What baggage comes along with the calcium in milk?
Plant vs. Cow Calcium
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So, we’ve gone over the overall healthfulness of eggs and meat. What about dairy? Overall—harmful, harmless, or helpful? Overall—harmful.
The #1 source of calcium in the American diet is dairy products. The #1 source of artery-clogging saturated fat is also dairy products: one of the top allergens in the U.S. food supply as well. So, while cow’s milk represents a substantial source of calcium, it comes with a lot of baggage.
Milk really is the perfect food… for baby calves. A superbly engineered fluid that will turn a 65-pound baby calf into a 500-pound cow in just one year. So, if we need to gain a few hundred pounds, maybe. But otherwise, we should just leave their mothers’ milk to them.
The calcium in dark green leafy vegetables, like kale, broccoli, and bok choy, is absorbed about twice as well as the calcium in milk—and there’s a bonus: fiber, folate, iron, antioxidants, and the bone-health superstar vitamin K. You won’t find any of those in milk. What you do get as a bonus to the calcium in milk is saturated butterfat, cholesterol, lactose, and antibiotics, pesticides, pus, and manure.
When scientists test pasteurization protocols, they have to actually take into account the manure in the milk: “Heat Inactivation…in Milk Contaminated with…Infected Feces.” To replicate what happens in the industry naturally: “High concentrations of feces from…[diseased cows] were used to contaminate raw milk” in the study.
There was even a study on pus this year! In the Journal of Dairy Science, they asked, frankly, a pretty revolting question: can you taste the pus? The U.S. has the highest allowable pus concentration in the world—you can have more than 300 million pus cells in just one glass. Now, the industry has always argued that it doesn’t matter how inflamed and infected the udders of our factory-farmed dairy cows are, because of pasteurization; it’s cooked pus; so, there’s no food safety risk.
What these researchers did, though, was to see if you can taste the difference. They made two vats of cheese—one with high-pus milk, and the other conforming to the more stringent European standards. Not only could they taste the difference, but the “now with less pus” cheese evidently tasted significantly better.
To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring, watch the above video. This is just an approximation of the audio contributed by Dianne Moore.
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- J. L. W. Rademaker, M. M. M. Vissers, and M. C. T. Giffel. Effective heat inactivation of mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculosis in raw milk contaminated with naturally infected feces. Appl. Environ. Microbiol., 73(13):4185-4190, 2007.
- P. C. B. Vianna, G. Mazal, M. V. Santos, H. M. A. Bolini, and M. L. Gigante. Microbial and sensory changes throughout the ripening of prato cheese made from milk with different levels of somatic cells. J. Dairy Sci., 91(5):1743-1750, 2008.
So, we’ve gone over the overall healthfulness of eggs and meat. What about dairy? Overall—harmful, harmless, or helpful? Overall—harmful.
The #1 source of calcium in the American diet is dairy products. The #1 source of artery-clogging saturated fat is also dairy products: one of the top allergens in the U.S. food supply as well. So, while cow’s milk represents a substantial source of calcium, it comes with a lot of baggage.
Milk really is the perfect food… for baby calves. A superbly engineered fluid that will turn a 65-pound baby calf into a 500-pound cow in just one year. So, if we need to gain a few hundred pounds, maybe. But otherwise, we should just leave their mothers’ milk to them.
The calcium in dark green leafy vegetables, like kale, broccoli, and bok choy, is absorbed about twice as well as the calcium in milk—and there’s a bonus: fiber, folate, iron, antioxidants, and the bone-health superstar vitamin K. You won’t find any of those in milk. What you do get as a bonus to the calcium in milk is saturated butterfat, cholesterol, lactose, and antibiotics, pesticides, pus, and manure.
When scientists test pasteurization protocols, they have to actually take into account the manure in the milk: “Heat Inactivation…in Milk Contaminated with…Infected Feces.” To replicate what happens in the industry naturally: “High concentrations of feces from…[diseased cows] were used to contaminate raw milk” in the study.
There was even a study on pus this year! In the Journal of Dairy Science, they asked, frankly, a pretty revolting question: can you taste the pus? The U.S. has the highest allowable pus concentration in the world—you can have more than 300 million pus cells in just one glass. Now, the industry has always argued that it doesn’t matter how inflamed and infected the udders of our factory-farmed dairy cows are, because of pasteurization; it’s cooked pus; so, there’s no food safety risk.
What these researchers did, though, was to see if you can taste the difference. They made two vats of cheese—one with high-pus milk, and the other conforming to the more stringent European standards. Not only could they taste the difference, but the “now with less pus” cheese evidently tasted significantly better.
To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring, watch the above video. This is just an approximation of the audio contributed by Dianne Moore.
Please consider volunteering to help out on the site.
- J. L. W. Rademaker, M. M. M. Vissers, and M. C. T. Giffel. Effective heat inactivation of mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculosis in raw milk contaminated with naturally infected feces. Appl. Environ. Microbiol., 73(13):4185-4190, 2007.
- P. C. B. Vianna, G. Mazal, M. V. Santos, H. M. A. Bolini, and M. L. Gigante. Microbial and sensory changes throughout the ripening of prato cheese made from milk with different levels of somatic cells. J. Dairy Sci., 91(5):1743-1750, 2008.
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Title
Plant vs. Cow Calcium
LicenseCreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
Content URLDoctor's Note
More on calcium in cow’s milk versus calcium in plant-based foods:
Alkaline Diets, Animal Protein, & Calcium Loss
Calcium Absorption: Soy Milk Versus Cow Milk
New Mineral Absorption Enhancers Found
And more on the health risks of dairy consumption:
Dairy Estrogen and Male Fertility
Trans Fat In Meat And Dairy
Preventing Alzheimer’s Disease with Diet
Carnitine, Choline, Cancer and Cholesterol: The TMAO Connection
And check out my other videos on dairy.
For more context, see my blog posts: Stool Size and Breast Cancer Risk and How to Enhance Mineral Absorption.
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