not milk?

The milk debate gets some open treatment in today's Chicago Tribune. The article asks:

Have we all been duped by the dairy industry's slick, celebrity-driven "got milk?" advertising campaign?

The anti-dairy contingent receives excellent face-time, for once:

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, say there is little evidence that shows boosting your calcium intake to the currently recommended levels will prevent fractures.

Willett, who co-authored "The Nurses' Health Studies," one of the largest investigations into the risk factors for major chronic diseases in women, 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 more than 2,400 Chinese counties.

Of course, dairy proponents miss the big picture:

The calcium from some vegetables such as broccoli, bok choy and kale is absorbed as well as or better than calcium from milk and milk products, according to the National Dairy Council's Calcium Counseling Resource. But the report also says that to get the same amount of calcium absorbed from 1 cup of milk, one would have to eat nearly 2 1/2 cups of broccoli or 8 cups of spinach.

Recommendations also suggest people need to eat more fruits and vegetables, which would get calcium intake up from those sources. And, as is suggested by Dr. Campbell, calcium recommendations are currently too high.

It's nice to see this debate pushed into the open in a major publication. But, despite it's generally positive consideration for the anti-dairy contingent, the article leaves the reader still wondering who to believe.

One can only hope that, at the very least, a more open debate will lend greater credibility to those of us who choose to forgo something that isn't produced for us. And maybe, just maybe, more people will start to look more deeply into whether high dairy consumption is as necessary as they're being led to believe.