Myths About Milk (I)

Milk has always been considered a very nutritious food, mainly because it is considered a healthy food that is rich in calcium and protein. Not only children drink a lot, adults also often drink milk believing it helps curing insomnia and supplementing calcium. It appears that Milk has become a necessity in everyone's life. However, is milk really as miraculous and nutritious as everyone says? Let's take a look at it.

• Milk supplements calcium to prevent osteoporosis?

Milk is rich in calcium, and milk calcium is easily absorbed, so some experts have been calling for milk to be the main source of calcium. There is even a legend that the Japanese changed the height of a generation because of drinking milk. Therefore, Chinese people are also calling on children to drink milk to grow taller, and the elderly to drink milk to supplement calcium. This is actually a myth. The Japanese increased their average height because they improved their overall nutritional levels, not because they drank milk.

When it comes to calcium absorption, we need to know about another mineral, magnesium. Calcium and magnesium are a pair of antagonistic minerals that restrict and promote each other. Magnesium has the function of coating calcium in the bone structure, and can also inhibit the activity of osteolytic cells and prevent bone loss. If you take in too much calcium, it will actually cause a lack of magnesium, which will make it easier for the body to excrete calcium. The best ratio of calcium to magnesium to promote calcium absorption is about 3:1, but the ratio of calcium to magnesium in milk is 23:1. Therefore, from the perspective of calcium supplementation, milk is not a good product for calcium supplementation.

Harvard University published a research report in 1997 on the relationship between milk and reducing osteoporosis. The study followed as many as 77,000 female nurses for up to 10 years. The researchers found no significant difference in the number of arm or hip fractures between those who drank one glass of milk or less per week compared with those who drank at least two glasses per week. The research team also conducted a similar survey on 330,000 men engaged in health work, and still found that milk does not seem to have any effect on the probability of fracture. Many randomized controlled trials have also been conducted on this, and one of the groups was asked to adopt a high-calcium diet—— Get calcium by drinking milk.

In 2014, the results of two large Swedish surveys made headlines: Milk does nothing for bones and may even be bad for you. For the study, researchers at Uppsala University and Karolinska Institute surveyed people's milk intake in questionnaires in 1987 and 1997, respectively, and in 2010 Mortality rates were also investigated. It turns out that drinking more than one glass of milk a day is linked to both more bone fractures and early death, which is alarming.

It is still difficult to say what these studies have to guide our diet, but what is certain is that drinking more milk to supplement calcium and prevent osteoporosis has not been scientifically proven.