Calcium and Osteoporosis

Got milk and... got osteoporosis?
How's that? Doesn't milk protect you from bone loss?

By Rob McLean

Eight million American women and two million men have osteoporosis. The disease is responsible for more than 1.5 million fractures annually, with a direct cost of $14 billion. Of those, 300,000 are hip fractures; one-third of the people over age 50 who break their hips never walk independently again, and 20 percent die within a year from related complications.

Hegsted sums it up,"It will be embarrassing enough if the current calcium hype is simply useless; it will be immeasurably worse if the recommendations are actually detrimental to health."

Milk--Calcium--Protein
Do they protect from osteoporosis?

Another doubter about dairy as a preventative for osteoporosis is Mark Hegsted, retired Harvard professor of nutrition. Hegsted believes we get too much calcium.

In an article in the Journal of Nutrition he writes, "Hip fractures are more frequent in populations where dairy products are commonly consumed and calcium intakes are relatively high. Is there any possibility that this is a causal relationship?"

Mark Hegsted, retired Harvard professor of nutrition believes we get too much calcium.

With age, the body moves from building bone mass to losing bone mass. Hegsted opines that the inefficient consumers have permanently damaged  their abilities to effectively use dietary calcium or even to conserve calcium in the bones later in life.    Hegsted's hypothesis explains why high dairy consumers so often end up with rampant bone loss.

Still another doubter is Dean Ornish, MD. He writes, "The real cause of osteoporosis in this country is not insufficient calcium intake, it's excessive excretion of calcium in the urine. Even calcium supplementation is often not enough to make up for the increased calcium excretion."

Americans commonly eat twice the amount of necessary protein with about 70 % of coming from animal sources. Vegetarians, the world over, obtain virtually all of their calcium from plant sources, in particular from leafy green vegetables.

In a report published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 1,600 women in Michigan were studied using direct photon absorptiometry to measure bone mineral density. Women who had been vegetarians for at least twenty years had only 18 percent less bone mineral when they reached the age of eighty. Closely-paired women who ate a typical American diet, however, had 35 percent less bone mineral.

Ornish writes, "Vegetarians, in contrast, excrete much less calcium, and this is why they have very low rates of osteoporosis even though their dietary intake of calcium is lower than those on a meat-eating diet."

Why don't many Americans know about this relationship between calcium, protein, and bone loss?

Campbell says, "Unfortunately, we are absolutely drowned in information coming out of the dairy industry."

So what does the milk industry have to say about this?

Well, they say that exercise has something to do with developing osteoporosis. They are right.

However, the milk industry compares our luxury toilet "thrones" to less-developed toilet practices of  squatting over a hole and claims those squatters are building strong bones in the practice.

Yoffe continues, "Another theory holds that Asian women in particular have better designed hips than Caucasians, making them like inflatable punching toys that can't be knocked down, thus less likely to suffer hip fractures. The problem with this theory is that recent studies show that the Chinese diet is rapidly becoming more Westernized. Guess what, so is the Chinese rate of osteoporosis."

Osteoporosis has enormous public health consequences. Why?

Yoffe answers, "Eight million American women and 2 million men have osteoporosis. The disease is responsible for more than 1.5 million fractures annually, with a direct cost of $14 billion. Of those, 300,000 are hip fractures; one-third of the people over age 50 who break their hips never walk independently again, and 20 percent die within a year from related complications. With an aging population, and in the absence of some plumbing apocalypse that will cause Americans to adopt a squatting posture to relieve themselves, the incidence and cost of osteoporosis can only rise."

Hegsted sums it up,"It will be embarrassing enough if the current calcium hype is simply useless; it will be immeasurably worse if the recommendations are actually detrimental to health."

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