And why milk is not the perfect food….
Do you keep hearing mixed opinions about milk. I know it's an excellent source of calcium and will "make your bones strong." But recently I've been hearing more negatives about milk. Aside from the fat content, what are the actual harmful aspects of milk? And if it's only a glass a day at the most, is there a huge difference between drinking 1 percent or 2 percent as opposed to skim?
Milk IS an excellent source of calcium, needed to keep our bones strong and healthy. However, there are nondairy foods that are high in calcium, such as tofu processed with calcium, canned sardines or salmon with bones, almonds, turnip greens and broccoli. Other health benefits are associated with calcium, specifically in regard to possibly helping to lower high blood pressure, and in decreasing the risk of some types of cancers. Those are certainly compelling reasons for women to have four to five servings of milk or yogurt each day.
The negatives associated with milk include increased mucus production and adverse affects on people with asthma. However, an article in the 1998 Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology concludes that dairy products have little effect on asthma and that there is little evidence that milk causes increased mucus production.
Some people do have lactose intolerance, which can be solved by using lactose-free milk or taking over-the-counter tablets when eating dairy products. True milk allergy is seen far less often; people with that condition really do need to avoid any food containing milk protein.
As for the health implications of skim milk vs full cream , you're right in that it depends on the amount of milk you drink each day. If you only drink one cup each day, it really doesn't matter. You could probably make more significant changes in your diet that would lower fat intake. If, however, you enjoy drinking milk, I strongly urge you to use only skim milk. Skim milk has all the calcium, vitamin D and vitamin A that the other types of milk have, yet it has none of the fat.
On that note, here's some food for thought about milk.
Top 10 reasons why milk is not the perfect food:
It's a great source of unwanted antibiotics.
Ditto for recombinant bovine growth hormone.
Eighty percent or more of the world's people are lactose-sensitive or -intolerant.
The homogenization process (which allows the fat to stay in suspension, so that the cream, for example, doesn't rise to the top) makes the fat and the cholesterol more subject to oxidation (and therefore free-radical generation).
The nations that consume the most milk also, incidentally, have the highest rates of oesteoporosis.
The top 10 reasons why you should drink it have been brought to you by the dairy industry, not by independent assessors.
It is very high in phosphorus, which is a calcium antagonist, so the calcium in it is not particularly well absorbed.
The calcium-magnesium ratio is not particularly good.
It is one of the top allergens, probably the number one allergen for children, and it is filled with sugar.
Calcium is not as well absorbed in the absence of some fat; hence skim milk is an even worse choice!!
When people have trouble identifying what in their diet might be causing them problems, I think it's a good idea for them to do their very own "science experiment" and try temporarily removing those foods that have been most recently introduced into the human diet. Grains and dairy head that list -- agriculture wasn't developed till 10,000 years ago, (less than a second on the 24-hour clock of human evolution), and wheat and milk are on everyone's top five list of usual suspects for food intolerances and allergies.
And just for good measure, some food for thought: no other mammal in the world drinks the milk of another mammal, and even cows won't touch homogenized, pasteurized milk.
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