Dairy products or calcium supplements?

Rewriter said:

Fayard
In a separate thread "anti-cancer diet and calcium," I included some links to articles discussing the dangers of calcium supplements. Other supplements do not pose the same dangers, but studies show that vitamins from food are more readily absorbed than vitamins from supplements.

I take a B-100 supplement because I have terrible peripheral neuropathy and the B vitamins help me cut down on Neurontin. My goal, though, is to also get more B from foods.

I encourage you to do your own research and make your own decision. This is just my approach.

Jill

california_artist said:

Milk's purpose is to make things grow quickly, and it does.
Unfortunately, that includes cancer. I too eat cheese and have Greek yogurt, the occasional cottage cheese, all those things, but I know I am playing with fire. So, ah?? doesn't speak too well of my impulse control upon occasion.

We are a nation that has been taught to drink milk. Where milk drinking is low or non existent after childhood/infancy, cancer rates are also low. Osteoporosis is highest in America, the land of the dairy farm. I am working on getting milk products out of my diet, some weeks are better than others. I have week when I shop where all dairy is off limits. My granddaughter is with me on this. I sure love living with her. Anyway, the following is information I read for the first time yesterday from a book called The cancer Survivor's Guide and is written by Doctor Neal Barnard.

He and his nutritionist coauthor say this about milk and I am paraphrasing...
When we drink cow's milk, it causes biological changes in the body. It raises insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-I) in the bloodstream which is a powerful stimulus for cancer cell growth. Some other chemical changes relate not only to greater likelihood you will get cancer but how rapidly it will grow and spread once it has occurred. Harvard studies have linked milk drinking to prostate cancer. Which I know none of us will get.

His recommendation is soy, rice almond, even oat milk as alternatives. Nummm?????

Got the book from the library along with 70 other books. They are starting to get bigger boxes for me. I recommend reading it. The recipes are less than stellar, devote a page each to boiling rice and something else that all you have to do is read the directions on the package. But the cancer information is extensive and very interesting with university studies as back up for the text.

All things in moderation and with wisdom. One needs to enjoy life whilst dodging those dang bullets.

Glad we can help one another and keep each other company. reminds me of those conversations in the village.

My love to you all, and may we live long and prosper, although there are days when I would like to prosper first, and then live long. Seems more enjoyable in the long run. claudia

Rewriter said:

Hormones in milk
I wish there was a way to highlight in bold some of the most important information in this article, which appeared in the December 7, 2006 Harvard Gazette. In summary, though, the article points out the following:

--Natural estrogens--those in food--are 100,000 times more potent than environmental estrogens--those in, for example, pesticides.

--The researcher hypothesizes that dairy heightens the risk of hormone-dependent cancers. Butter, meat, eggs, milk, and cheese are implicated in higher rates of hormone-dependent cancers in general, she said. Breast cancer has been linked particularly to consumption of milk and cheese.

--The researcher is investigating 22 years of data from Harvard's Nurses Health Study, looking for a potential link between dairy and endometrial cancer.

--When comparing levels of hormones and growth factors in whole, whole organic, skim milk, and UHT - ultra-high temperature - milk, hormone levels were very low in skim milk. I am assuming that this study does not show any advantages of organic skim milk over "regular" (i.e., not organic) skim milk.

What I conclude from this study is that the benefits of consuming dairy products made from SKIM milk--sources of Vitamins D and calcium--might outweigh the dangers. In any case, the article follows:



Hormones in milk can be dangerous

By Corydon Ireland
Harvard News Office

Ganmaa Davaasambuu is a physician (Mongolia), a Ph.D. in environmental health (Japan), a fellow (Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study), and a working scientist (Harvard School of Public Health).

On Monday (Dec. 4), she drew on all those roles during a lunchtime talk to most of her fellow fellows.

Ganmaa's topic was lunch-appropriate: the suspected role of cow's milk, cheese, and other dairy products in hormone-dependent cancers. (Those include cancers of the testes, prostate, and breast.)

Schedule of public talks
by Radcliffe Fellows
The link between cancer and dietary hormones - estrogen in particular - has been a source of great concern among scientists, said Ganmaa, but it has not been widely studied or discussed.

