The camps are divided, and the U.S. and Great Britain are the few places where people drink milk past toddlerhood.
I spoke with two Fort Worth nutritionists, Dabney Poorter and Danae Fenti, to find out what exactly we are drinking. Let's start with the milk available in U.S. grocery stores, which is pasteurized. Poorter said milk is naturally full of vitamins like thiamin, riboflavin and vitamin B12, and small amounts of niacin, pantothenic acid, vitamin B6, vitamin C and foliate. It also has bacteria (mostly good) and enzymes that aid in the digestion of milk. Fenti said our gut is its own little ecosystem, and these things help it thrive.
In an attempt to make milk safer, it is boiled and then cooled, also known as pasteurization, to kill most bacteria and make most enzymes inactive. Fenti said the process actually gets rid of the good fat, vitamins and natural calcium. It is then fortified by synthetic calcium and Vitamin D.
"It is not helping people but causing a deficiency in calcium," Fenti said. "In pasteurized milk, they fortify it with vitamin D because it is stripped, but it is synthetic so the body doesn't know what to do with it."
She said pasteurized milk also has a lot of growth hormones to increase milk production in cows and antibiotics to keep cows infection-free in unhealthy and close living quarters. Both chemicals make their way into the milk. We just don't know how much. The New York Times reported in 2011 that federal inspectors with the Food and Drug Administration found illegal amounts of antibiotics in older dairy cows. Worried about how much of those medicines and other chemicals were getting into consumers" milk, the F.D.A. attempted testing, but the dairy industry fought back.
The U.S. dairy industry is powerful and wealthy. Its aggressive advertising campaign has inundated us for years. You are probably familiar with the "Got Milk?" ads making claims of stronger bones and beauty because of the vitamin D and calcium. We see beautiful celebrities in all the magazine ads posing with a milk mustache, but studies tell a different story.
Another New York Times" article by its Upshot columnist Aaron E. Carroll points to recent scientific research in his 2014 article proving milk not only doesn't decrease the risk of bone fractures in both men and women, but also increased in women. It also increased overall health risks for both men and women.
Fenti said people don't have to drink milk because many hearty greens like kale, spinach or Swiss chard are packed with calcium. She drinks raw goat's milk as well. She even makes a funny point: Cows have four stomachs and their milk is produced for calves that also have four stomachs. People don't have four stomachs.
