Milk campaigns are still running strong today, as cases of osteoporosis keep rising worldwide. But somewhere along the way, somebody has to ask “why are the populations who consume the most dairy, also the ones with some of the highest rates of osteoporosis in the world?”

Could there be something else to our bone health than just the amounts of dairy we consume?

Well, indeed there is. While we continue to be brainwashed here in North America, about how much dairy, or specifically milk we need, not to mention how could anyone omit a whole food group from their diet, we we missing something else and something big about our diets.

Most people in the Western, developed world, such as North America eat diets that are both high in protein, especially animal protein and high in sodium, from the high amounts of processed food. Either one of these factors alone could be detrimental to your bone health, so one can imagine the magnitude of the two together. Hence today, more than ever we need to really take a step back from the paradigms we have been lead to believe and seriously re-evaluate where our bone health comes from.

Quick Overview of Osteoporosis

Osteoporosis is a bone thinning disease. In the long term, it can lead to pain, frailty, fractures, breaks, immobility and premature death. It typically strikes people, women more than men, in their senior years, and is today a growing concern for nearly all world populations. It is also not a disease that impacted our ancestors. Rather, scholars note that it is a man-made disease, that in fact should have never happened.

The International Osteoporosis Foundation estimates that by the year 2020, over half of all Americans over 50 will have weak bones. Current estimates show that 1 in 3 women and 1 in 5 men over 50, will suffer a fracture due to osteoporosis. For more details on osteoporosis and world statistics, check out the following osteoporosis fact sheet.

The highest hip fractures are seen in Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Denmark and the US. Now recall what I said above, about the highest consuming dairy populations having the highest rates of osteoporosis. According to 2006 data from the University of Guelph, Finland, Sweden and Ireland, respectively take the world’s top 3 dairy consumption spots. Norway is in the top 5 and United States in the top 15 spots for this trend. Interestingly enough, the United States is the world’s largest producer of cow milk and takes the first spot by more than double compared to any other country.

Generally speaking the trend to consume more dairy products is seen in Northern lying areas, compared to the South. And the most interesting fact perhaps about all of this milk consumption is that around 3/4 of the world has some degree of lactose intolerance and are consuming very little if any dairy. These are also the countries who do not exhibit osteoporosis at rates seen in the dairy consuming parts of the world.

What is troubling however, is that countries that were not previously tied to dairy as much, and had generally speaking low rates of osteoporosis are starting to exhibit the opposite trends. Countries like Asia, Latin America and parts of the Middle East are showing sharp increases in the rates of osteoporosis. And while some of these places rely on milk consumption, the result of their osteoporosis has been linked to a “Western-like type of lifestyle.” Which begs the question, what is it about the Western type lifestyle that has lead and continues to lead to ever increasing osteoporosis rates?

The answer: a high protein (especially high animal protein), high fat, high salt (high dependence on processed food), high sugar diet, along with a sedentary type of lifestyle.

We in the West have been living this way, for at least 60 good years now and have seen rates of chronic diseases, like osteoporosis skyrocket. Underdeveloped countries on the other hand, instead of learning from our mistakes, are still for the most part aspiring to live like the West lives, and thus falling prey to the same pitfalls as us.

So while all of the above named are heavily responsible for our poor bone health these days, two of the most intricately ones tied to the status of good bone health or lack thereof, are high protein and high sodium diets, which we will discuss below.

High Sodium Diets

With the invention of the microwave, came the age of frozen convenience. And with frozen convenience came just plain convenience when it came to food, which we refer to today as processed food. No matter what processed item you pick up, from crackers to pasta sauce, you can bet on one thing – it is going to be loaded with sodium.

Most of us up to this point link high sodium diets with high blood pressure, and while this is true, it is not the scope of this article to cover that. What will however shock people even more perhaps, is that a high sodium diet is deleterious for pushing calcium out of our bodies.

It is estimated that in order to thrive we require as little as 500mg of sodium per day. The current recommended daily allowance (RDA) for sodium is 2400mg. This is the US based number, and just to compare, in the United Kingdom, the recommended nutritional intake (RNI) for sodium is set at 1600mg as the maximum.

And yet despite the above 3 numbers, most North Americans consume between 3000mg to over 10,000mg of sodium per day! So do we have a high sodium problem? You bet! And we would be kidding ourselves if we thought that this type of lifestyle did not have huge implications where our health is concerned.

So where is all this salt coming from? Well, about 15% comes from the salt shaker, while most of the rest, about 75%, comes from the processed food we eat. Now let us look at the impacts of this where our bone health is concerned.

Scientific literature says that for every 1000mg of sodium in our diets, we lose about 20-40mg of calcium from our body. That wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the fact that calcium is not the most easily absorbed mineral. We typically absorb about 15-20% of our dietary calcium. In other words if you get 100mg of calcium from a meal, you only keep about 20mg of it, and if you also had about 1000mg of sodium in that meal, then you just lost all that calcium if not more. So not only did your bones not gain any calcium, in fact they probably also lost some too.

Thus a high sodium diet is so much more detrimental to our health than just the high blood pressure that may result from it, as if that were not bad enough.

