Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom (162 page)

But conventionally produced milk can be a problem food for many children and adults. Frank Oski, M.D., former chief of pediatrics at Johns Hopkins Medical School, published a great little book entitled
Don’t Drink Your
Milk
(Mollica Press, 1983), which documented the link between dairy foods and allergy, eczema, bed-wetting, and ear infections in children.
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Countless children are needlessly treated with antibiotics for repeated ear infections that would go away if they were taken off dairy foods. Dr. Oski’s honesty about the adverse health effects of dairy foods is a much-appreciated contribution. Since you will find so little cultural support for removing conventionally produced milk from the diet of your children, it is helpful to have good information.

Over the years, I have seen many problems associated with dairy foods: benign breast conditions, chronic vaginal discharge, acne, men strual cramps, fibroids, chronic intestinal upset, and increased pain from endometriosis.

Consumption of dairy foods has been implicated in both breast and ovarian cancers.
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I can’t help but think that there might be some correlation between overstimulation of the cow’s mammary glands, through the use of certain hormones intended to increase milk production, and subsequent overstimulation of our own. Nursing babies as well as their mothers are affected by what the mothers eat. They sometimes develop symptoms of cow’s milk allergy when their mothers are consuming a lot of cow’s milk.

Like most Americans, I was taught that milk was necessary for getting enough calcium, even though three-quarters of the world’s popu lation manages to maintain health without drinking milk after infancy. (Many do, however, consume other kinds of dairy foods, usually fer mented forms, such as cheese and yogurt, often made from sheep’s or goat’s milk.) Stopping dairy foods or substituting organically produced dairy foods often improves menstrual cramps, endometriosis pain, allergies, sinusitis, and even recurrent vaginitis. Because an entire gener ation of baby boomers has been raised on cow’s milk instead of human milk, the cow at some deep level is now associated with “mother” and “nourishment.” The very notion of eliminating dairy products causes heart palpitations in some people; they cannot conceive of living with out milk.

On the other hand, dairy foods produced organically, without bovine growth hormone and antibiotics, have a very different effect on the body. Some of my patients with gyn problems related to dairy have had complete remission of these problems when they have switched to organically produced milk products, which are now widely available. One of my newsletter subscribers in Indiana even went so far as to buy a milk cow for her family’s milk supply. They have no health problems at all. On the other hand, some people continue to have an allergic-type reaction even to organic cow’s milk.

People often wonder, “If I don’t drink milk, where will I get my calcium?” Though milk is generally a good source of calcium, there are non-dairy sources as well—for example, dark green leafy vegetables such as kale, collard greens, and broccoli. These sources of calcium can be just as effective for bone health.
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Most of the world’s population, including inhabitants of China, which has almost no breast cancer and no osteoporosis in rural areas, gets its calcium from greens. Studies also show that while the Chinese consume only half the calcium of Americans, osteoporosis is uncommon in China despite an average life expectancy of seventy years—only five years less than ours.
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African Bantu women eat no dairy foods, but they consume 150 to 400 mg of calcium daily through the foods they do eat. This is half the amount of calcium consumed by the average American woman. Yet osteoporosis is essentially unknown among the 10 percent of female Bantus who reach more than sixty years of age. Genetic protection was considered the reason but has been ruled out: When relatives of these same Bantu people migrate to more affluent societies and adopt rich diets, osteoporosis and diseases of the teeth become more common.
⁹⁰

The current recommended daily allowance (RDA) for calcium in the United States is 1,200 mg a day for women age twenty-five and older. Fully 50 percent of American women do not consume this RDA and are thus at increased risk for osteoporosis. The current World Health Organization recommendation for calcium intake is 400 mg per day—one-third the amount recommended in the United States. For most of the world this is adequate.

The average Chinese, who has a very low risk of osteoporosis, consumes 544 mg of calcium each day.
⁹¹
The calcium supplement and dairy industries have been so effective at offering us an osteoporosis “fix” that we think we can reduce the complexity of bone physiology to a formula as simple as taking calcium pills. But bone is affected by a whole host of factors (See
chapter 14
), and bone health is profoundly affected by our daily food and exercise choices. Caffeine, alcohol, sugar, and tobacco also have a negative effect on bone health and contribute to osteoporosis. With lifestyle im provement on all levels, our bones would stay healthy on relatively less calcium, as long as we also exercised, cut back on refined foods, and got enough vitamin D.

UPDATE ON VITAMIN D

The most recent research reveals that calcium is virtually useless without enough vitamin D, which plays a crucial role in maintaining bone health. Studies now show that women with osteoporosis typically have less vitamin D in their systems than women with healthy bones. In fact, the former RDA of this vitamin (400 IU per day) is not even half the amount that is actually necessary to maintain optimal bone health!

