A lit­tle known fact about our obses­sion with “Milk for strong bones” is that it is one of the biggest mis­un­der­stand­ings in nutri­tion today. We have become crazy with the idea that you have to con­sume dairy prod­ucts for good health and noth­ing could be fur­ther from the truth.

Stud­ies done in the late 70’s & early 80’s demon­strated a gen­eral lack of bone den­sity in chil­dren.  Focus was placed on chil­dren of low income fam­i­lies and ulti­mately led to some polit­i­cally dri­ven ini­tia­tives to make milk more afford­able to the poor. This is also what sparked the ad cam­paign for “Milk does a body good” and of course “Milk for strong bones”.

What the study failed to note in rela­tion to the poor bone den­sity was the con­sump­tion of sodium (salt)  as a rel­a­tive fac­tor. This is the 300lb pink gorilla in the room that is always over­looked when dis­cussing the need to con­sume dairy prod­ucts for calcium.

The fact is that too much cal­cium is a bad thing for you. As a point of ref­er­ence, another study was done that demon­strated a notably higher rate of osteo­poro­sis in coun­tries where dairy con­sump­tion was the highest.

Here is why salt and dairy don’t mix well, so to speak. Salt is processed by our bod­ies using its inter­nal stores of cal­cium. In order to process salt, cal­cium is used up. This con­cept applies to bio­chem­istry as a whole when­ever you are deal­ing with salt and the means by which it is processed. Plants do the same thing our bod­ies do. Heck even chlo­ri­nated pools func­tion much in the same way. Chlo­rine is a salt. It needs cal­cium to work properly.

The chil­dren noted in the study were likely con­sum­ing a diet high in salt as most of the west­ern­ized world does. I am sure the eco­nomic fac­tor played a role in other parts of their nutri­tion too but a diet high in sodium would not be a big leap of faith, in terms of poten­tially over­looked factors.

Now you may not add salt to your food but that doesn’t mean you aren’t con­sum­ing high amounts of it. Almost all processed foods (the ones we were never meant to eat in the first place) are high in salt. Try read­ing the labels on the foods you are eat­ing and look at the sodium content.

The point here is that you only need to con­sume dairy for cal­cium if you are eat­ing a diet high in salt. If you don’t eat a diet high in salt, you don’t need to drink the nurs­ing milk from cows or eat yogurt to get the cal­cium your body requires to be healthy.

Now I am not so brazen to say there aren’t excep­tions and cer­tainly there are those who may have spe­cial med­ical needs for cal­cium, but as a whole we have been brain­washed by nutri­tion experts and the milk indus­try into believ­ing this flat out lie.

My fam­ily and I do take steps to make sure we eat nat­ural sources of cal­cium which includes every­thing that is leafy and green. We eat sal­ads sev­eral times a day with lunch and din­ner. We add spinach to our eggs reg­u­larly. With that I am com­pletely uncon­cerned about whether or not we are get­ting enough cal­cium because we rarely use salt and the foods we eat only con­tain nat­u­rally occur­ring salt in them.

I will not get on my soap­box about why dairy prod­ucts are bad for you. This post is sim­ply about myth-busting the whole cal­cium thing. If you are curi­ous how­ever, milk and dairy can play a major role in your upper res­pi­ra­tory sys­tem.  Also con­sider the antibi­otics they have to give the cows to com­mer­cially make them pro­duce milk in the most unnat­ural of ways. Those antibi­otics don’t get fil­tered out before you con­sume it. That is a really bad thing to say the least. Hor­mones? I wont even go there because  BGH (Bovine Growth Hor­mone) is a whole sep­a­rate post. Most impor­tantly lets not over­look one glar­ingly obvi­ous fact: Cow’s milk is made for baby cows. Okay so I took a small step onto the soap box. Sorry.

Take some solace know­ing that you don’t have to give up on the taste of milk alto­gether if you are a “milk junkie” as I was. There are some great alter­na­tives out there if you really must have it. Almond milk is great in cof­fee. Coconut milk is good too. For a once in a while treat we enjoy ice cream made from coconut milk that is out of the world. In my opin­ion it is bet­ter than its cow made counterpart.

Just con­sider the facts. If con­sum­ing the milk from another mam­mal seems weird to you, then go with your instincts and don’t. Just make sure you keep a close eye on the salt and your bones will be just fine.