Milk is a very good source of calcium and it has nothing to do with lactose.
> "A meta-analysis of cow’s milk intake and hip fracture studies showed no significant protection"
> "milk may sometimes increase bone and hip fracture rates"
Milk and all it's derived products have lactose, so they should be avoided by people that can't digest them properly, which includes, for example, most African Americans and Native Americans among many others.
It's a gradual thing that gets worse with age, you become more and more lactose intolerant. If you find yourself having frequent diarrheas say once a month or so, consider cutting on dairy and see if it improves, you might be slightly lactose intolerant without realizing it.
Who does that?
The estimates of 1000mg or more have been pushed for decades by the dairy industry.
You can get calcium from greens like kale etc. eat a bit of brocolli, eat pulses like beans and lentils, use tahini as a sauce, drink fortified plant-milk.
Just eat a well-balanced plant-based diet and you will be absolutely fine. Studies show that plant-based diets don't cause brittle bones at all on the contrary.
You can get all the nutrients that you need, calcium included from a plant-based diet. The only thing you need to supplement is B12, which is produced by bacterias in the dust.
And as everything is so clean, we don't eat a lot of dirt anymore so that its advised to supplement. Animals don't have it too on factory farms, they get injected with it together with the anti-biotics for health reasons.
So might as well take it directly, otherwise calcium is not an issue at all in a plant-based diet and this can and it has been easily shown.
Edit: Check this YouTube playlist on bone health for more info - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5TLzNi5fYd_ACcY8TDQC...
“ You can get all the nutrients that you need, calcium included from a plant-based diet. The only thing you need to supplement is B12”
Plant based milk is fortified with calcium carbonate. You just told us to take a calcium supplement added to a liquid.
That’s admitting it’s not possible to get enough calcium from plants.
With that logic there’s a lot of food we don’t need.. everyone just needs a multivitamin.
There is no indication of lack of calcium in vegetarians or vegans, many studies have shown it.
Most likely, its your expectation of how much calcium is actually needed and how essential dairy is that has been shapped through years of advertising and missinformation.
Actually, its the opposite vegetarians and vegans have usually stronger bones. Dairy has been actually linked to more bone fractures in general - https://nutritionfacts.org/2017/01/31/why-is-milk-consumptio...
Eat a balanced whole food plant-based diet and you will be absolutely fine and actually much healthier in general than with a standard diet.
Well that settles it then. Now all we need is to get everyone to do this.
Modern milk is also a processed food, which brings a host of other negative associated factors.
Link?
> Even worse, milk increases calcium loss in bones, resulting in higher rates of fractures.
I would love to read some serious research on this. Some 3-4 years ago I read similar advice, stopped drinking milk for about 5 months and started having serious problems with teeth which I never had before. Started drinking milk again and a month later all the problems disappeared.
People, don't stop drinking milk just because a random person on the Internet said so.
Funny you ask for scientific research to support OP's argument, then you follow it up with a personal anecdote about milk fixing your teeth problem in a month (which it assuredly did not).
The reason your teeth still have enamel is that they are constantly being remineralized with minerals (including calcium) in your saliva being deposited on the top surface of the tooth.
If you consume less calcium, less calcium will be in your saliva, and that’ll slow that process down, while erosion continues normally (leading to sensitivity and eventually cavities)
if the problems he’s referring to are sensitivity (not related to gum disease), and he wasn’t getting enough calcium without milk, it’s quite possible that milk (calcium) reduced the sensitivity.
Biologically this means that the infant would release the mother so that they could have another child, so there is biological adaption on most species to not drink milk past a certain age.
And we have it too via lactose intolerance, which is normal.
However, some relatively small percentage of humans developed the ability to drink milk around 10k years ago in Turkey, but it's not perfect. It gets worse with age as one would expect.
Human babies shouldn't drink cow's milk, it's completely unnecessary and there are questions about it's effect on long-term human health.
https://www.snpedia.com/index.php/Lactose_intolerance and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactase_persistence
And we know since the mid 2000s by a dozen or so genetic studies that these genes did not arrive from a single culture or single timeframe, but are an example of "convergent evolution" aka it was beneficial for humans generally and thus when independent random mutations occurred they persisted longer for those people were more likely to breed and thrive. This happened several times in human history and are not a singular event.
And thus individual humans may have Lactase Persistence in adulthood and other individual humans may not have the persistence. Furthermore how much Lactose you can process with the Lactase enzyme is a dependent process where some people can handle some quantities but not too much quantity of Lactose all at once.
But we're not animals. Animals cannot drive cars (not even the babies!) and we do. We're different than animals in some aspects.
Some of us are able to digest milk
Also, there is a whole spectrum to it. You don't have to be 100% medically diagnosed as lactose intolerant, it might cause you ocasional digestive issues without you even know it.
Like those unexplained, once a month or once every 3 months diarrheas that many of us take as a fact of life, it's actually not normal and might very well be dairy that is causing it for a lot of people.
At least, a lot of us do it a lot worst than we realize, and there are a ton of people with recurring mild digestive issues which should not be consuming dairy daily at all, but keep doing do due to the public perception that its a healthy thing to do when in fact it's not.
The ones that can digest it, do it usually less well than they think they do. Mild chronic diarrhea is prevalent is western countries, and a degree of dairy intolerance could very well be one of the factors.
It gets worse for most people with age, as elderly people can become lactose intolerant, fully or only slightly. This does not happen overnight, its a progressive thing, many people gradually stop being able to properly digest dairy.
There are also lots of dairy products that contain little lactose, from lactose-free milk to cheese. And of course, it's pretty simple to just take lactase pills.
From a completely subjective perspective, dairy products are some of the tastiest foods, and they're objectively a huge part of food culture in Europe. I don't foresee them going away.
But there is this perception that they are absolutely essential due to decades of dairy industry advertising and lobbying, and it's simply not true.
We are animals like all the others, even if a percentage of our population evolved the ability to continue to digest milk into adulthood.
There's an entire class of people called "children" who are neither babies nor adults who can benefit from drinking milk (or any other good source of calcium).
1. According to whom?
2. Can you name a type of food that has zero questions about its effect on long-term human health?
Globally seen yes. Locally it depends. Living in i.e Europe and having lactose intolerance is not normal.