Calcium and Osteoporosis

Got milk and... got osteoporosis?
How's that? Doesn't milk protect you from bone loss?

By Rob McLean

The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine writes, "It is a common myth that people should increase their calcium intake. Mostly, they are encouraged to take supplements and to drink more milk. But milk may not 'do a body good.' The highest rates of osteoporosis are in the industrialized Western nations~the biggest consumers of milk."

Take African Bantu women for example. They average only 350 mg calcium per day. They also average the birth of nine children each whom they breast feed for two years. Yet    they never suffer from calcium deficiency. Osteoporosis is almost nonexistent, even in women over 65 years of age.

Milk--Calcium--Protein
Do they protect from osteoporosis?

That's what the dairy industry and public health officials would have us believe. Yet a growing number of researchers are doubting the recommendation that Americans should drink the quart of milk a day, or its equivalent, endorsed by public health officials.

Dairy ads are rampant in the United States. We've all seen advertisements such as "Milk, it does a body good." 

Why don't many Americans know about this relationship between calcium, protein, and bone loss? What is the secret about osteoporosis?

The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine writes, "It is a common myth that people should increase their calcium intake. Mostly, they are encouraged to take supplements and to drink more milk. But milk may not 'do a body good.' The highest rates of osteoporosis are in the industrialized Western nations~the biggest consumers of milk."

On a more serious note Yoffe continued, "Strange, then, that most of the world's people, who rarely if ever drink milk and who get just a small percentage of the calcium we are told is vital, have not devolved into boneless heaps of protoplasm. Even stranger, in many of these dairy-avoiding countries, people get through life with far fewer of the age-related hip fractures that plague Americans. This paradox has led a small number of researchers to become dairy doubters, questioning the wisdom of the calcium   recommendations of the public health establishment."

The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine and many renowned researchers such as Dean Ornish, T. Colin Campbell,  and Mark Hegsted doubt these calcium recommendations. They are saying that keeping strong bones depends more on preventing calcium loss than on increasing calcium intake.

Dr. Campbell is one of those doubters. In his study of 6,500 rural Chinese,   Campbell found that most Chinese consume no dairy products, obtaining their calcium from vegetables. Strangely enough, from the Western point of view, osteoporosis is uncommon in China even though the people there consume only half the amount of calcium Americans consume.

Research into world dietary patterns show that places where people devour large amounts of calcium (United States and northern Europe) are also countries where people devour large amounts of animal protein. These areas of the world also endure the world's highest rate of  fractures from osteoporosis, the disease characterized by weak, porous bones.

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