Another food recommended for its nutritional advantages without
consideration for the harm it can cause is milk. Dr. Duane Alexander,
director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human
Development, is quoted as saying, "Without including milk in the diet,
it is nearly impossible to meet calcium needs." Some medical
authorities, concerned about the deficiency of calcium in the diets of
young people, believe that drinking more milk is the solution. A
national survey revealed that only 13.5 percent of girls and 35.3
percent of boys between the ages of twelve and nineteen consume the
recommended amount of calcium for teenagers: 1,300 mg of calcium daily.
Teenagers
may be short on calcium, but they need to satisfy their calcium
requirements by eating calcium-rich foods rather than by drinking milk
because milk puts them at risk for developing a serious, sometimes fatal
health problem later on in life. Milk causes a spurt in growth by
stimulating the release of the human growth hormone somatotropin. This
increases the teenager's chance of getting cancer as an adult if his or
her milk-drinking habit causes growth above a certain height. A study
published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and
conducted at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Brigham and Women's
Hospital, and the Harvard School of Public Health found that taller
people in general were more likely to get both pancreatic and colon
cancer. Dr. Dominique Michaud, an investigator at the National Cancer
Institute, states that this increase in cancer risk is related to
exposure to the growth hormone in milk during adolescence. (This is the
growth hormone that occurs naturally in milk, not the hormone added by
dairy farmers to increase cows' production of milk.)
With each
generation in America and elsewhere growing taller than the previous one
because of increased milk consumption, and therefore increasingly
likely to get cancer -- as well as diabetes and calcium-hardened tissues
-- it's time that the human body's calcium requirements were satisfied
by eating foods that are high in calcium, such as yogurt, cheese, and
root vegetables, rather than milk. (Yogurt and cheese, although made
from milk, have been chemically altered by fermentation, so, unlike
milk, they don't stimulate the release of somatotropin, the human growth
hormone.)
Not only should teenagers avoid drinking milk because
of the health risks involved when they become adults but also because
the processed milk available in supermarkets today won't satisfy their
calcium needs. Standard brands of milk produced by agribusinesses have
been heated, for the purposes of extending their shelf life, to a
temperature of 212 degrees Fahrenheit. Pasteurization at such high heat
destroys the acidity in milk; without it calcium can't be broken down,
and undigested calcium can't be absorbed and utilized by the cells.
Drinking
commercially pasteurized milk not only fails to satisfy the body's
calcium requirements, but because undigested calcium particles are not
assimilated, adults who drink as little as two glasses of milk a day
risk a buildup of excessive levels of calcium in their bodies. Yet a
recent revision in the guidelines of the U.S. government's Food Pyramid,
published on April 20, 2005, in the New York Times, ignores this
information by recommending three cups of milk for adults daily, one
more cup than it recommends for children. In adults who drink milk every
day, the calcium is apt to be deposited in the wrong places, for
example, in the reproductive organs, in the bile duct, or in the
ureters, the ducts that convey urine from the kidneys to the bladder.
The
well-known downside of drinking milk is that it induces the
mucus-secreting glands to overproduce. Excessive amounts of mucus cause
unfriendly germs to multiply faster because it's a food they thrive on.
But
far more dangerous to health than excess mucus is the elevation of
blood insulin that the consumption of milk by adults causes. Excessive
insulin in the blood makes glucose levels drop drastically. This gives
rise to binge eating, which brings the blood sugar back up; however,
because blood sugar goes too high, insulin again rises excessively and
once again causes the blood sugar to plummet. These wild swings in blood
sugar give rise to hypoglycemia (low blood sugar), and when the
overproducing insulin glands stop working, the hypoglycemic individual
becomes diabetic.
Elevated insulin levels have also been
implicated in the development of cancer. Women with breast cancer who
have high insulin levels are six times more likely to have a recurrence.
The
deficiency of a nutrient in the body is not always the result of a diet
that is lacking in that particular nutrient. Calcium deficiency is a
case in point. The body can be deficient in calcium even though the diet
meets the calcium requirements if the individual lacks vitamin D or the
mineral boron. Both are necessary for the absorption and utilization of
calcium.
Vitamin D is found only in the fat in meat, milk
products, and seafood. The low-fat diet, by depriving the body of
vitamin D, could be responsible for the widespread calcium deficiency in
teenagers. In a study published in The Archives of Pediatrics and
Adolescent Medicine, 24 percent of the 307 teenagers tested had a severe
deficiency of vitamin D, and 42 percent were slightly deficient in the
vitamin.
The only way to overcome nutrient deficiencies is to eat
the foods that are indicated for your metabolic type. The metabolically
appropriate diet is geared toward normalizing mineral levels in the body
and providing the fats and oils needed to assimilate minerals. The
danger to health caused by consuming large quantities of milk to
overcome a calcium shortage make it clear that foods should not be
evaluated solely on the basis of their nutrient values but also on what
effect they have on long-term health.By
Felicia Drury Kliment
