Drink milk for healthy teeth and bones, right?

By 31. October 2014Blog, Health, Nutrition, Risk Management

Well, not according to a new study published in the British Medical Journal.

The researchers wanted to see what effect milk consumption has on the likelihood of bone fractures and death in men over 10 years and women over 20 years. They found that chance of bone fractures and death increased with increasing milk consumption.

To be clear this finding was not a surprise find for the researchers, they state in their introduction that milk contains a high amount of D-galactose and that this has been shown in animal studies to be bad for our health.

They hypothesized that consuming a large amount of milk would increase the oxidative stress your body is exposed to and that because oxidative stress later in life is related to increased chance of bone fractures then drinking large amounts of milk later in life would increase not decrease your chance of bone fractures.

The data came from two studies based on 90,303 women aged 39-74 years old and 48,850 men aged 45-79 years old all residing in Sweden.

The authors recommend a cautious interpretation of the results. I do not blame them.

Click here to go to the publication on the BMJ website.