The potential for risk is large. Natural estrogens are up to 100,000 times more potent than their environmental counterparts, such as the estrogen-like compounds in pesticides.

"Among the routes of human exposure to estrogens, we are mostly concerned about cow's milk, which contains considerable amounts of female sex hormones," Ganmaa told her audience. Dairy, she added, accounts for 60 percent to 80 percent of estrogens consumed.

Part of the problem seems to be milk from modern dairy farms, where cows are milked about 300 days a year. For much of that time, the cows are pregnant. The later in pregnancy a cow is, the more hormones appear in her milk.

Milk from a cow in the late stage of pregnancy contains up to 33 times as much of a signature estrogen compound (estrone sulfate) than milk from a non-pregnant cow.

In a study of modern milk in Japan, Ganmaa found that it contained 10 times more progesterone, another hormone, than raw milk from Mongolia.

In traditional herding societies like Mongolia, cows are milked for human consumption only five months a year, said Ganmaa, and, if pregnant, only in the early stages. Consequently, levels of hormones in the milk are much lower.

"The milk we drink today is quite unlike the milk our ancestors were drinking" without apparent harm for 2,000 years, she said. "The milk we drink today may not be nature's perfect food."

Earlier studies bear out Ganmaa's hypothesis that eating dairy heightens the risk of some cancers.

One study compared diet and cancer rates in 42 counties. It showed that milk and cheese consumption are strongly correlated to the incidence of testicular cancer among men ages 20 to 39. Rates were highest in places like Switzerland and Denmark, where cheese is a national food, and lowest in Algeria and other countries where dairy is not so widely consumed.

Cancer rates linked to dairy can change quickly, said Ganmaa. In the past 50 years in Japan, she said, rising rates of dairy consumption are linked with rising death rates from prostate cancer - from near zero per 100,000 five decades ago to 7 per 100,000 today.

Butter, meat, eggs, milk, and cheese are implicated in higher rates of hormone-dependent cancers in general, she said. Breast cancer has been linked particularly to consumption of milk and cheese.

In another study, rats fed milk show a higher incidence of cancer and develop a higher number of tumors than those who drank water, said Ganmaa.

All this begs the question of the health effects of milk on children. About 75 percent of American children under 12 consume dairy every day, but its health effects on prepubescent bodies is not known - "a good rationale for further study," said Ganmaa, who studies bioactive substances in food and reproductive health disorders.

She and her Harvard colleagues have already conducted two pilot studies.

One compared levels of hormones and growth factors in American milk (whole, whole organic, skim milk, and UHT - ultra-high temperature - milk) to milk from Mongolia. Levels were very low in both American skim and in Mongolian milk.

Another pilot study looked at third-graders in Mongolia. After a month, the hormone levels jumped among the children fed commercial U.S. milk.

Long-term studies are needed to see if any of this is important for children's health. "We don't know what the larger implications are," said Ganmaa. (The National Institutes of Health is now reviewing Ganmaa and her team's application to fund a two-year study.)

Meanwhile, Ganmaa is investigating 22 years of data from Harvard's Nurses Health Study, looking for a potential link between dairy and endometrial cancer.

But she is cautious about the implications of her studies of cancer rates and dairy consumption.

For one, said Ganmaa, "milk is a food of great complexity" and contains high levels of beneficial nutrients, including calcium and vitamin D. (Mongolian children, who drink a third less dairy than their American counterparts, have low levels of vitamin D.)

"The hormonal effects of milk are very new," said Ganmaa during questions from her Radcliffe audience. Until more research is done, she said, "I'd like to keep our heads low."

But steps can be taken now to reduce the amount of hormones in milk, said Ganmaa. Because hormones reside in milk fat, drinking skim milk is one option. Getting calcium from green leafy vegetables is another.

Modes of milk production can also change, said Ganmaa. She suggested milking only nonpregnant cows (the Mongolian model), or not milking cows when they are in the later stages of pregnancy, when hormone levels are particularly high.

