The former is a candy-coloured playground that welcomes visitors to its "better bones" page with the news that "your ‘growth spurt’ is just about to happen - it typically starts around 11-13 years of age."

The latter, straining to woo a more worldly juvenile demographic, is slick, sexy, and riddled with we-speak-your-Beastie-Boy-language (". . .the fact is, 20% of bone growth happens when you're a teenager – and that's straight"), subversively kewl games ("Make Your Own Milk Mustache: The only place you won't get into trouble for drawing a mustache on a picture!"), and a teen-appeal gallery of heroic, milk-mustachioed celebrities. It's milksucks.com’s slick mirror image.

It’s also flagrantly misleading.

To bone up on dairy facts, whymilk directs you to "Milk U," its faux institute of higher dairy learning.

Should a bored teenager stray there and click on "diet and health 101," the first thing he or she will feel is a hook in the old baby fat: "Trying to Lose Weight?"

Diet and health 101 is here for you.

"Even on a diet," the tutorial warns, "it's important to get three glasses of milk a day for the vitamins and minerals your body needs. . . .Make fat-free, skim or 1% lowfat milk a habit three times a day: in the morning, when you get home from school or work, and before you go to bed."

Roland Weinsier, M.D., Dr. P.H., is Chairman of the Department of Nutrition Sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He has served on the advisory committees of the USDA's Dietary Guidelines, the National Institute of Diabetes & Digestive & Kidney Diseases, and the Federal Trade Commission. In 2000, Weinsier and his associate Carlos Krumdieck, Ph.D. published a major review in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition called "Dairy Foods and Bone Health: Examination of the Evidence."  I asked Weinsier to evaluate some of the content at whymilk.com and similar websites.

"Milk has many valuable nutrients," Weinsier wrote of the preceding public health message from Milk U. "However, I am not aware of evidence that three glasses of milk a day are necessary (if that is what is implied by the word important) for getting adequate intake of vitamins and minerals, although data do indicate that persons who drink milk may be less likely to drink less nutritionally adequate beverages."

In other words, milk is more nutritious than Dr. Pepper.

Walter Willett was too busy to offer his reactions, but I think I can predict what they would have been. Chairman of the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, Willett is a pillar in the field of nutritional epidemiology. His job is to study large groups of people and try and figure out how diet affects their health.

This January, in an online chat at ABC.com, Willett waxed sour on milk: "There's absolutely no nutritional requirement for milk per se. If you do think you need more calcium, calcium supplements are probably better than milk because they contain no calories, no saturated fat and are less expensive than dairy products." In fact, Willett and his colleagues at the Harvard School of Public Health recently unveiled an "evidence-based" alternative to the USDA's Food Guide Pyramid. The latter recommends two or three servings of dairy every day for adults. Harvard's Pyramid recommends one or two servings a day of dairy or a calcium supplement. The plant-based nature of the Pyramid ensures that you don't need to bone up so much on dairy or  supplements.

Next on the curriculum at Milk U: osteoporosis.

If your lifestyle includes the following, you may be setting yourself up for brittle bones in the future:

• Low calcium intake
• Smoking
• High alcohol consumption
• Low vitamin D intake
• Sedentary lifestyle: exercise less than three times per week
• Chronic dieting.

"Do you consider it inappropriate," I asked Dr. Weinsier, "that several risk factors that would reflect poorly on milk (and dairy) as adequate and/or optimal dietary 'bone helpers' have been omitted in the above checklist?

• High [ratio of] animal to plant protein
• High sodium intake
• High vitamin A (as retinol) intake
• Low vitamin K intake

Weinsier replied:
 

Based on a lot of new information on the effects of these dietary factors on calcium retention and, in some cases, bone health, it seems that calcium intake needs to be considered in the context of these other nutrients.

