Got Milk?
Milk has been a part of my diet since infancy. I was breast fed by my mother and after that, by the family cow. Then the neighbor’s cows. Then by cows I had never met via school lunches and grocery stores.
Daily consumption of milk was absolutely vital to a child’s health, we believed. Especially for building strong bones and teeth. That’s what the American Dairy Council told us, and it was easy for everyone to accept. Milk was chalk-white, like bones, like teeth, like sea shells. Calcification turned things stony-hard. If you want strong bones, you have to drink milk.
It was an easy fiction to maintain in my community, made up primarily of people of northern European stock. Not too many of my classmates and none of my neighbors claimed roots in Africa or Asia. We never heard of lactose intolerance or casein sensitivity.
For the longest time, the minimal daily requirement for calcium was set by the National Institutes of Health and the National Academy of Sciences at 800 mg, and 1200 mg for pregnant or nursing mothers. The new RDA is between 1,000 and 1,300 mg. Without at least three of glasses of milk or dairy-product equivalents each day, osteoporosis awaited. Calcium was in every multivitamin. To get calcium into your bones, you have to eat calcium and the more you eat, the more you get.
Calcium