By the way, the benefits of vitamin D go way beyond helping you achieve healthy bones. The Vitamin D Council (a nonprofit educational organization) reports on its website (
www.vitamindcouncil.org
) that current scientific research “has implicated vitamin D deficiency as a major factor in the pathology of at least 17 varieties of cancer as well as heart disease, stroke, hypertension, autoimmune diseases, diabetes, depression, chronic pain, osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, muscle weakness, muscle wasting, birth defects, periodontal disease, and more.” (A 33 percent reduction in type 2 diabetes has been reported in those taking 800 IU of vitamin D a day plus calcium, as well as a 78 percent reduction in type 1 diabetes in children taking 2,000 IU a day in the first year of life).
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Vitamin D deficiency has been linked with bacterial vaginosis, a vaginal infection associated with premature birth.
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Researchers have also found a correlation between higher vitamin D levels and reduced risk of being overweight, although vitamin D supplements haven’t been found to promote weight loss except in those on very low-calorie diets.
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A 42 percent reduction in multiple sclerosis has been reported for women taking more than 400 IU of vitamin D a day.
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There’s even research showing that vitamin D can ward off influenza.
⁹⁶

To get adequate amounts of vitamin D, I recommend moderate, safe sunlight exposure. A thirty-minute sunbath over most of your body without sunscreen will provide 10,000 IU of vitamin D, but most people don’t get outside enough and leave too little skin exposed to the sun when they do. For the average Caucasian living in the United States, exposing the hands, face, and arms for fifteen to twenty minutes to midmorning or late-afternoon sun three days a week provides sufficient UVB radiation to produce vitamin D during the months of March through October. For those who live from about Washington, D.C., north (from latitudes around the mid-30 degrees and higher), an eight-to ten-minute sunbath in a tanning booth once a week will provide you with adequate UVB radiation to make vitamin D during the winter months. Women who live nearer to the equator will have an easier time meeting their vitamin D needs from sunlight. I also recommend taking vitamin D supplements (absorption is higher if you take the supplement with a meal containing some fat) and getting your vitamin D level checked as a baseline. Optimal blood levels are between 40 and 100 ng/ml. If your levels are low, you may need to start by taking 5,000 to 10,000 IU per day. Once you reach a healthy level, you can maintain it by taking anywhere from 2,000 to 5,000 IU a day depending on sun exposure.
⁹⁷

The famous Women’s Health Initiative Study on calcium and vita min D supplementation showed that women who took both calcium and vitamin D experienced a 29 percent reduction in the risk of hip fracture over a period of seven years as compared with the placebo group, but no decrease in vertebral fractures—which may have been because study participants took 1,000 mg of calcium per day and only 400 IU of vitamin D, which most experts believe is not a high enough dose. The other limitation to the study was the fact that most women didn’t start taking the supplement until they were over sixty years old—after many had probably already lost considerable bone mass.
⁹⁸
Though there was an increased risk of kidney stones in those who took the calcium, that would probably have been greatly reduced by including adequate magnesium to balance the calcium. (For more about the importance of vitamin D, read
The
Vitamin D Revolution
[Hay House, 2009] by Soram Khalsa, M.D.; also see the discussion of vitamin D on page 357 in chapter 10.)

Bone health is affected by many factors other than calcium.
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Television advertising promotes the use of antacids because of their calcium content. But antacids such as Tums (calcium carbon ate) decrease the acidity of the stomach, which can lead to decreased absorption of calcium, since hydrochloric acid in the stomach is neces sary for assimilation of calcium.
¹⁰⁰
Given that studies have shown that about 40 percent of postmenopausal women are already deficient in stomach acid, using an antacid such as Tums to supplement calcium doesn’t make sense. In addition, it has been shown that people with insufficient stomach acid can absorb only about 4 percent of an oral dose of calcium given as calcium carbonate, while a person with normal stomach acid can absorb about 22 percent. Those with low stomach acid secretion need a soluble, ionized form of calcium such as calcium citrate, succinate, malate, aspartate, or fumarate.
¹⁰¹
Also, the strong alkaline na ture of carbonate combined with the calcium that is absorbed can set the stage for kidney stones, especially if milk products are a regular part of the diet. Calcium citrate can act as a good antacid if you need one, even though it isn’t marketed as such.

Colas and root beer also contribute to osteoporosis, because the coloring agent and the phosphoric acid used in these drinks interfere with calcium metabolism.
¹⁰²
Depression is also a significant contributor to os teoporosis because high levels of epinephrine and cortisol, produced by the adrenal glands in greater quantities in depressed individuals, can increase calcium loss in the urine and also cause breakdown of bone.
¹⁰³

The best approach to building bone health is a holistic one in which we look at all the dietary, environmental, and genetic factors related to osteoporosis development and improve those areas in which we have some control. (See
chapter 14
.) Note the following points about calcium sources:

The nutritional content of food is dependent upon where the food was grown, when it was harvested, the quality of the soil, and so on.

There can be wide variation in the mineral content of foods, depending upon soil mineralization.