How Do You Tell Your 8-year-old Daughter About School Milk Lies?

By Robert Cohen, Notmilk.com

In school, they scare her with a lie and then reinforce that lie with cafeteria posters which you never see. The posters are paid for by the dairy industry and include role models who are paid to reinforce the lie.

The antidote to deceit?

You print the following for her to read. She will respect logic, unlike most adults...

"The myth that osteoporosis is caused by calcium deficiency was created to sell dairy products and calcium supplements. There's no truth to it. American
women are among the biggest consumers of calcium in the world, and they still have one of the highest levels of osteoporosis in the world. And eating even more dairy products and calcium supplements is not going to change that fact. The primary cause of osteoporosis is the high-protein diet most Americans consume today. As one leading researcher in this area said, '[Eating a high-protein diet is like pouring acid rain on your bones.'"
- Dr. John McDougall

"It is hard to turn on the television without hearing commercials suggesting that milk promotes strong bones. The commercials do not point out that only 30 percent of milk's calcium is absorbed by the body or that osteoporosis is common among milk drinkers. Nor do they help you correct the real causes of bone loss."
- Dr. Neal Barnard

"The association between the intake of animal protein and fracture rates appears to be as strong as the association between cigarette smoking and
lung cancer."
- Dr. T. Colin Campbell

"Milk, it now seems clear, is not the solution to poor bone density. To the contrary, it's part of the problem."
- Dr. Charles Attwood

* * * * * * *

If your precocious 8-year-old is wise enough to look you in he eyes and say, "But mom, those are just opinions from doctors, and are not scientific."

Give yourself your best inner smile and give her this. She will understand:

Why does calcium leave bones?

In 1988, N.A. Breslau and colleagues identified the relationship between protein-rich diets and calcium metabolism, noting that protein caused calcium loss. His work was published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology (1988;66:140-6).

A 1994 study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (Remer T, Am J Clin Nutr 1994;59:1356-61) found that animal proteins cause calcium to be leached from the bones and excreted in the urine.

"Osteoporosis is caused by a number of things, one of the most important being too much dietary protein." {Science 1986;233, 4763}

"Even when eating 1,400 mg of calcium daily, one can lose up to 4% of his or her bone mass each year while consuming a high-protein diet." {American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 1979;32,4}

"Increasing one's protein intake by 100% may cause calcium loss to double." {Journal of Nutrition, 1981; 111, 3}

"The average man in the US eats 175% more protein than the recommended daily allowance and the average woman eats 144% more." {Surgeon General's Report on Nutrition and Health, 1988}

"Consumption of dairy products, particularly at age 20 years, were associated with an increased risk of hip fractures... metabolism of dietary protein causes increased urinary excretion of calcium." {American Journal of Epidemiology 1994;139}