Leading cause of death: Milk?

[cynic]

I understand that the leading cause of death in the United States is heart disease. Furthermore, the leading cause of heart disease is the consumption of saturated fats. The leading source of saturated fat in the diet is dairy products, the most common of which is cow's milk. Therefore, milk must be the #1 killer of Americans. Why is such a nefarious product still considered "wholesome" by most Americans? Why aren't politicians going after this industry, like tobacco and gun manufacturers?

[friedo]

Because unlike tobacco and guns, milk is yummy.

[Qadgop the Mercotan]

Originally posted by cynic
I understand that the leading cause of death in the United States is heart disease. Furthermore, the leading cause of heart disease is the consumption of saturated fats. The leading source of saturated fat in the diet is dairy products, the most common of which is cow's milk. Therefore, milk must be the #1 killer of Americans. Why is such a nefarious product still considered "wholesome" by most Americans? Why aren't politicians going after this industry, like tobacco and gun manufacturers?

You got a cite for the statement that most folks get their saturated fat from milk, cynic? Fast and deep-fried foods always seemed to be the greater culprit, at least in my medical reading. And now with research showing that it's the trans fats that cause the worst damage, there's less stigma attached to dairy than there used to be. But you'd better watch those stick margarines, they're loaded with the bad fats!

Qadgop, MD

[Duck Duck Goose]

Your chain of reasoning is faulty.

Originally posted by cynic
The leading source of saturated fat in the diet is dairy products.

Got a cite for this? 'Cause all I can find is this:

http://www.heartinfo.com/reuters2000/001020elin022.htm

He argues that Americans consume too many animal products, the leading source of saturated fat in the diet.

This means dairy AND meat AND eggs.

http://seattle.earthsave.org/hphp_myths.htm

Recent studies have shown that meat consumption is the number one source of saturated fat in the standard american diet, with milk being the second leading source.

Meat. Then milk.

http://www.ahc.umn.edu/NewsAlert/Jul...lert/54731.htm

And so now cheese runs neck-and-neck with beef as the leading source of saturated fat in the American diet.

Cheese and beef together.

I can't find anything that says that "milk is the leading source of saturated fats in the American diet".

Your chain of reasoning also breaks down because not that many adult Americans drink milk, and those that do, frequently drink low-fat or skim milk.


Preview. DANG!! Must learn to type faster than the Mercotan.

[waterj2]

We, the people that elect our government, in general, do not want the government telling us what to eat.

Incidentally, even if you accept the assertions in the OP, there are still several flaws in the logic. Let's suppose that heart disease kills about 50% of the population. Among all the causes of heart disease, let's suppose that saturated fat is the direct cause of 50% of them. And furthermore, let's pretend that 50% of those are caused by dairy products (i.e. dairy is those people's only source of saturated fat). That's about 12.5% of the population. Lung cancer could be cause number 2, with 20% of the population, 95% of whom get it from smoking or second-hand smoke. Then, if you toss in people that get heart disease from cigarettes as well, plus various other diseases, cigarettes could be responsible for twice as many deaths, easily.

There is also a vast difference in the positive aspects of milk and dairy products as compared to cigarettes and guns. Also, there are substantially more people that consume dairy products than that smoke. And of course, there is also the matter of how much sooner people die due to dairy products than they would in their absence.

And of course there's the matter that it's none of your business how much milk I drink or how long I'm going to live.

[cynic]

I never said I want our government telling us what to eat. It's just that the silence is deafening.

[sewalk]

Originally posted by cynic
Furthermore, the leading cause of heart disease is the consumption of saturated fats.

I seriously doubt that the consumption of saturated fats, in and of itself, is the leading cause of heart disease. It would seem to me that a combination of an unbalanced diet (usually containing too many saturated fats, I'll admit) and lack of exercise is the leading cause of heart disease in the US.

[waterj2]

Next: "Recliners: where's the outrage?"