"The dairy industry in the United States is not going to change in any radical way," said artist Shimon Attie, the Mildred Londa Weisman Fellow at Radcliffe - and a former dairyman.

But in the meantime, he had a suggestion for the coffee setting at future Radcliffe Fellows luncheons: a pot of nondairy creamer.

Radcliffe sponsors 50 fellows a year - scientists, artists, writers, and scholars of every stripe. Three times a month, one of them gives a private luncheon talk for other fellows.

Rewriter said:

Hormones in milk
I wish there was a way to highlight in bold some of the most important information in this article, which appeared in the December 7, 2006 Harvard Gazette. In summary, though, the article points out the following:

--Natural estrogens--those in food--are 100,000 times more potent than environmental estrogens--those in, for example, pesticides.

--The researcher hypothesizes that dairy heightens the risk of hormone-dependent cancers. Butter, meat, eggs, milk, and cheese are implicated in higher rates of hormone-dependent cancers in general, she said. Breast cancer has been linked particularly to consumption of milk and cheese.

--The researcher is investigating 22 years of data from Harvard's Nurses Health Study, looking for a potential link between dairy and endometrial cancer.

--When comparing levels of hormones and growth factors in whole, whole organic, skim milk, and UHT - ultra-high temperature - milk, hormone levels were very low in skim milk. I am assuming that this study does not show any advantages of organic skim milk over "regular" (i.e., not organic) skim milk.

What I conclude from this study is that the benefits of consuming dairy products made from SKIM milk--sources of Vitamins D and calcium--might outweigh the dangers. In any case, the article follows:



Hormones in milk can be dangerous

By Corydon Ireland
Harvard News Office

Ganmaa Davaasambuu is a physician (Mongolia), a Ph.D. in environmental health (Japan), a fellow (Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study), and a working scientist (Harvard School of Public Health).

On Monday (Dec. 4), she drew on all those roles during a lunchtime talk to most of her fellow fellows.

Ganmaa's topic was lunch-appropriate: the suspected role of cow's milk, cheese, and other dairy products in hormone-dependent cancers. (Those include cancers of the testes, prostate, and breast.)

Schedule of public talks
by Radcliffe Fellows
The link between cancer and dietary hormones - estrogen in particular - has been a source of great concern among scientists, said Ganmaa, but it has not been widely studied or discussed.

The potential for risk is large. Natural estrogens are up to 100,000 times more potent than their environmental counterparts, such as the estrogen-like compounds in pesticides.

"Among the routes of human exposure to estrogens, we are mostly concerned about cow's milk, which contains considerable amounts of female sex hormones," Ganmaa told her audience. Dairy, she added, accounts for 60 percent to 80 percent of estrogens consumed.

Part of the problem seems to be milk from modern dairy farms, where cows are milked about 300 days a year. For much of that time, the cows are pregnant. The later in pregnancy a cow is, the more hormones appear in her milk.

Milk from a cow in the late stage of pregnancy contains up to 33 times as much of a signature estrogen compound (estrone sulfate) than milk from a non-pregnant cow.

In a study of modern milk in Japan, Ganmaa found that it contained 10 times more progesterone, another hormone, than raw milk from Mongolia.

In traditional herding societies like Mongolia, cows are milked for human consumption only five months a year, said Ganmaa, and, if pregnant, only in the early stages. Consequently, levels of hormones in the milk are much lower.

"The milk we drink today is quite unlike the milk our ancestors were drinking" without apparent harm for 2,000 years, she said. "The milk we drink today may not be nature's perfect food."

Earlier studies bear out Ganmaa's hypothesis that eating dairy heightens the risk of some cancers.

One study compared diet and cancer rates in 42 counties. It showed that milk and cheese consumption are strongly correlated to the incidence of testicular cancer among men ages 20 to 39. Rates were highest in places like Switzerland and Denmark, where cheese is a national food, and lowest in Algeria and other countries where dairy is not so widely consumed.

Cancer rates linked to dairy can change quickly, said Ganmaa. In the past 50 years in Japan, she said, rising rates of dairy consumption are linked with rising death rates from prostate cancer - from near zero per 100,000 five decades ago to 7 per 100,000 today.

