Battle Lines Drawn Over Milk
Dairy industry pans study that downplays its importance to kids
 (HealthDay News) -- A study on how much milk kids need in their diets to build strong, healthy bones has pitted nutrition rebels against mainstream experts and the dairy industry.
The furor started when a medical journal published an article that found little evidence that children need to drink lots of milk to build strong bones.
The authors analyzed the results of 27 studies that focused on diet and bone health in children and young adults. According to the authors, only nine studies found a link between calcium intake and bone health, and the benefits were small.
"We didn't see any difference between kids who are consuming around 500 milligrams (of calcium) and those consuming 800 or 1200," study co-author Amy Lanou, nutrition director for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, told HealthDay. The group, based in Washington, D.C., promotes vegetarianism.
About 1½ glasses of milk would provide 500 milligrams of calcium, she said. But Lanou, who is a vegetarian, recommends non-animal sources of calcium instead, such as dark greens, tofu, nuts and seeds, and calcium-fortified products such as rice milk, soy milk and orange juice.
"The bottom line for parents is that if your child is lactose-intolerant, or if your child doesn't like milk or is allergic to milk, you really don't have to worry," she said.
In addition, she said, calcium isn't the only way to make sure kids have strong bones.
"The best option is to get your kids outside playing, getting some exercise and some sunshine, and make sure they have an overall healthy diet rich in fruits, vegetables, grains and legumes," Lanou said.
But the dairy industry contends that the authors of the study had a pro-vegetarian agenda that goes against the conventional wisdom behind the three-servings-a-day dairy recommendations.
"Go out and look at what mainstream medical and health professionals are saying," Greg Miller, the National Dairy Council's senior vice president of nutrition and product innovation, told HealthDay. "This opinion piece really stands out as an anomaly compared to what every other group is saying."
Miller said the article did not analyze studies that used medical research's "gold standard" to determine cause-and-effect relationships between milk consumption and bone health.
Other industry critics also have questioned the studies used in the article by Lanou and colleagues.
David Martosko, of the nonprofit advocacy group Center for Consumer Freedom, told HealthDay that Lanou's group "cherry-picked which studies they included because they knew if they included more actual clinic trials that the results wouldn't be very animal-rights friendly."
"What we object to," he said, "is a group claiming to represent the mainstream medical community when it pronounces that dairy foods are inherently unnecessary."
But Lanou has her supporters as well.
When it comes to its role in forming and maintaining strong bones, "the data for calcium is quite weak, as compared to looking at vitamin K and vitamin D," Susan Brown, director of the Osteoporosis Education Project, told HealthDay.
On the Web
Learn more about kids' bone health at the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases online.
SOURCES: HealthDay News; Amy Lanou, Ph.D., nutrition director, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, Washington D.C.; Greg Miller, Ph.D., senior vice president for nutrition and product innovation, National Dairy Council, Chicago; March 7, 2005, Herald-Sun (Durham, N.C.); March 8, 2005, Post Standard (Syracuse, N.Y.); March 2005, Pediatrics
Author: Anne Thompson
Publication Date: March 31, 2006
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