[astro]

Originally posted by cynic
I never said I want our government telling us what to eat. It's just that the silence is deafening.

Huh? What silence? Doctors and health advocates of every stripe are yelling and beating on drums made out of the skins of fat people...

"Eat less fat! Get more exercise! Don't over indulge!"

and yet many Americans are becoming as fat as pigs mainly because we get a lot less exercise than we used to. Based on a recent report I saw (I'll try to remember cite) the number of calories consumed per capita has not increased all that much since the mid sixties and yet incidence of obesity has increased substantially, especially among kids.

This was laid mainly at the door of television, video games etc and (primarily) being carted around in automobiles and other transportation from place to place vs walking even short distances, which contributes to a physically sedentary lifestyle for many Americans (even kids) and the inevitable increases in weight which makes you less likely to be active etc etc.

The problem is lot bigger and more intractable than the simple over consumption of dairy products.

[evilhanz]

I'd like to see cynic's PETA membership card, please. This sounds like the same load of garbage that was coming out of Bruce Friedrich's mouth a few months ago on the radio talk show circuit. I won't do them the favor of linking to their sites.

I am a vegetarian, btw. However, PETA's tactics and propoganda are outrageous and grossly offensive. As is registering on SDMB merely to incite the membership with your unsubstantiated claims.

[cynic]

Originally posted by evilhanz
I'd like to see cynic's PETA membership card, please. This sounds like the same load of garbage that was coming out of Bruce Friedrich's mouth a few months ago on the radio talk show circuit. I won't do them the favor of linking to their sites.

I am a vegetarian, btw. However, PETA's tactics and propoganda are outrageous and grossly offensive. As is registering on SDMB merely to incite the membership with your unsubstantiated claims.

I am not at all a PETA sympathizer, nor am I a vegetarian (I am considering it, though). I am much more concerned about humans than about cows. Facts remain facts even when you don't like the people who are stating them.

[Morrison's Lament]

I prefer cows to humans, but I also prefer milk to almost any other drink under the sun.

I may be a semi-veggie, but it looks like I'm dead meat if this milk thing is true. Between the prostate cancer and the heart disease discussed in this thread, I'm a gonner. Bye all!

--- G. Raven

[Qis]

Am i incorrect in saying that drinking bad water and drowning are perhaps bigger killers than any other?

Just a thought, maybe i am wroong, but when you think about the number of people that die every day from diseases caught from bad water, or those that die from not enough, add to teat the number of people thatdrown at sea, it hink we are in big numbers by now.

maybe that is in the world, americans having less problems with water than, say, indians.

just a thought

Qis

[Tars Tarkas]

Hey, as mammals, we produce milk! I fail to see a significant problem with milk. Now people who can't get their fat butts off the sofa and then have heart attacks seem to be the big problem here. America needs to do some jogging, and then drink some milk to keep its bones strong!

[cynic]

Originally posted by Tars Tarkas
Hey, as mammals, we produce milk! I fail to see a significant problem with milk. Now people who can't get their fat butts off the sofa and then have heart attacks seem to be the big problem here. America needs to do some jogging, and then drink some milk to keep its bones strong!

As far as I know, throughout history humans have breast fed their offspring for a maximum of 5 or 6 years. After this period saturated fats were not easily to come by (until a few thousand years ago when cattle were domesticated). For the vast majority of our evolution, adults ate diets extremely low in saturated fats.
BTW, do you really believe that we need to be more concerned about osteoporosis that heart disease, which is far more common and considerably more deadly?

[mothman]

http://www.notmilk.com

[Manda JO]

cynic, when questioing what type of diet nature "meant" for us to have, you ought to keep in mind that nature is only interested in keeping us alive til oour 30s and 40s at the latest. After that we become evolutionary dead ends. As heart disease tends to kill middle aged people, nature couldn't care less.

Furthermore, people "in the wild" thrive on all sorts of diets: we are amazingly flexible organisms, and the idea that there is some eating style that nature meant for us to have is fallacious.

