by Robert Williscroft

Created on: March 22, 2008

Drink your milk for strong bones and teeth! Did your mother ever tell you this?

She's right - if you are a calf. After all, milk is nature's way of adding 300 pounds to a calf and turning it into a cow in about a year.

Television and radio carry generic ads sponsored by the "Milk Council" - which seems to be a sub-unit of the National Dairy Council. These same guys sponsor ads in newspapers, magazines, bill boards - in fact, just about wherever you look, you will see something enticing you to purchase and drink milk.

"Milk does a body good" - I'm sure you have seen this a thousand times. Did you also notice that you don't see this slogan anymore. "Got Milk?" has replaced it, and for good reason. When challenged in court recently, the Milk Council could not substantiate its claims that "Milk does a body good."

The truth about milk and its dubious benefits is one of the best-kept secrets in America.

Cow milk has several inherent problems. Everybody knows that milk is laden with cholesterol. In fact, butterfat has the highest percentage of cholesterol of any routinely consumed animal fat. Milk also contains lactose - milk sugar which requires the enzyme lactase for proper digestion. Nearly ten percent of white American adults, fully seventy percent of black American adults, and virtually all Asian and Amerind American adults are deficient in this enzyme and so cannot properly digest milk; the result is gas and diarrhea.

The ratio of calcium to phosphorus in cow milk is about 1:1.2. In this ratio, they tend to combine in the intestine to form nearly indigestible mono-calcium phosphate. Despite this near indigestibility, cows can utilize it anyway by processing it through four stomachs. With our single stomach, however, much of this calcium simply passes through humans. In contrast, human milk contains a calcium to phosphorus ratio of more than 1:2, and in this ratio, less mono-calcium phosphate is produced. Thus, although human milk has less total calcium than cow milk, more calcium is actually available after digestion.

The Milk Council website (www.whymilk.com), is one of those sites where many pages are filled with very little actual information. In fact, you cannot even discover who these guys really are at this site. It promotes milk, and repeats much of the "common wisdom" about milk. In today's litigious world, however, they use the language very carefully. For example, here is a direct quote from their site regarding calcium:

"Calcium is one of the nutrients most

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