Milk mustache shaven for your health

Chicago Tribune (By way of The Crescent Online, University of Evansville)

This reprinted story just caught me eye. Starts off quite promisingly, and thankfully it gets the debate out there in mainstream print in a logical, sensible way:

we’ve had it hammered home since grammar school that milk is a health food. We were told that increasing calcium intake by drinking milk will prevent osteoporosis, the weakening of bones.

But researchers Walter Willett, chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, and T. Colin Campbell, professor emeritus of nutritional biochemistry at Cornell University, said there is little evidence that shows boosting your calcium intake to the currently recommended levels will prevent fractures.

Willett, who coauthored “The Nurses’ Health Studies,” found that women with the highest calcium consumption from dairy products actually had substantially more fractures than women who drank less milk.

Campbell, who like Willett comes from a dairy-farming family, found the same thing after spending several decades surveying health-related effects of a plant-based diet and death rates from cancer in Asian countries.

Both men said there is no calcium emergency; Americans get plenty. And they argue that the unnecessary focus on calcium prevents us from using strategies that really work in the fight against osteoporosis, including getting enough exercise, vitamin D and avoiding too much vitamin A.

But then it turns on a dime and takes a boneheaded quote from an uninformed member of the public as its ending. It's as if publishers as diverse as the Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, and Newsweek, among others, seem to relish subverting even the most positive articles at the very end with brain-locking bits like this:

But some can’t imagine life without whole milk in their lattes or mozzarella cheese on their pizza. Chicago’s Trina Kakacek, the adult aquatic director at Lakeshore Athletic Club Lincoln Park, drinks a glass of skim milk and eats cheese and yogurt daily. Once a week she treats herself to ice cream, but then again who doesn’t.

“I would never dream of giving up dairy,” Kakacek said. “Particularly cheese or the real cream in my coffee every morning.”

Head of nutrition at Harvard and professor emeritus of nutritional biochem at Cornell U, meet Bonehead Q. Public. Well done, Julie Deardorff of the Chicago Tribune. Your glib excuse for an article has not only betrayed its subject matter, but has also done a disservice to the health of everyone who reads it, and made it clear to this reader that your journalism is deeply, deeply flawed.

Categories: dairy | milk | calcium | nutrition