide. How can this be? This is because osteoporosis is a metabolic disorder that is caused by a high protein diet, not lack of calcium intake. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 1995 explained that "dietary protein increases production of acid in the blood which can be neutralized by calcium mobilized from the skeleton." This means, the more protein (which is plentiful in cow's milk) you take in, the more acid gets built up in the blood. But your blood needs to be neutralized, so in order for this to happen, it must take calcium from the bones which causes them to become weak. So even if someone were getting 1,400mg of calcium per day, bone mass of up to 4 percent could still continue annually if the individual were on a high protein diet. Many of us think that a high protein diet consists of eating steaks and protein shakes, but an abundance of protein is also found in cow's milk. If you look at the rates a calf and a human baby grow, of course a one year old human is quite smaller than a one year old calf. What is needed for us to grow? Proteins. And what do babies drink? Milk. Cow's milk has far too many proteins for humans to consume, this is why they are so much bigger than we are. So when we drink cow's milk, we also create a high protein diet. The key to preventing osteoporosis is to reduce the excess protein in our diet, not increase our consumption of cow's milk.