Milk Can Sabotage Your Diet

Another food recommended for its nutritional advantages without consideration for the harm it can cause is milk. Dr. Duane Alexander, director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, is quoted as saying, "Without including milk in the diet, it is nearly impossible to meet calcium needs." Some medical authorities, concerned about the deficiency of calcium in the diets of young people, believe that drinking more milk is the solution. A national survey revealed that only 13.5 percent of girls and 35.3 percent of boys between the ages of twelve and nineteen consume the recommended amount of calcium for teenagers: 1,300 mg of calcium daily.

Teenagers may be short on calcium, but they need to satisfy their calcium requirements by eating calcium-rich foods rather than by drinking milk because milk puts them at risk for developing a serious, sometimes fatal health problem later on in life. Milk causes a spurt in growth by stimulating the release of the human growth hormone somatotropin. This increases the teenager's chance of getting cancer as an adult if his or her milk-drinking habit causes growth above a certain height. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and conducted at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Brigham and Women's Hospital, and the Harvard School of Public Health found that taller people in general were more likely to get both pancreatic and colon cancer. Dr. Dominique Michaud, an investigator at the National Cancer Institute, states that this increase in cancer risk is related to exposure to the growth hormone in milk during adolescence. (This is the growth hormone that occurs naturally in milk, not the hormone added by dairy farmers to increase cows' production of milk.)

With each generation in America and elsewhere growing taller than the previous one because of increased milk consumption, and therefore increasingly likely to get cancer -- as well as diabetes and calcium-hardened tissues -- it's time that the human body's calcium requirements were satisfied by eating foods that are high in calcium, such as yogurt, cheese, and root vegetables, rather than milk. (Yogurt and cheese, although made from milk, have been chemically altered by fermentation, so, unlike milk, they don't stimulate the release of somatotropin, the human growth hormone.)

Not only should teenagers avoid drinking milk because of the health risks involved when they become adults but also because the processed milk available in supermarkets today won't satisfy their calcium needs. Standard brands of milk produced by agribusinesses have been heated, for the purposes of extending their shelf life, to a temperature of 212 degrees Fahrenheit. Pasteurization at such high heat destroys the acidity in milk; without it calcium can't be broken down, and undigested calcium can't be absorbed and utilized by the cells.

Drinking commercially pasteurized milk not only fails to satisfy the body's calcium requirements, but because undigested calcium particles are not assimilated, adults who drink as little as two glasses of milk a day risk a buildup of excessive levels of calcium in their bodies. Yet a recent revision in the guidelines of the U.S. government's Food Pyramid, published on April 20, 2005, in the New York Times, ignores this information by recommending three cups of milk for adults daily, one more cup than it recommends for children. In adults who drink milk every day, the calcium is apt to be deposited in the wrong places, for example, in the reproductive organs, in the bile duct, or in the ureters, the ducts that convey urine from the kidneys to the bladder.

The well-known downside of drinking milk is that it induces the mucus-secreting glands to overproduce. Excessive amounts of mucus cause unfriendly germs to multiply faster because it's a food they thrive on.

But far more dangerous to health than excess mucus is the elevation of blood insulin that the consumption of milk by adults causes. Excessive insulin in the blood makes glucose levels drop drastically. This gives rise to binge eating, which brings the blood sugar back up; however, because blood sugar goes too high, insulin again rises excessively and once again causes the blood sugar to plummet. These wild swings in blood sugar give rise to hypoglycemia (low blood sugar), and when the overproducing insulin glands stop working, the hypoglycemic individual becomes diabetic.

Elevated insulin levels have also been implicated in the development of cancer. Women with breast cancer who have high insulin levels are six times more likely to have a recurrence.

The deficiency of a nutrient in the body is not always the result of a diet that is lacking in that particular nutrient. Calcium deficiency is a case in point. The body can be deficient in calcium even though the diet meets the calcium requirements if the individual lacks vitamin D or the mineral boron. Both are necessary for the absorption and utilization of calcium.

Vitamin D is found only in the fat in meat, milk products, and seafood. The low-fat diet, by depriving the body of vitamin D, could be responsible for the widespread calcium deficiency in teenagers. In a study published in The Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, 24 percent of the 307 teenagers tested had a severe deficiency of vitamin D, and 42 percent were slightly deficient in the vitamin.