Prove me wrong: Milk

I've been reading a LOT of things that are really interesting lately and doing a lot of research that backs it up. One of the things that has been the most interesting to me is that dairy products are actually NOT good for you! There are some things IN dairy products that are good, but overall, they are really BAD for you!

Talk about shocking.... I mean, I've always worried that I was going to have osteoporosis because of my low consumption of dairy products. I was completely convinced that I was practically unAmerican!

But after reading all this stuff, I'm totally shocked.

So.... I'm going to go through what I've learned, put together a few things I've wanted to put together and show that milk ISN'T good for you.... and if you're not convinced, I would love for you to go out and prove me wrong! Don't be mean, though! LOL! Just post links to credible sources that show that I've got things wrong and we'll go from there....

Here goes:

WHY MILK IS BAD FOR YOU
Drinking milk does not insure that you'll have strong bones
To process animal protein, our bodies require calcium to do this. If there isn't enough calcium in our diets to process the amount of animal protein we're taking in, it will pull it from our body. This is not true with plant proteins - the do not pull calcium from our bodies.
From the National Institute of Health (NIH) and National Library of Medicine (NLM)

As a matter of fact, the higher your animal protein intake, the more likely you are to have bone loss! (This study was done on elderly women. AJCN - American Journal of Clinical Nutrition)

The National Dairy Council actually funded this study that proved that drinking additional milk was actually not helpful! Whoops!

More milk means more weight!
A study done about a year and a half ago on adolescent children found that milk was directly correlated to gaining weight - even though these were drinking 1% milk. The Washington Post sums it up and here is the actual study.

But what about calcium?
1 cup milk = 300mg calcium, of which 32% or 96mg is bioavailable (absorbable by the body)
Other foods that have the same amount of calcium (bioavailable): 1.5 cups broccoli, 1/2 cup firm tofu, 1/3 cup sesame seeds. 1 cup of cooked quinoa has the same amount of calcium as a quart of milk! And lots of fiber and no fat and a ton of other nutrients. (Except for the quinoa, all information taken from The Food Revolution on page 101.)

Human milk vs cow milk
This section is just me thinking - precious sections were taken from other sources....

I am currently reading The Food Revolution and one thing that struck me was that we are the only animal on Earth that consumes milk from other animals. Another thing that was mentioned was the fact that cows milk is made to grow a 50lb calf into a 300+ pound cow in a year. (My numbers may be off, but they're close.) And that got me to thinking.

Why would we go from drinking a milk (human breastmilk) that grows a child from about 7lbs to 20lbs in a year to drinking cow's milk which is designed for cows and putting a LOT of weight on in a small amount of time? Just odd that this even happened. And that we push people to drink a pretty hefty amount in hopes of losing weight and staving off osteoporosis, which cow's milk doesn't do!

I finally found this link (although I'm not sure who it is!) and you can see that in some things, the nutrition in both is quite different in many aspects.

Milk causes cancer?
Actually not so much causes cancer, but allows cancer to grow. This article on the BBC talks about the link between milk and ovarian cancer. Scary. (Note the small inset box on that article - suggesting a diet high in fruits and veggies. )

This article talks about the rise in IGF-1 levels when drinking cancer - this is directly related to higher rates of breast cancer.

I've looked for information talking about how Dr Campbell, author of "The China Study", fed rats casein (milk protein) at levels very similar to the American diet and how, after being injected with a carcinogen, they developed tumors. And when their animal protein levels were dropped to 5%, the tumor growth slowed or stopped. But I haven't found much yet.... And everything I have found to refute him is shown to have a specific agenda.

Anyway, you can read an excerpt from the book that talks about this here: http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/research-dr-campbells-china-study.html. If I find any studies that prove this, I'll add them to this post.

Hormone free in England?
I've read a lot lately that Europe is way ahead of the US. As a matter of fact, they refuse to even import meat from us because of all the hormones and antibiotics! But I stumbled across this short article about only purchasing hormone free milk: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6147472