Lastly, several people have pointed out that meat and fried foods contribute much more saturated fat to people's diets than milk, especially milk in a liquid form (which is often as not served skim or with its fat content halved, for god's sake). So there is a fact here you need to accept, becasue "Facts remain facts even when you don't like the people who are stating them."

[JillGat]

Originally posted by sewalk

I seriously doubt that the consumption of saturated fats, in and of itself, is the leading cause of heart disease. It would seem to me that a combination of an unbalanced diet (usually containing too many saturated fats, I'll admit) and lack of exercise is the leading cause of heart disease in the US.

Certainly we should be concerned about the premature, preventable deaths from heart disease. But some people are just genetically predisposed to develop heart problems. Another reason a high percentage of Americans die from heart disease is that they live long enough to get it, because they don't die of other things first! What we want to look at here is the percentage of cases of heart disease that could be prevented by improving the diet. And I'm guessing that milk is not the major culprit here.

[cynic]

Originally posted by Manda JO
cynic, when questioing what type of diet nature "meant" for us to have, you ought to keep in mind that nature is only interested in keeping us alive til oour 30s and 40s at the latest. After that we become evolutionary dead ends.

How can this be when men are fertile into their 70's?

Originally posted by Manda JO
Furthermore, people "in the wild" thrive on all sorts of diets: we are amazingly flexible organisms, and the idea that there is some eating style that nature meant for us to have is fallacious.

EAT SHIT!

[dasmoocher]

I'd also suggest that you might need to be aware of where some of the info might come from.

There's a group called "The Physician's Council on 'Dairy Products'" or something like that. It turns out that, although physicians (supposedly but probably), they are also an anti-dairy group along the lines of PETA.

The average Joe might see "Physcian's Council" and think "Hey, these are doctors who have an interest in my health".

Wrong. Or maybe in their anti-dairy world they do. But they've formed a group with a legimately sounding name to promote their cause--which is 'milk is evil'.

I could form a group called the "Physician's Group for LSD Mind Expansion" and it would have the same legitamacy--too bad (Ph.D) Timothy Leary's dead. Imagine: "Harvard researcher states LSD is good for you!"

Not the best example perhaps, but it makes the point.

[evilhanz]

cynic, How can we accept your question as an honest inquiry when your claims are almost word for word the proclamations of the PETA propagandists? It seems to me that this thread more properly belongs in GD.

(satisying my daily aliteration requirement)

[astro]

Originally posted by cynic

How can this be when men are fertile into their 70's?

EAT SHIT!

Ummm... Cynic since you're new you get the benefit of the doubt. If this is meant as an amusing rejoinder to the "variety of diet" issue you might want to telegraph it as such just a little bit better here in GQ as the mods go for the smackdown pretty quick if they start seeing or suspecting potty mouth answers.

Re the male fertility issue the male sperm making machinery is a lot less complex and thus more robust than the female egg making and gestation capability so it could easily last considerably longer than is necessary for optitimum fertility. In additon recent studies have shown male sperm past the male(s) age of mid-forties or so has increasingly greater chances of having incipient genetic defects.

Once you're well beyond the age of optimum reproduction you're a used kleenex in the overall scheme of things from the genome(s) point of view. To some extent, however, this is chicken and egging it from a biological/anthropological perspective as one of the hypotheses about the development of extended human lifespans vs other primates is that having longer human parental and grandparental lifespans enhances the viability and survivability of the genome from an available resource perspective.

[Manda JO]

How can this be when men are fertile into their 70's?

I have a layman's understanding of evolutionary biology, but near as I can tell both a man's fertility into old age and a woman's lack of fertility are accidents, biologically speaking. Primitive men (and women) so rarely lived past 40 or so that the ones that did would not have made any particular impact on the process of natural selection. Remember, evolution does not evolve until we are "perfect", it evolves until we are better than whatever we are competing against. And large numbers of people living into thier 50s, 60s, and 70s is such a recent development that they cannot have had much influence.

