The Calcium Myth

If you were anything like me growing up, you were probably fed a story like this: ‘Milk is good for you. It makes you big and strong, and builds healthy bones. It’s a great source of calcium, and essential for growing kids.’ Dairy and I certainly have previous. I grew up in the Waikato, heart of the New Zealand dairy industry. My Dad even came to New Zealand from the UK to begin a new life as a dairy farmer. As a child, I was given free bottles of milk at school. I was aware of the infamous national ‘butter mountain,’ and felt a duty to help keep it in check personally. I spent several years as a teen running around delivering milk as a local ‘milk boy,’ dropping off bottles to customers, and downing three pints a night myself. I still enjoy it on occasion in my coffee, and certainly prefer butter to any pharmaceutically-produced alternatives on the market. But the complicitness of UK government ‘health agencies’ and the dairy industry in peddling myths about the benefits of milk leave me cold. Every time I see a bus go past showcasing the current ‘Make Mine Milk’ campaign, I shudder. Of late, we have British Olympic athletes proudly displaying their milk moustaches, inferring that they have got where they are with the support of a healthy and sustained diet of milk. Dubious, to say the least. A component of this myth is the assertion that milk is a fantastic provider of Calcium, which builds healthy bones. The fallacy of this was revealed by Mutsuko in her class last week, with a chart comparison of Calcium content of various foods leaving Butter and Milk way down the pecking order. (Source: The Kind Diet) Forget Milk for strong bones: check out Sesame Seeds or Hijiki, people. There’s plenty of debate around this issue. It’s a sensitive one, because challenging the use of dairy in people’s lives, and especially their children’s, is a threat to the parents own relationship to dairy. You can end up arguing with a very large three-year-old. But as suggested in ‘The Kind Diet,’ it’s worth reflecting on a very simple truth: ‘The human immune system recognizes milk from another species as an attacker – or allergen – that causes the body to go on red alert. This is why many people walk around with chronic runny, stuffy noses – even asthma and allergies – and think its normal. But actually it’s the body’s own defense system trying to ward off a foreign invader.’ I certainly experienced this myself growing up, suffering from Asthma as a child and using an inhaler well into my twenties. We are the only species that continues drinking milk throughout our adult life. Not only that, but milk from another species. Isn’t that just a little odd? And isn’t it time we came off the bottle?