In other words, Milk U’s curriculum is self-servingly out of date. Dairy products have a "100 to nothing" animal protein to plant protein ratio. Cross-cultural studies suggest animal protein is a highly significant risk factor for osteoporosis. Deborah Sellmeyer and her associates at the University of California at San Francisco point out that animal sources of protein, because of their relatively high proportion of acid-forming amino acids and shortage of alkaline mineral salts, have a highly acidifying effect on the body while plant protein sources typically are neutral or mildly basic in effect. This animal protein-induced "metabolic acidosis" has a number of adverse effects, and leaching calcium (an acid buffer) from the bones is one of them.

When Sellmeyer's group did a long-term, prospective multicentre study of over 1000 elderly American women, they found that those with a high ratio of plant to animal protein in their diets were roughly 70 percent less likely to suffer a hip fracture, even after controlling for possible confounders such as smoking, exercise, calcium intake, and estrogen use.

In fairness, Sellmeyer and associates note it’s the elderly who are most vulnerable to the corrosive effects of animal acids, because their failing kidneys are hard-pressed to eliminate them. The students at Milk U can put up better resistance – at least for now.

Based on a penetrating analysis of the evidence, Stephen Walsh, Ph.D., of the Vegan Society in the U.K. concludes that the animal/vegetable protein effect is strong, but not that strong. Taking into account the relative bone-friendliness of some animal protein sources and the relative bone-unfriendliness of some sources of plant protein, Walsh advises:
 

Replacing protein from meat, fish or eggs with protein from milk or yoghurt will improve calcium balance. Eliminating all animal proteins and living almost exclusively on grains can be expected to be harmful. Replacing meat, fish or eggs with soy and other legumes will benefit bone health, as will replacing milk with green leafy vegetables.

As with animal protein, so with sodium and retinol (a type of vitamin A found only in animal foods, especially milk). High sodium – as found in most dairy products – leads to a significant increase in urinary calcium loss. Too much retinol is coming under increasing scrutiny as a cause of osteoporosis. This January, in a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Diane Feskanich and her associates at the Harvard School of Public Health reported that women in the Nurses' Health Study who consumed the highest amount of retinol, whether from diet or supplements, had nearly double the risk of hip fractures compared to those who consumed the least. Earlier, a study of women in Sweden suggested that in people already consuming just a little more than the RDA of vitamin A (as many do), adding the amount of retinol in about 2 cups of shredded cheese, 6 tablespoons of butter, 1 cup of whipping cream, 8 cups of whole- or retinol-fortified low-fat milk (or retinol-fortified plant milk - soy, rice, etc.), ten or 20 grams of liver, or a typical multivitamin pill (most brands still use retinol, rather than the bone-friendly plant form of vitamin A, beta carotene) raises fracture risk by 68 percent.

Milk U also shies away from mentioning vitamin K, an essential catalyst for the activation of osteocalcin, a major bone-building protein. Recent research not only suggests that very many people don’t get their RDA of vitamin K, but that "the current RDA may not be sufficient for maximizing vitamin K's function in bones." Ironically, that quote comes from an article on a USDA website – the same USDA that indirectly underwrites Milk U. "Vegetables provide the lion's share of this vitamin in the diet," the USDA article points out, particularly leafy green vegetables (including lettuce) – which are also good sources of bone-building calcium, magnesium, and potassium – and canola or soybean oil. Indeed, just "one serving of spinach or two servings of broccoli provide four to five times the RDA." In 1999, the Nurses’ Health Study found that women with low vitamin K intake were over 40 percent more likely to suffer a hip fracture.

The faculty at Milk U could use a refresher course on where calcium is found in the diet.

"Is your diet low in calcium?" they ask their students. It is if "you rarely drink at least 3 glasses of milk daily, or eat 3 servings of dairy products each day to get 1,000 mg of calcium from dietary sources (1 serving = 1 cup of milk or yogurt, 12 - 2 oz. cheese)?" [emphasis theirs]

Perhaps they should consult with Professor Weinsier.

"I believe it is a mistake to equate calcium intake to dairy product intake," Weinsier comments, "just as it is to equate dairy product intake to milk intake. In each case, the effects on bone status can be very different. . . .[D]airy foods such as cottage cheese may have very different (even adverse) effects on calcium excretion than milk, again due to their very different content of protein, sodium, and potassium. Thus, one has to be careful in discussing a specific calcium source and its relationship to bone health, because they are clearly not all the same and not all equally beneficial (or harmful)."