It is thus critical that we not fool or cheat ourselves and drink 3 glasses of milk per day, with 3 processed, high sodium meals. If we really want to help our bones, yes by all means pay attention to your calcium sources, but pay even more attention to how much salt you are ingesting.

High Protein Diets

Most of us by now know, that protein has incurred a highly misrepresented popularity for almost the past 100 years now. As soon as it was discovered it was hyped up to be, the be all and end all of nutrition that would fix any nutritional deficiency. Boy were we wrong. Well unfortunately as government subsidies went out to meat and dairy farmers in the early parts of the 20th century, protein only continued to grow in popularity.

As a result today, we have a highly misinformed population who thinks the more protein the better. Nowhere is this more evident than in the local gym or fitness club. Add to this our reliance on meat and dairy products and you get a high protein eating population – especially high in animal protein that is.

Aside from the serious liver and kidney damage and upset balance to our naturally alkaline state of the body, let us add to this calcium depletion from our bones.

The recommended daily allowance (RDA) for protein is 0.8g of protein per kilogram of body weight. This means that a 110lb (50kg) person would need 40g of protein and a 220lb (100kg) person would need 80g of protein. Note that some gym buffs easily consume around 200g or more of protein per day!

Average Americans, regardless of whether they are actively building muscle or not, easily meet and exceed their protein requirements each day, as meat and dairy portions are typical with pretty much every meal. On top of this, we still have a generation, especially the younger ones, who seem to think they always need more. Note however that most holistic and plant-based doctors advise us to eat much less protein than the RDA.

Now here is where things get interesting where your bone health is concerned. Research has shown that for every gram of protein that we eat over 47g, we lose about 0.5mg of calcium. This means that someone who eats 87g of protein, loses about 20mg of calcium. Given the explanation about calcium absorption above, you can again easily see, how not only may bone strengthening not occur under these circumstances, but they may actually lead to bone loss.  At least the people here who go to the gym have resistance training which strengthens their bones, but even more loss is incurred by those leading a sedentary lifestyle.

The other problem with high protein diets is that they are highly acidic. Although we will not get into the whole acid-alkaline balance in this article, a simple way of understanding the protein-calcium balance is that most protein by-products are acidic and calcium is alkaline. The calcium then acts as the bfuffer to neutralize our body, and keep it slightly alkaline – this is a must for survival. So the more acidic we get, the more calcium is used for buffering the acid, instead of bone building.

It is thus kind of ironic you may think, that on the one hand we are told to eat dairy (and for the most part lots of it) for strong bones, while on the other hand dairy is high in animal protein and when added to an already high protein diet, can instead result in calcium loss from bones instead of gain.

In the end, if you want to keep dairy as part of your lifestyle and rely on it as a source of calcium, then you must be more conscious of how much other animal protein you are ingesting daily. Many of us still cannot get it through our heads that meat was not ever meant to be eaten in the amounts typical North Americans eat it (i.e. 2-3 times a day, everyday). In any case, if you don’t like dairy or were only eating it out of fear for the calcium,  now is also a good time to breathe a huge sigh or relief, throw it all away and start getting calcium from more beneficial sources like leafy greens, nuts, seeds and yes even beans.

Conclusion

So in conclusion, you can obsess over milk and dairy and fall prey to the hype that is built around this whole campaign or you can start to realize that all the milk in the world is not going to help your bone status as long as you eat a diet that is high in protein and/or high in sodium.

We simply as consumers need to really embrace that today the field of nutrition science is doing leaps and bounds and is literally bringing us new and vitally useful information each day. We also did not get all the correct information to begin with. We can no longer hide behind the paradigms of “but this is how my mother, grandmother, etc. ate”. Because the truth is, maybe your mother did and chances are her health is comparable to what most seniors’ health is today, but definitely not your ancestors, as the whole milk, meat and processed food revolution just hit from the early to mid 1900’s on.

This is why it is crucial that in today’s day and age, we really start listening to the media messages with a fine filter when they tell us what to eat and drink, and simply start looking into information ourselves. For as long as they continue to give us half truths, or the truths that serve them, you can guarantee that your health will not be what benefits, but their bank accounts.

References and Further Reading:

1. The International Osteoporosis Foundation

2. Osteoporosis Fact Sheet from the IOF

3. Boning Up On Osteoporosis by Raymond Francis

4. Becoming Vegetarian: The Complete Guide to Adopting a Healthy Vegetarian Diet by Vesanto Melina and Brenda Davis

5. Introduction to Dairy Science and Technology: Milk History, Consumption, Production and Composition from the Univeristy of Guelph

6.  Got Osteoporosis? from milksucks.com

7. Are You Getting Too Much Salt? from froedtert.com

*Photograph provided by patrix

About the author:
Evita Ochel, B.Sc., B.Ed., CHN - is a certified holistic nutritionist, biologist, educator, writer, researcher and speaker in the areas of health, science and holistic wellness. She is a nutritional science expert and her teaching and writing focus on natural, wholesome, plant-based and organic nutrition to achieve optimal health and longevity. Learn more about Evita Ochel or Follow Evita Ochel on Twitter.