What If We Have Been Wrong?
What if, the milk we have been encouraging people to drink for health is actually contributing to the incidence of chronic disease in the U.S.?
What if milk protein causes increases in blood cholesterol level (yes I said protein, not just the fat)?
What if milk protein were found to promote cancer?
What if the large quantities of cow's milk we practically force children to drink is causing the allergies, excema, stomach upset so commonly seen in American children, perhaps even contributing to ADD?
What if the intake of milk contributes to osteoporosis risk rather than reduces it?
What if milk really doesn't do a body good?
What if the high quality and efficiency of milk and other animal protein is part of the problem?
For me, as a nutrition professional these thoughts are really quite terrifying. What if I have been teaching misinformation for six years? What if I have been living and encouraging others to live by misinformation for my whole adult life? These questions shake me to the core.
I remember well the day in fall of 1996 that I wrote these questions. I had been working at New Century Nutrition for about 8 months, and I had just come back from a lecture in Dr. Campbell's Vegetarian Nutrition class at Cornell University (the first semester he taught it). In that particular lecture he covered a series of animal studies that very clearly implicated casein (milk protein) as a promoter of high blood cholesterol levels. I was outraged. Why hadn't I at least heard that there were some questions about the health value of milk?
Over the course of the last four years, I have been exposed to a lot of information, both old and new, that I did not encounter in my professional nutrition training at top quality universities. As an undergraduate nutrition science student at University of California at Davis, I did not learn that there might be long-term health benefits to choosing a plant-based diet. Even when I discovered in an advanced nutrition lab that I had very high cholesterol levels (>300mg/dl) no one (not the professor, the teaching assistant or the doctor I went to see) suggested that I consume less animal food. While I was at Davis I did hear Frances Moore Lappe speak and I learned about the global health and environmental reasons to choose a meatless diet. I learned, too, that it was difficult but possible to get a nutritionally adequate diet eating this way.
As a human nutrition Ph.D. student at Cornell, I did not learn that there are multiple animal and human studies showing blood cholesterol levels are lower when plant protein is fed instead of milk and other animal protein. Nor did I know that some studies have shown a correlation between high calcium and animal protein intake and high bone fracture rates. I've seen first hand the ravages of osteoporosis. My grandmother's deterioration and eventual demise was due, in part, to severe osteoporosis. Because of this, I had been very insistent upon including low-fat calcium-rich dairy foods in my diet and recommending that others do as well. I get very concerned when I think about the fact that children, adults and aging persons are all encouraged to drink lots of milk for healthy bones. What if turns out that this strategy does more harm than good?
I did, however, learn that there was an epidemiological study going on in China that suggested that high protein intakes might be cancer promoting. What I didn't know was that high protein intake in China is at the low end of normal in the U.S. and that this correlation was specific to animal protein intake.
And, I did learn that consuming diets high in total fat, saturated fat and cholesterol put individuals at increased risk for heart disease, diabetes, obesity and some types of cancer. We have discussed the relative merits of different types of fat ad infinitum. For this reason, I recommended the inclusion of only very low-fat and non-fat dairy and small amounts of lean cuts of meat or fish.
Here are some highlights of the information that in recent years has challenged my assumptions about what it means to eat healthfully.
I started working with Colin Campbell and the NCN team and became very familiar with the main findings of the China Study as well as the work of the other forward thinking researchers and physicians, Drs. Esselstyn, Ornish, Shintani, Attwood, Bernard and McDougall. I learned that perhaps one of the reasons my lacto-ovo-vegetarian diet based on the American Heart Association guidelines wasn't controlling my cholesterol level was that 30% of calories from fat is just not low enough for everyone (perhaps anyone?) to achieve a truly healthy blood cholesterol level (<140mg/dL).
For more information about the landmark work of these individuals:
Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn recently published his findings from a 15 years study published in the August 1 issue of the The American Journal of Cardiology and there is an interesting news report on this study offered by TheHealthNetwork.com on September 27, 1999.
Dr. Dean Ornish (www.allhealth.com/ornish/) has made his findings very accessible to the public through his many books, my favorite of which is Dr. Dean Ornish's Program for Reversing Heart Disease without Drugs or Surgery.
Dr. Terri Shintani is the author of Eat More Weigh Less and The Hawaii Diet.
Dr. Charles Attwood wrote a great book for parents called Lowfat Prescription for Kidsand some of his essays and news reports are available in the NCN archives and on VegSource (www.vegsource.com/attwood/).
Dr. Neal Barnard is the president of the Physician's Committee for Responsible Medicine the findings from this hardworking organization are available on their site. Dr. Bernard is a prolific author as well, with his interesting and most curent book Foods that Fight Pain highlighted on the PCRM site.
Dr. John McDougall has a very active web site (www.drmcdougall.com) and a series of very useful books to his credit.
And the final challenge to my beliefs about the health value of milk is not very scientific, but perhaps the most convincing for me personally. When I made the personal decision to shift from vegetarian to nearly entirely plant-based (I reduced my dairy intake to about 1 small serving a week), I dropped my cholesterol level by 75 mg/dL (which over time had increased on a low-fat vegetarian diet to >400mg/dL and was being controlled with drugs to about 300mg/dL) bringing it for the first time in my adult life into the moderate risk range (with my LDL at 150 mg/dL). My allergies went away and I stopped taking the prescription anti-histamines that I had been taking daily for about 3 years. And, incidentally, I lost about 20 pounds which was not a personal goal of mine, but might be of interest to some people. And believe me, I ate. I still do. In fact, people comment on how much I eat.
So looking back, I'm asking myself a few questions. If this information was available and/or presented to me, why didn't I notice it? And, if it wasn't available, why wasn't it? Do you realize that milk is the only food that we have a specific requirement for? Why is that?
In this webzine issue, Dr. Colin Campbell offers some thoughts and answers to some of these questions. Over the course of the last month there has been several very interesting threads of discussion of these and related questions on the NCN discussion board. Several individuals have offered a variety of opinions supported by scientific research. If you haven't checked it out yet, its worth stopping by. We are in process of compiling a list of useful references for those interested in researching these questions further--look for it by mid-October.
Please join me in taking an honest open-minded look at the data that question the health value of dairy and meat products. Compare this data with evidence of their health promoting effects and make a decision for yourself about whether these foods are health promoting or health negating for you and your families.
Wishing you the best of health,
Amy Lanou, Managing Editor
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