WARNING: Milk Is Dangerous!

WARNING: AMONG THE MANY FOODS AND DRINKS THAT HELP CAUSE CHILDHOOD OBESITY, MILK HAS JUST BEEN ADDED TO THE LIST.

Here’s the link from Yahoo! – http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20050606/hl_nm/milk_dc_1. (Can’t link for some reason)

Well, it hasn’t been added to the list, but this study does try to scare parents into lessening their children’s intake of milk – specifically skim milk and my personal favorite whole milk. The article suggests that people don’t really know the real caloric value and milk and drink too much. In the study, the children who drank the most gained more weight. Duh!

What the article doesn’t point out is what everyone tells their kids that drinking milk builds stronger bones. The weight gain might be corresponding to the stronger bones that the kids are building as they drink more milk. “The take-home message is that children should not be drinking milk as a means of losing weight or trying to control weight,” Berkey said. Weight gain in children is a given because the body adjusts itself and its weight to the quick, normal (height) growth that children go through in puberty. Milk aids that growth.

The researchers further commented that water is the best beverage, and that milk shouldn’t be promoted as a healthy drink. Both are very healthy in my opinion. The article did mention toward the end that a nutrition professor said the study did not clearly show that milk causes weight gain. I’m glad that there was a sentence that showed doubt in the study’s findings.

Even if milk did have higher calories than people think or more fat, I’d rather intake “natural” calories and fat than the processed calories and fats in most of the crap found in supermarkets. What people should really focus on instead of scaring people from eating and drinking healthy foods is the idea of moderation. Is junk food bad for you? You bet. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have it, it just means that you need to be able to tell yourself when you’d had enough and to not overindulge in it, and also that you need to eat your fruits and vegetables on a daily basis in order to maintain a healthy diet.

I wouldn’t have a second thought to drinking my daily glass of whole milk. I just have to put off eating my annual Christmas Twinkie for another week.