EAT SHIT!

I must confess I don't understand what you are getting at here. The only thing I can figure is that you think that if humans can survive on a wide variety of diets, then they ought to be able to survive on a diet of excrement. That dosen't make any sense at all: I never said humans could live on ANYTHING, just a wide variety of things. Though I wonder if humans could survive on pure cat feces? They are apparently very high protien (according to a friend of mine in vet school, cat feces contain more protien than dog food, which explains alot, really). Anyway, your body has developed specific enzymes to break down everything from insects to muscle to fat to all but the most fibourous plants to milk. This is why humans have been so successful at spreading out over the planet.

[cynic]

First off, I'm sorry about that last post, Manda JO. I intended for it to be a humorous rebuttal, not a mean-spirited flame. What I should have said is if an organism evolves in an environment eating a particular diet, altering it significantly is bound to have some negative effects. I'm reminded of hard-core vegetarians who try to make their dogs vegans. Similarly, children have been nursing off of their mothers since the dawn of mankind. Breast-feeding is an integral part of their Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation, and to not breast feed your child would likely have adverse health consequences.

To those who insist that I represent PETA or some other political organization, I can assure you that I am not. I have serious disagreements with their stance on animal testing, as I am an insulin-dependant diabetic. I owe my life to animal testing.

[dasmoocher]

I would disagree with some statements:

"Though I wonder if humans could survive on pure cat feces? They are apparently very high protien (according to a friend of mine in vet school, cat feces contain more protien than dog food, which explains alot, really"

Let's say cat feces have a high amount of protein, why would the protein in cat feces be more avaible to be absorbed in human's gut than at cat's? If a cat can't use it, why a person?

"Anyway, your body has developed specific enzymes to break down everything from insects to muscle to fat to all but the most fibourous plants to milk. This is why humans have been so successful at spreading out over the planet."

I would say humans are more successful at exploiting animals and plants that have the enzymes that can break down whatever substrates.

Humans can't digest cellulose, but they can digest meat from animals that can. Humans can domesticate cows, which break down cellulose through sybiotic rumen flora, and eat the benefit that the cows gain in muscle and milk.

Without trying to make this a meat v. vegatarian debate, humans are made of 'meat'. It makes some sense that a human body would want food in a form more accessible than cellulose.

That debate is for another forum.

But to say that your body has whatever enzymes needed to breakdown whatever foodsource is wrong.

[Manda JO]

And my point is that humans evolved as scavengers, eating all sorts of things: rather like dogs (which are omnivores, btw, and which can go veg. It's cats that can't). Primitive humans ate whatever they could get their hands on, be it vegtables, milk, meat, insects, or blubber. And we managed to reproduce quite niecely on all of those.

[Manda JO]

I agree that humans can't break down cellulose, and I didn't mean to imply that we could. But we do produce enzymes that are geared specifically towards breaking down sugars from a wide variety of sources, from meat to plant to insect. (At least I was told by a nutritionist that we produce enzymes specifically for breaking down sugars found only in insects. I don't have a hard site for this). This, combined with the fact that the diets of "primitive" humans vary widely from place to place, suggests to me that many different diets are perfectly natural.

[Princhester]

Sorry to get back to the OP and interrupt the hijack, but isn't there a major point we are missing here? Cynic, you compare milk to guns and tobacco. Milk you drink for yourself. If you choose to drink it, and there are possible health problems, that's your choice. And if you start drinking milk, then later decide it's bad for you, you stop drinking milk.

By way of contrast, politicians are under pressure to regulate guns because (mostly) they are used by people to shoot other people, and tobacco because it is addictive, so even when you hear the health warnings, it's difficult to stop.

On that basis, milk is just not comparable.

