Is consumption of dairy beneficial to bone health? Is it not necessary? Is it actually detrimental to bone health?
I have always heard growing up that consumption of dairy was essential for healthy bones. Now, however, I am hearing more and more that it may actually be detrimental to bone health. I also wonder: if dairy is essential for bone health, how does the bone health of those many populations worldwide who find it difficult to consume dairy compare? What about our ancestors who lived before the domestication of cattle? Or current stone-age tribes? What is their bone health like? Or – the other extreme – what about herding tribes like the Masai who consume large amounts of milk?
This seems to be one of those subjects that it is difficult to get non-biased information on. Set me straight.
talk to a licensed pro. and if he/she doesn’t know your test results and medical history, it’ll be hardly useful, just basic knowledge.
there are medical conditions wherein doctors advise against high calcium intake (one is predisposition to form calcic kidney stones.) so they proscribe dairies and sea foods (that answers part of your question regarding alternate calcium sources.)
i once watched on tv about athletes who load up on minerals (like carbohydrates, iron, etc.) regarding calcium loading: the skeleton doesn’t grow more than 5% above normal mass during loading. but that 5% increase reduces the risk of injury by 40%. a very significant finding.
proscribe: verb, of old it was to denounce or condemn a thing as being evil or harmful. i meant the doctors will advise you against eating dairies or seafood (both very high in calcium.)
i mentioned carbo and iron as among the various “load-up” regimens athletes follow under very strict supervision. now, regarding calcium-loading, follow the remaining sentences of my previous post.
The consensus agreement among all major medical groups in the U.S. is that Americans tend not to get a sufficient amount of dietary calcium and that dairy is the best source of dietary calcium in the American diet. They also all agree that adolescents, especially girls, on average don’t get close to the amount of calcium they require, and neither do most adults.
That’s carefully worded. Calcium is agreed by everybody to be needed. It does not necessarily mean that you can cure or prevent osteoporosis just with dietary calcium. It’s doesn’t mean that other sources of dietary calcium can’t be substituted. It doesn’t mean that calcium supplements are worthless.
It’s that researchers agree that we are a heavily dairy society, that people will willingly eat large amounts of dairy and not of spinach, and that the correlations between dairy intake and health are high. However, it does seem to be better to get the proper amount of calcium when you’re young and your bones are forming than later in life. Some of the major longitudinal studies, like the Nurses Health Study, do not find that adding calcium as an older adult is helpful.
Vegans can certainly get the proper amount of calcium. They just have to work at it harder and make more a deliberate effort to eat those foods. Calcium is found in many plants and a variety of seafoods. Here’s a page that lists non-dairy sources of calcium. Some of them look good compared to milk, but quantities of them aren’t part of the standard American diet. In addition, milk is a better all-around source of nutrients than almost any other individual food.
The discussion about the value of dairy has been utterly poisoned by anti-milk groups, some of them vegan and some with other agendas. Of course you can find some studies that correlate milk with a variety of problems. However, you can find a larger number that correlate milk with healthy effects and that dispute the negatives. You never hear about those from the anti-milk side.
Bone health is a matter of lifestyle as much as food intake. The human body and its digestive system are almost infinitely malleable, so the balance can be struck by many combinations of diet and exercise. We live in a sedentary society and our diets will reflect that. Some people can be perfectly happy on a non-dairy diet, but the reality is that the vast majority will approach life differently.
An interesting perspective was given at an NIH State of the Science Conference on Lactose Intolerance in 2010. One of the questions raised was what the health condequences were of avoiding dairy. The consensus was that for the average person they were bad. Here’s the conference statement.
Ha ha… Ah, proscribed… Sorry, I think it was a combination of reading your post quickly, the lack of capitalization (I often do the same thing myself), and the fact that I had just read a post by someone who could not spell worth a damn. Apologies.
It’s a calcium thing, not just a milk thing. It just so happens that in America, milk gets super-fortified with calcium to prevent deficiencies (like how iodine is put into table salt to prevent iodine deficiencies). Of course, this misses out on a population of lactose-intolerants (and people who just don’t like milk), but it tends to hit the vast majority of kids for a good number of years.
As you get older, too much calcium can HURT you in other ways. I’m prone to calcified kidney stones, for example, so if I overdo the calcium I end up with spiky pokey kidney stones… ow. Since I probably won’t live to 70+ anyway (judging on the average age of my elderly family members), and osteoporosis isn’t a huge deal until later in life, I’m probably better off avoiding the calcium. But you should see a doctor to see how it applies to you specifically. Errybody’s different.
You can buy calcium-fortified milk but it’s only in specially-marked cartons and is a tiny, insignificant percentage of total milk sales. Lactose-free milk that is calcium fortified is equally available in any supermarket, but again it’s a small percentage of that market as well.
If you don’t drink milk you can also get calcium-fortified orange juice and lots of other things as well.