Butter, meat, eggs, milk, and cheese are implicated in higher rates of hormone-dependent cancers in general, she said. Breast cancer has been linked particularly to consumption of milk and cheese.

In another study, rats fed milk show a higher incidence of cancer and develop a higher number of tumors than those who drank water, said Ganmaa.

All this begs the question of the health effects of milk on children. About 75 percent of American children under 12 consume dairy every day, but its health effects on prepubescent bodies is not known - "a good rationale for further study," said Ganmaa, who studies bioactive substances in food and reproductive health disorders.

She and her Harvard colleagues have already conducted two pilot studies.

One compared levels of hormones and growth factors in American milk (whole, whole organic, skim milk, and UHT - ultra-high temperature - milk) to milk from Mongolia. Levels were very low in both American skim and in Mongolian milk.

Another pilot study looked at third-graders in Mongolia. After a month, the hormone levels jumped among the children fed commercial U.S. milk.

Long-term studies are needed to see if any of this is important for children's health. "We don't know what the larger implications are," said Ganmaa. (The National Institutes of Health is now reviewing Ganmaa and her team's application to fund a two-year study.)

Meanwhile, Ganmaa is investigating 22 years of data from Harvard's Nurses Health Study, looking for a potential link between dairy and endometrial cancer.

But she is cautious about the implications of her studies of cancer rates and dairy consumption.

For one, said Ganmaa, "milk is a food of great complexity" and contains high levels of beneficial nutrients, including calcium and vitamin D. (Mongolian children, who drink a third less dairy than their American counterparts, have low levels of vitamin D.)

"The hormonal effects of milk are very new," said Ganmaa during questions from her Radcliffe audience. Until more research is done, she said, "I'd like to keep our heads low."

But steps can be taken now to reduce the amount of hormones in milk, said Ganmaa. Because hormones reside in milk fat, drinking skim milk is one option. Getting calcium from green leafy vegetables is another.

Modes of milk production can also change, said Ganmaa. She suggested milking only nonpregnant cows (the Mongolian model), or not milking cows when they are in the later stages of pregnancy, when hormone levels are particularly high.

"The dairy industry in the United States is not going to change in any radical way," said artist Shimon Attie, the Mildred Londa Weisman Fellow at Radcliffe - and a former dairyman.

But in the meantime, he had a suggestion for the coffee setting at future Radcliffe Fellows luncheons: a pot of nondairy creamer.

Radcliffe sponsors 50 fellows a year - scientists, artists, writers, and scholars of every stripe. Three times a month, one of them gives a private luncheon talk for other fellows.

Rewriter said:

Hormones in milk
I wish there was a way to highlight in bold some of the most important information in this article, which appeared in the December 7, 2006 Harvard Gazette. In summary, though, the article points out the following:

--Natural estrogens--those in food--are 100,000 times more potent than environmental estrogens--those in, for example, pesticides.

--The researcher hypothesizes that dairy heightens the risk of hormone-dependent cancers. Butter, meat, eggs, milk, and cheese are implicated in higher rates of hormone-dependent cancers in general, she said. Breast cancer has been linked particularly to consumption of milk and cheese.

--The researcher is investigating 22 years of data from Harvard's Nurses Health Study, looking for a potential link between dairy and endometrial cancer.

--When comparing levels of hormones and growth factors in whole, whole organic, skim milk, and UHT - ultra-high temperature - milk, hormone levels were very low in skim milk. I am assuming that this study does not show any advantages of organic skim milk over "regular" (i.e., not organic) skim milk.

What I conclude from this study is that the benefits of consuming dairy products made from SKIM milk--sources of Vitamins D and calcium--might outweigh the dangers. In any case, the article follows:



Hormones in milk can be dangerous

By Corydon Ireland
Harvard News Office

Ganmaa Davaasambuu is a physician (Mongolia), a Ph.D. in environmental health (Japan), a fellow (Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study), and a working scientist (Harvard School of Public Health).

On Monday (Dec. 4), she drew on all those roles during a lunchtime talk to most of her fellow fellows.