In their paper on "Dairy Foods and Bone Health," Weinsier and Carlos Krumdieck discuss the relative (de)merits of different dairy foods in considerable depth. Bottom line: salty, acidic, high protein cheeses - especially cottage cheese and processed cheeses – may well erode your skeleton rather than build it.
 

On the basis of the known effects of individual nutrients on calcium status, one could speculate that intake of foods such as yogurt and milk would be advantageous, hard cheeses and processed cheese products would be less advantageous, and cottage cheese would be disadvantageous.

But don’t tell the children that.

At got-milk.com, pre-teens are taught:
 

You need to pack your bones with calcium.

How?
 

It's easy - just follow these tips:

Feast on at least three servings of milk or milk group foods each day! Try foods like chocolate milk, fruit yogurt, a taco with cheese, frozen yogurt, a slice of pizza and even a cheeseburger!

How nice not to have grown-ups breathing down your neck about eating your broccoli.

Recently, an exhaustive survey by the Center for Science in the Public Interest found that commercial pizzas deliver between 2.5 and 14 grams of saturated fat per slice - and on average about 900 mg of sodium.  This amounts to as much as half the recommended daily limit for saturated fat intake for 11 to 14-year olds (10% of 2500 calories) and nearly 40% the sodium limit. All that for about 100 milligrams of calcium, or 1/13th the daily intake  recommended by the US National Academy of Sciences for children during their growth spurt.

Every industrialized country appears to be in on the crooked milk mustache act. Here in Canada, for example, at the website of the Dairy Farmers of Canada, Director of Nutrition Helen Bishop MacDonald, R.D., writes a "Nutrition Bites" column for "health professionals" interested in the benefits of dairy. A recent bite sought to draw sustenance from the well-known Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension Study, better known as DASH. DASH has been milked like a golden cow by the dairy industry ever since its first results were published in 1997. "Dairy makes the difference in DASH" has become a mantra of the dairy campaign.

In this particular "bite," MacDonald writes:
 

Follow-ups to the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) trial suggest that the DASH diet - high in fruits, vegetables and low-fat dairy products - may be even more cardioprotective than originally believed. These studies show that, in addition to its well-documented ability to lower blood pressure, the DASH diet also significantly reduces total- and LDL-cholesterol as well as serum homocysteine levels.

MacDonald makes much of the fact that while the DASH diet significantly lowered cholesterol, the extra fruit and vegetables (sans extra milk) control diet didn’t. But she fails to mention that the DASH diet was also more "reduced in saturated fat, total fat, and cholesterol" (to quote the study), ammunition enough to account for all or much of the benefits she attributes to milk.

Not even the scientists who did the DASH study buy the dairy spin.

When LA Times covered the milk story last October,  they reported:
 

Dr. Frank Sacks, a Harvard Medical School researcher and one of the DASH investigators, says he doesn't believe that the three daily servings of non- or low-fat dairy products were a crucial part of the DASH diet. Nor, he says, do his colleagues. Much more than dairy makes the difference between the fruit and vegetable diet and the DASH diet, he points out.
DASH also includes more vegetables and fish, less meat and saturated fat, and fewer snacks and sweets. And there's no way of knowing whether one of these, or a combination, or some unknown factor is actually responsible for the blood pressure benefit.

But MacDonald would like health professionals to believe that not only did low-fat dairy make the difference, so could whole-fat:
 

DASH also reduces HDL-cholesterol [good cholesterol], an effect which might be offset by choosing regular fat dairy products, since saturated fat raises HDL.

Whaaat?

