Need Motivation to Eat Less Meat and More Plants? Part 2 of 12
Today, great stats on whether dairy products contribute to health:
Asians have little or no osteoporosis. They also (until recently) have been nonconsumers of dairy products. (Besides eating much less meat and almost no dairy products, they also drink few sodas, get lots of exercise, and eat more vegetables.)
The huge nurses’ study (75,000 subjects) by Harvard School of Public Health found that women with the highest dairy consumption had substantially more bone fractures than women who drank less milk.
The highest dairy-consuming countries are Finland, Sweden, the U.S., and England. The countries with the highest rates of osteoporosis are Finland, Sweden, the U.S., and England.
Black South Africans consume 1/10th the amount of calcium that African Americans do. But African Americans have 9 times as many hip fractures! (Our obsession with eating massive amounts of calcium is unwarranted. We just need to eat bioavailable sources of calcium. These foods high in calcium include greens, nuts, grains, etc.)
Researchers studying diet and hip fractures in 33 countries found this “absolutely phenomenal correlation”: the more plant foods people eat (primarily fruits and vegs), the stronger their bones, and the fewer fractures they experience. The more animal foods people eat, on the other hand, the weaker their bones and the more broken bones they experience.
Posted in: Whole Food
Also, the highest dairy-consuming countries have the highest incidence of Crohn’s disease, except India (they’re the world’s largest producers of milk) but then they’re vegetarians and alot of the milk they drink is raw or boiled and half of it is buffalo milk.