Ganmaa's topic was lunch-appropriate: the suspected role of cow's milk, cheese, and other dairy products in hormone-dependent cancers. (Those include cancers of the testes, prostate, and breast.)

Schedule of public talks
by Radcliffe Fellows
The link between cancer and dietary hormones - estrogen in particular - has been a source of great concern among scientists, said Ganmaa, but it has not been widely studied or discussed.

The potential for risk is large. Natural estrogens are up to 100,000 times more potent than their environmental counterparts, such as the estrogen-like compounds in pesticides.

"Among the routes of human exposure to estrogens, we are mostly concerned about cow's milk, which contains considerable amounts of female sex hormones," Ganmaa told her audience. Dairy, she added, accounts for 60 percent to 80 percent of estrogens consumed.

Part of the problem seems to be milk from modern dairy farms, where cows are milked about 300 days a year. For much of that time, the cows are pregnant. The later in pregnancy a cow is, the more hormones appear in her milk.

Milk from a cow in the late stage of pregnancy contains up to 33 times as much of a signature estrogen compound (estrone sulfate) than milk from a non-pregnant cow.

In a study of modern milk in Japan, Ganmaa found that it contained 10 times more progesterone, another hormone, than raw milk from Mongolia.

In traditional herding societies like Mongolia, cows are milked for human consumption only five months a year, said Ganmaa, and, if pregnant, only in the early stages. Consequently, levels of hormones in the milk are much lower.

"The milk we drink today is quite unlike the milk our ancestors were drinking" without apparent harm for 2,000 years, she said. "The milk we drink today may not be nature's perfect food."

Earlier studies bear out Ganmaa's hypothesis that eating dairy heightens the risk of some cancers.

One study compared diet and cancer rates in 42 counties. It showed that milk and cheese consumption are strongly correlated to the incidence of testicular cancer among men ages 20 to 39. Rates were highest in places like Switzerland and Denmark, where cheese is a national food, and lowest in Algeria and other countries where dairy is not so widely consumed.

Cancer rates linked to dairy can change quickly, said Ganmaa. In the past 50 years in Japan, she said, rising rates of dairy consumption are linked with rising death rates from prostate cancer - from near zero per 100,000 five decades ago to 7 per 100,000 today.

Butter, meat, eggs, milk, and cheese are implicated in higher rates of hormone-dependent cancers in general, she said. Breast cancer has been linked particularly to consumption of milk and cheese.

In another study, rats fed milk show a higher incidence of cancer and develop a higher number of tumors than those who drank water, said Ganmaa.

All this begs the question of the health effects of milk on children. About 75 percent of American children under 12 consume dairy every day, but its health effects on prepubescent bodies is not known - "a good rationale for further study," said Ganmaa, who studies bioactive substances in food and reproductive health disorders.

She and her Harvard colleagues have already conducted two pilot studies.

One compared levels of hormones and growth factors in American milk (whole, whole organic, skim milk, and UHT - ultra-high temperature - milk) to milk from Mongolia. Levels were very low in both American skim and in Mongolian milk.

Another pilot study looked at third-graders in Mongolia. After a month, the hormone levels jumped among the children fed commercial U.S. milk.

Long-term studies are needed to see if any of this is important for children's health. "We don't know what the larger implications are," said Ganmaa. (The National Institutes of Health is now reviewing Ganmaa and her team's application to fund a two-year study.)

Meanwhile, Ganmaa is investigating 22 years of data from Harvard's Nurses Health Study, looking for a potential link between dairy and endometrial cancer.

But she is cautious about the implications of her studies of cancer rates and dairy consumption.

For one, said Ganmaa, "milk is a food of great complexity" and contains high levels of beneficial nutrients, including calcium and vitamin D. (Mongolian children, who drink a third less dairy than their American counterparts, have low levels of vitamin D.)

"The hormonal effects of milk are very new," said Ganmaa during questions from her Radcliffe audience. Until more research is done, she said, "I'd like to keep our heads low."

But steps can be taken now to reduce the amount of hormones in milk, said Ganmaa. Because hormones reside in milk fat, drinking skim milk is one option. Getting calcium from green leafy vegetables is another.