[cynic]

Originally posted by Princhester
Sorry to get back to the OP and interrupt the hijack, but isn't there a major point we are missing here? Cynic, you compare milk to guns and tobacco. Milk you drink for yourself. If you choose to drink it, and there are possible health problems, that's your choice. And if you start drinking milk, then later decide it's bad for you, you stop drinking milk.

By way of contrast, politicians are under pressure to regulate guns because (mostly) they are used by people to shoot other people, and tobacco because it is addictive, so even when you hear the health warnings, it's difficult to stop.

On that basis, milk is just not comparable.

I grew up drinking milk (whole milk, no less) in large quantities. When I finally bothered to read the label, I was appalled at the amount saturated fat, as we all know this is a heart disease risk factor. I switched to 2%, until I read that this is still high in saturated fat (I forget the exact bacon analogy). I then switched to skim milk, which tastes like crap, IMO. The transition has not been easy for me so far. My fault, admittedly.

Furthermore, if the "addictive" qualities of tobacco are the reason for the political pressure, why are they so lenient with alcohol? After all, we have the best politicians money can buy.

[Akatsukami]

The OP may have deceived by misinformation, combined with bad dietary habits.

It is currently recommended that people over the age of two hold their saturated fat intake to not more 10% of their total calories. It is also recommended that the average sedentary American hold his caloric intake to about 2,000 kcal/day¹. As fat, regardless of its composition, has about 9kcal/g, this means that the consumption of saturated fat should be held to 22g/day or less.

One cup (8 fluid oz., about 240g) of whole milk contains about 5.1g of saturated fat. Pretty potent stuff -- until we recognize that this means drinking over a quart of the stuff each day to get one's RDA of saturated fat. Whilst there undoubtedly people who do drink that much milk, whole or otherwise (see the thread in which one person asserts that if God hadn't meant for a pint of ice cream to be a single serving, He wouldn't have made ice cream cartons that size), I fear that such a habit cannot but be condemned. (A nutritional guide that I own recommends the total consumption of milk -- including that in the sauces, cakes, etc. -- for an adult be limited to one pint per day.)

OTOH, we also note that lean ground beef has 5.5g of saturated fat per 3-oz. (about 85g) portion, and that lamb loin has about 8.4g in the same amount (although by carefully trimming away the fat portion, we can cut that to 3.7g). Those genuinely concerned with the saturated fat in their diets may wish to continue drinking milk, and knock off the cheeseburgers and lamb chops instead.

¹_{There are, unfortunately, two units known as the "calorie". The larger of these is styled the "dietary calorie", or, worse, the "Calorie", and is 1,000 times the smaller unit (which allows confusions such as "if you eat frozen food, you'll use more calories thawing than are in it"). I call them "kilocalories", abbrievated "kcal").}

[cynic]

Originally posted by Akatsukami
One cup (8 fluid oz., about 240g) of whole milk contains about 5.1g of saturated fat. Pretty potent stuff -- until we recognize that this means drinking over a quart of the stuff each day to get one's RDA of saturated fat. Whilst there undoubtedly people who do drink that much milk

The only problem I have with your analysis is that people who drink milk tend to consume cheese, as well. This leaves very little room for both whole milk and cheese in our diets.

[Duck Duck Goose]

Okay. In the interest of fairness, I went and looked at a number of PETA anti-milk websites, and I have to say that although I think the OP here is a teeny bit off-the-wall, still it doesn't sound like PETA's "if you drink cow's milk, you are participating in the evil exploitation of innocent animals!" party line.

Cynic's point is that milk is fatty, not evil. So far he hasn't said anything about the exploitation of innocent animals, and I'm kinda beginning to think that maybe the OP is just a little tongue-in-cheek, sorta "devil's advocate" kind of thing. Eh?

[scr4]

Originally posted by cynic
if the "addictive" qualities of tobacco are the reason for the political pressure, why are they so lenient with alcohol?

Perhaps because tobacco can harm non-smokers through second-hand smoking? And it seems to me that there is already a lot of political pressure to reduce alcohol abuse, especially teenage drinking.