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3 Servings of Dairy per Day for Good Health? Or Death?

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At times I question my anti-dairy stance because every public health recommendation includes 3 servings of dairy.   This is NOT one of those times.

I would challenge you to find a public health recommendation from a government agency that does not include 3 servings a day of milk, cheese or yogurt.  Schools teach it like it’s gospel.  And you can’t go a day without hearing some ad on TV or the radio that portrays dairy as the ultimate health food designed to build strong muscles teeth and bones.

Even the National and local “Healthy Kids” groups designed to combat the childhood obesity epidemic pays homage to the 3 servings per day mantra.

Personally, I just can’t get past the reality of what we are doing by drinking milk.  While you may be drinking it out of a cup, it’s essentially breastfeeding from a cow by proxy.

Let that image sneak through your brain for a moment.

Nursing is great for the early periods of mammalian development (i.e. for humans 6 months up to 2 years), but beyond that it serves no purpose.

Here’s another thought to consider.  Just how does that cow continually produce milk?  Think of human females—milk production is tied to pregnancy and delivery and does not continue for years and years after that time frame.

In order to achieve this near-continually milk production in dairy cows farmers have to impregnate cows as soon as the milk dries up after birth, far sooner than they would in nature.

Regular readers of the Rantings will know that none of this information is new.  I even have an eBook on the evils of dairy that can be purchased by clicking here.

So what does my current Rant have to do with this particular article?  It is because this article does not beat around the bush.  In it, researchers in Sweden (a country that, just like the US, have a very high consumption of dairy) looked at 61,433 women and 45,339 men to look at how dairy consumption related to the risk of death or fracture.  Arguably, death was considered the more serious outcome…

Specifically, an initial questionnaire looking at dairy intake was done in women as young as 39 and men as young as 45 years of age.  They were followed up on an average of 20.1 years later.  Here’s what they found:

  • The women who followed the recommendations of three or more glasses of milk a day were 93% more likely to have died compared with women who drank less than one glass a day
  • Basically, for every glass of milk the women drank, they were 15% more likely to die (the men were 3% more likely, which was not considered significant).
  • For every glass of milk in women there was a 9% increased risk of a hip fracture (no association was found in males).
  • When the researchers looked at a smaller sample size in the group, they also found an increase in inflammation (interleukin 6) and 8-iso-PGF2α (a marker of oxidative stress).

Even looking at this large study through rose-colored glasses, you have to admit that, at its BEST, dairy did nothing good for your health.

Looking at it through the lens of hundreds of studies that found associations between animal proteins and fracture as well as dairy intake and several types of cancer, you have to admit that the concept of dairy as a health food is a wee bit glim.

This article, for some strange reason, did not get picked up by the popular press.  Until articles like this get brought to the publics’ eyes, our society will continue to be deluded by millions of dollars in advertising and buying government influence by the dairy industry.

 

Miracle Supplement for Bone or Waste of Money?

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Resveratrol can increase bone density
Photo courtesy of https://www.flickr.com/photos/naudinsylvain/

Coral calcium, Tums, dairy. The list of miracle compounds to increase bone density can be found easily on the Internet.

And if you read it on the Internet, it’s got to be true, right?

Just how many times has it been drilled into your brain that 3 servings of milk, cheese and yogurt per day will make your bones, teeth, nails and nasal hair stronger? Ok, so maybe you missed the nasal hair ad, but you get the point.

So, given all the hype (and BTW, yes the whole dairy = strong bones thing IS way more hype than reality), how can you piece together what’s good for bone health.

Luckily for you, on I’m a plane heading to dreary Chicago as I write this to teach a 12 hour class on the relationships between the gut, bone health and diabetes. So I couldn’t be more brushed-up on this topic.

Let’s get one thing out of the way first. Healthy bones are not about talking calcium supplements. This couldn’t be further from the whole story. Rather, you need to view this in the context of “bone health,” understanding that bone is not an inert tissue that we happen to attach our bones, tendons and ligaments to. Rather, bone tissue is an incredibly active tissue being affected by the health of your GI tract and, in turn, affecting your risk of diabetes. It also plays a critical role in producing immune cells, platelets and red blood cells. Do you really think calcium alone can handle this enormous task?

The list of things playing a positive or negative role in bone health are quite long, but the short list includes:

  1. Optimal levels of vitamin D
  2. Eating a plant-based diet loaded with natural calcium sources like green leafies
  3. Weight bearing exercise
  4. Avoiding drugs that affect serotonin levels (like SSRIs)
  5. Avoiding drugs that block acid production in the stomach (like Nexium)

The long list is enough to take up an entire eBook (which is in the development stages).

So what does all this have to do with this particular article? In it, researchers looked at the ability of a high dose of resveratrol (the protective compound found in red wine from the skin of the grapes as well as from peanut skins) to have an impact on bone density. They specifically looked at 74 middle-aged obese men who were pre-diabetic (Metabolic syndrome, or MetS) because being pre-diabetic is bad for your bones.

Here’s the details of the study:

  • They were given either 1,000 mg or 150 mg of resveratrol a day or a placebo daily for 16 weeks.
  • Bone alkaline phosphatase (BAP) was measured to look for how fast bone was being remodeled (higher = more bone turnover).
  • BAP increased the most with the highest dose (around 4%).
  • The volume of the bone in the lumbar spine increased 2.6% in the high dose group.

Before you go digging around in your “Principles of Bone Density” textbook you’ve right by your side, I can tell you can a 2.6% increase in bone volume in just 4 short months is pretty amazing. And all without breaking a single drop of sweat or drinking liquid from a cow’s udder meant to raise its young to an independent heifer.

Not quite in that same breath I can also tell you that 1,000 mg of resveratrol is a pretty high dose. It’s not that you’d have GI upset or grow a third limb; it’s just that this would be a pricey proposition to increase your bone density.  This much resveratrol, from a good quality source, is likely going to run around $100 / month or more.

Of course, when compared to the cost of drugs used to treat bone density, it’s still a very cheap bet. As way of comparison, the newest drug used to treat osteoporosis, Denosumab (Xgeva), runs about $2,000 per monthly injection. Makes the resveratrol look like quite a bargain.

 

BONE FRACTURES = HEART DISEASE?

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I’ve always contended that the human body cares not one squat about the artificial delineations we have created in Westernized medicine.  The body does not recognize that “cardiovascular” problem independently from an “endocrine” problem from a “gastroenterological” problem.

Instead, every single system in the human body interacts with other systems.  The degree of this is so complex as to make our division into “specialties” laughable.  Dr. Jeffrey Bland (a strong influence on the way I view health) always called it “knowing more and more about less and less.”

To me, helping patients to make lifestyle changes that will lower their risk of chronic disease, there is NO differentiation between heart disease and diabetes.  These two conditions are so tightly linked that anything that affects one affects both.  Heck, 70% of diabetics die of cardiovascular issues and we want to consider them separate conditions, both treated by different specialists.

So, the results of this study finding that, in those with heart disease there is a strong correlation with the risk of fractures.  This relationship has actually been getting stronger over the past decade or so–likely because we have more sick people with heart disease rather than dead people who had heart attacks.  Live people are more likely to suffer a fracture…

The bottom line is that lifestyle changes to improve a condition are nonspecific and will lower your risk across the board for all chronic diseases.  This is the beauty of lifestyle changes and the glaring failure of pharmaceutical dominated medicine, which touts one cure for one disease.

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