Modes of milk production can also change, said Ganmaa. She suggested milking only nonpregnant cows (the Mongolian model), or not milking cows when they are in the later stages of pregnancy, when hormone levels are particularly high.

"The dairy industry in the United States is not going to change in any radical way," said artist Shimon Attie, the Mildred Londa Weisman Fellow at Radcliffe - and a former dairyman.

But in the meantime, he had a suggestion for the coffee setting at future Radcliffe Fellows luncheons: a pot of nondairy creamer.

Radcliffe sponsors 50 fellows a year - scientists, artists, writers, and scholars of every stripe. Three times a month, one of them gives a private luncheon talk for other fellows.

Rewriter said:

This article is FANTASTIC--Jana first posted the link
The link for this article was posted by Jana; THANK YOU, Jana. Sometimes, I am too lazy to copy links into my browser, so I am posting the whole article here. The gist of it is that our need for calcium is lower than what has been indicated (750 mg. instead of 1500 mg. post 50). Studies show that amounts beyond 750 mg. generally do diddly squat and, in fact, can be very harmful to our hearts and kidneys. THIS doctor suggests a combination of supplements and dairy. Oh, I am SO confused.


Hello, this is Dr. JoAnn Manson, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women's Hospital. I would like to talk with you today about calcium intake and the increasing evidence that more is not better when it comes to optimal health.

Calcium has been in the news a lot lately. You probably have heard about the studies linking calcium supplements to an increased risk for cardiovascular events, vascular calcification, and kidney stones in the Women's Health Initiative Calcium/Vitamin D Supplementation Study.[1] Now a large prospective study from Sweden published in the British Medical Journal [2] indicates that even when it comes to bone health, more is not better for calcium intake.

The Institute of Medicine (IOM)[3] released dietary guidelines for calcium earlier this year, and the recommended dietary allowance (RDA) for calcium from a combination of diet plus supplements was set at 1000 mg a day for adult women until age 50 years and 1200 mg a day for women older than 50 years of age. The IOM also set a tolerable upper intake level of about 2000 mg a day for women in these age groups because of some concern about kidney stones and other health risks when calcium intake is very high.

The study that was just published in the British Medical Journal looked at the relationship between calcium intake and risk for fractures and overall bone health. This was a very large study: more than 61,000 women, followed for 19 years overall, had a total of more than 14,000 incident fractures and more than 3800 incident hip fractures. Specifically, the fractures were identified through a registry, so concern about reporting bias or recall bias was minimal. This study suggests that it's only the women who had the lowest intake of calcium, below about 750 mg a day, who had an increased risk for fracture, and then with increasing intake of calcium, evidence of further benefit for bone health and fracture reduction was very limited. A threshold factor or plateauing of benefit was suggested.

The women who had the highest intake of calcium (above 1100 mg a day) actually had a hint of increased risk for hip fracture. The bottom line of this study was that more moderate levels of calcium intake were best for bone health and that more was not better. We should be recommending more moderate intakes of calcium for our patients and not above the RDA of 1000-1200 mg a day total. Assuming that many women will get about 700 mg a day from dietary sources alone, many women may require no more than an additional 500-600 mg a day from calcium supplements. In contrast, many women are taking a very high dose of calcium, often 1200-1500 mg a day just from the supplements alone, and this could lead to very high total intake.

On the basis of the recent study in the British Medical Journal, as well as the overall totality of evidence, it seems that even for bone health, calcium in moderation is probably best. We may want to recommend that women try to get as much of their calcium as possible from dietary sources. Some of the best dietary sources are low-fat dairy products and leafy greens, fortified foods such as fortified fruit juices and cereals, and types of fish that have bones in them, such as sardines and canned salmon. It's probably best, wherever possible, to read the food labels that will help you understand the amount of calcium that's in the different food products and to recommend reading labels to our patients.

So bottom line, the recommendation is for calcium intake in moderation, being sure to add dietary calcium to the calcium from supplements, to ensure that the total calcium intake isn't too high. Evidence is increasing that more is not better when it comes to calcium intake.