IN MID-MARCH, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sparked controversy with its campaign promoting beer's advantages over cow's milk to college students. Certainly, few health professionals would advocate beer as a health tonic, yet many mistakenly regard milk as a necessarily wholesome choice. Indeed, saying "don't drink your milk" may initially sound as un-American as "don't eat apple pie." But PETA's anti-milk points are well-taken.
For generations, most parents and physicians have kept urging children to drink their glasses of milk. To be sure, they generally had good intentions -- but they also had been flooded with endless promotions and ads from the financially well-set dairy industry. More recently, it's hard to miss those here, there and everywhere milk-mustache and "Got Milk?" billboards, bus ads, print ads, TV spots, and classroom promotions. The milk industry even hit the road with its "Better Bones Tour," visiting 100 U.S. cities with trucks carrying displays claiming a beneficial relationship between dairy and osteoporosis.
Science, however, has been raining on dairy's parade. Observations in South African black townships, with virtually no dairy consumption, showed residents there experience almost no osteoporosis, while the chronic bone disease afflicts millions in dairy-devouring places such as Scandinavia, Canada, and the United States. In a finding published in the
cf03 American Journal of Public Health
cf01 in June 1997, the 12-year Harvard Nurses' Study of almost 78,000 people found those regularly consuming dairy products had no protection at all against hip and forearm fractures. Indeed, women drinking three glasses of milk daily had more fractures than women who rarely or never touched milk.
Other studies are investigating dairy's links with breast cancer, ovarian cancer, iron deficiency, insulin-dependent diabetes, cataracts, food allergies, heart disease, asthma and colic. Common toxic contaminants in dairy include pesticides, drugs and antibiotics.
In attacking cow's milk, PETA actually echoes the growing number of nutritionists and doctors wiping off their milk mustaches.
From my perspective as an African-American physician, there is another troubling side to dairy promotions, and especially to government recommendations that it be part of every school lunch meal and similar nutrition programs.
