Milk: Health Hero Or Villain ?

Is milk essential to growing tall and mighty? Witness theDepartment of Agriculture’s MyPlate, which is crowned with a blue circle symbolizing the dairy food group, and advising everyone older than eight to consume three servings of dairy per day.

But with sales of cow’s milk plummeting, the dairy industry isn’t taking milk’s century-long reign as a North American staple for granted. For example, it partnered with marketing juggernauts such as the Coca-Cola Company to help keep cow’s milk a relevant and competitive drink.

Fairlife, which some have called “monster milk,” represents the marriage between Big Dairy and Big Beverage. It’s lactose-free milk with 50 percent more protein, 30 percent more calcium, 50 percent less sugar, and an extended shelf life of 100 days (compared to 14 days for regular milk).

Veterinarian and dairy farmer Mike McCloskey and his wife, Sue, who own Fair Oaks Farm in Fair Oaks, Indiana, invented the patented filtration process that breaks milk down into its five major components — water, fat, protein, sugar, vitamins, and minerals — and then recombines them to, they claim, retain the purity of real milk yet significantly improve the health benefits and taste. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. In addition to setting you back $4.59 for a 52-ounce plastic bottle, you may pay for this amped-up milk with your health.

Following are facts that may make you think twice about whether you want to be drinking cow’s milk by the glass, let alone cow’s milk with unnaturally high levels of protein and calcium.

You Can Have Too Much Milk

Drinking too much milk has been linked to shorter lifespans and more broken bones. A large 2014 study published in the British Medical Journal included data on more than 100,000 men and women, and found that “high milk intake was associated with higher mortality in one cohort of women and in another cohort of men, and with higher fracture incidence in women.”

More specifically, the women who drank three or more glasses of milk per day were 60 percent more likely to have suffered a hip fracture. They were also 90 percent more likely to die ofcardiovascular disease and 44 percent more likely to have died of cancer during the study than those who drank less than one glass of milk per day.

The authors of the study are calling for more research into the possible correlation between milk consumption and a greater risk of mortality and bone fractures before advising people to change their dietary habits. But one of the lead researchers, Dr. Karl Michaëlsson, a professor in the Department of Surgical Sciences at Uppsala University in Sweden, has said he has cut down on his milk consumption, reports the LA Times. Read more

Source: (everydayhealth)