MacDonald's reference for this astonishing suggestion is a 1994 study that found that three of the major saturated fatty acids - lauric, myristic, and palmitic - raised good cholesterol. But they also raised bad cholesterol. In fact saturated fatty acids like these typically raise the bad nearly three times as much as they raise the good, which is why, as Health Canada points out:
 

Dietary cholesterol and saturated fatty acids, particularly lauric, myristic and palmitic acids, have been implicated in the etiology of cardiovascular vascular disease by a large body of evidence from epidemiological, clinical and animal research.

In contrast to saturated fatty acids (which constitute two thirds of the fat in whole milk), monounsaturated fatty acids raise HDL slightly less than saturated fats, but lower LDL instead of raising it, resulting in a more favourable balance of good and bad cholesterol.¹ Also, unlike saturated fat, monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats don't promote the kinds of internal blood clots that can cause heart attacks, strokes, and senile dementia. As studies of "the Mediterranean diet" attest, when it comes to cholesterol, olive oil or other high monounsaturate foods and oils like nuts and canola oil - not milk fat - are what could make the  difference in DASH.

Sponsored by Milk Maritime Inc., a promotional agency for Canada's maritime province dairy producers, justaddmilk.ca also has an in-house health professional manning its "Ask the Dietitian" department. In response to the stock question, "Isn't fat bad for me?" Nathalie Roy, R.D., has nothing but good news:
 

All fats are a mixture of saturated and unsaturated fats. While there are some fats that are better for us than others, remember that no fat is all good or all bad. Some saturated fats such as stearic acid help lower blood cholesterol levels. Myristic and lauric acid, two more types of saturated fats help raise the good cholesterol (HDL). Some saturated fats have no effect whatsoever on blood cholesterol levels. Conjugated linoleic acid or CLA, a fat found in milk and milk products and to a lesser extent in some meat, is a unique type of fat that studies have identified as being a potent cancer inhibitor. It may also play a role in the prevention of heart disease and obesity. Milk fat is the richest natural dietary source of CLA.

CLA (a group of polyunsaturated fatty acids that comprise roughly half of one percent of dairy fat), may well be a cancer-fighting fat. But so far it has only shown signs of this in animals and - in a test tube - in human cancer cells. Exciting as this is, it's a weak predictor that CLA has the same effect in people – especially when 135 times its weight in saturated fatty acids tag along with it (saturated fats are associated with increased cancer risk in actual humans). The evidence of a heart-friendly effect for CLA also appears to be confined to animal research. However, some but not all of a handful of human studies suggest CLA supplements can reduce body fat. But then the usual dosage – 2 or 3 grams a day - is the CLA-equivalent of a pound or more of butter.

A few years ago, it looked like stearic acid – the major fatty acid in chocolate – might lower LDL-cholesterol (LDL-C). The food industry seized upon that scrap like a life jacket and has kept it alive in the media and websites like justaddmilk.ca ever since. But as far back as 1995, an analysis by nutritionists from Pennsylvania State University of 18 studies found that stearic acid has no effect on cholesterol, good or bad, in humans. Worse, it keeps company with other saturated fatty acids, like the ones touted by justaddmilk’s dietitian, that do raise LDL-C and much more than they raise good cholesterol, with predictably adverse effects. Recently, Harvard scientists analyzed the effects of different fatty acids on heart disease amoung the over 80,000 participants in the Nurses' Health Study. After adjusting for confounding factors, they found that for every 1 percent increase in stearic acid intake (in calories), the risk for CHD (coronary heart disease) rose by 19 percent. Perhaps this was related to some evidence that stearic acid "may lower HDL and increase lipoprotein(a) [another CHD risk factor] concentrations." The researchers concluded that, notwithstanding other evidence suggesting a benign or neutral effect, "a distinction between stearic acid and other saturated fats does not appear to be important in dietary advice to reduce CHD risk, in part because of the high correlation between stearic acid and other saturated fatty acids in typical diets."

As in non-skim milk.

NOTES:
1. These trends are based on a 1992 meta-analysis of 27 clinical trials. The effects on cholesterol are relative to consuming an equal number of calories from pure carbohydrate - sugar, refined starch - which actually has a considerably worse effect on cholesterol than  saturated fat.
 

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