We’ve been brought up to think that
drinking milk is good for our bones, but new
research suggests that not only is this false,
but the sugars in it may actually be
accelerating the ageing process.

A research team from Uppsala University in Sweden has found that women who drink more than three glasses of milk per day were more likely to break their bones than women who drank less.

This finding was part of a study conducted
on more than 100,000 people in Sweden,
based on how much diary they habitually
consumed. The researchers monitored the
diets of 61,400 women between 1987 and
1990 and 45,300 men through 1997 by
asking them to fill out questionaries on how often they ate common dairy products such as milk, cheese, and yoghurt. The health of
the female participants was monitored for
20 years after the questionnaires, and for
11 years afterwards for the males.
Publishing their results in the BMJ, the
team says that in women, high milk intake
led to a greater risk of bone fracture, and in both men and women, it was associated
with a higher mortality rate.
"Women who drank three or more glasses a day had twice the chance of dying at the
end of the study than those who drank less
than one glass a day,” lead researcher Karl
Michaelsson, a professor in medical
epidemiology at Uppsala University, told
BBC News. "And those who had a high milk
intake also had a 50 percent higher risk of
hip fracture."
Interestingly, unlike milk, when the diary
product was fermented, like in yoghurt, the
results were reversed. The participants who
consumed more yoghurt showed a
decreased risk of experiencing bone
fractures. Michaelsson told BBC News
that the difference could be down to the
sugars that are found in milk - lactose and
galactose. Both have been shown to
accelerate ageing processes such as
inflammation and oxidative stress in
previous research using animals.
While the study involved a good amount of
participants and was conducted over a
relatively long period of time, the
researchers are careful to point out that
they’re not ready to draw causal
conclusions just yet. Something they want
to look at in the future is if alcohol
consumption and weight could have had an effect on the results.

“As milk features in many dietary guidelines
and both hip fractures and cardiovascular
disease are relatively common among older
people, improving the evidence base for
dietary recommendations could have
substantial benefits for everyone,”
epidemiologist Mary Schooling from the
City University of New York in the US, wrote
in an accompanying editorial in the BMJ.

sciencealert.com.au/news/20143010-26428.html

True talk, every day consumption gives fat.