Got Spinach?

By: Laura Correnti


Calcium can be found in both liquid form and leaf form. Milk and spinach are two excellent sources of calcium that are needed for strong bones and teeth. However, I read many articles published by the PCRM (the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine) in which they are trying to switch people from milk to other means of calcium for developing stronger bones.

In the article ‘PCRM Week’: The Dairy Attack, on The Center for Consumer Freedom website, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine was quoted saying, “feeding milk to children is unnecessary, and that there are better ways, such as, kale, tofu, turnip greens or spinach, for kids to get the calcium they need.” Now don’t get me wrong, but I can’t think of a child that would give up a glass of cold milk for a steaming cup of spinach. However, that is exactly what parents should be doing according to the PCRM. To reach this result, PCRM relied on only a few dozen of the nearly 1,000 studies that were conducted on milk and bone health, while ignoring that a child would have to eat eight cups of spinach, to replaces the calcium that is in one small glass of milk. According to the website ProCon.org, one cup of skim milk has 200 more milligrams of calcium content per measure than one cup of turnip greens, showing that the same amount of milk and greens both supply adequate calcium but milk has more per serving.

PCRM was quoted saying, “increased calcium intake, especially from dairy products, increased bone density loss in childhood adolescence. Low milk consumption at currently recommend intakes is likely to be beneficial for bone health at all stages of the life cycle.”So according to the PCRM, the glass of milk that I had for dinner every night since I was four, will cause my bones to become less dense and I will have bone health issues later in life. As reported in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition in 2009, “women that were given 1,200 mg of calcium and 300 IU of vitamin D from dairy products everyday had developed stronger bones in the hip and spine than woman who stuck to their normal diets.” Now it seems that that glass of milk all those years ago will do me some good after all.

According the PCRM website in an article called Parents Guide to Building Strong Bones, orange juice and apple juice are excellent substitutes for milk. However, in the 1998 Journal of Dentistry, tooth enamel erosion was caused by the consumption of orange juice and other fruit drinks containing high fructose corn syrup. Even though PCRM says that orange juice is good, dentists say that it causes tooth enamel loss, which once the enamel is gone, it is does not come back.

In an article by Chris Woolston, a writer for the LA Times, entitled “Too much milk?” on latimes.com, PCRM said that milk was a particularly dangerous part of typical western medicine. The PCRM website even states, “Saturated fats in dairy products increase the risk of heart disease, and natural hormones in milk encourage cancer of the breast, prostate and ovaries.”Some studies have been conducted to see if there were higher than-expected rates of ovarian cancer in people that drank milk, nothing has been turned up thus far. A study was done by the EPIC (European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition) in which 325,000 women, in 10 countries, showed that there was no evidence that animal products, in the form of: eggs, meat and milk, raised the risk of ovarian cancer. Similarly, the NIH-AARP diet and health study did a long-term study of nearly 500,000 older Americans and which published in the Archives of Internal Medicine in 2009, which found no link between the intake of dairy products and cancer. “It was found that dairy lowered the risk of developing colorectal cancer in both male and females.” Dairy products not only do not cause cancer risks, they have been shown to lower risks of cancer.

Neal Barnard was quoted from his book, Food for Life: How the New Four Food Groups Can Save Your Life saying, “Feeding kid’s meat and milk is a form of child abuse.” If that is so, then my parents abused my brothers and me for more than eighteen years by making sure we had a glass of milk at dinner, and three meals consisting of all of the food groups.

References
http://www.consumerfreedom.com/news_detail.cfm/h/2785-pcrm-week-the-dairy-attack
http://www.latimes.com/news/health/la-he-milk-20100712-2,0,5598126,print.story
http://www.spinachwords.com/bone_health.shtml
http://www.pcrm.org/health/prevmed/building_bones.html
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science
http://milk.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=000659
http://www.consumerfreedom.com/news_detail.cfm/h/4213-milk-malice-too-extreme-for-anti-milk-extremist