“Let me tell you a quick story. Years ago, when I was on Martha Stewart’s television show which no longer exists. And we were talking about optimal performance and health and I was one of the experts. Now when you’re an expert on TV show, you don’t get Q cards. You got to know your stuff. And you just got to say what you got to say when you got to say it. Now there was a trainer that she had, I think it was her trainer, that was also on the show. And I talked to the producer. He was telling about the segment and he said ‘Well, we’re going to talk about how dairy is his great sports drink.’ And I said, ‘Wait a minute. Where are you getting that information?’ He said, ‘well’. I said, ‘Listen, here, let me send you a bunch of papers.’ So I went through PubMed and I sent them all the papers showing them that this is not true. And I also showed them the papers that said it was true but they were all funded by the Dairy Council.
Now when a food industry or organization or agency or a council funds a study, it’s eight to fifty times more likely to show a positive benefit. In other words, if Coca-Cola does a study on soda, it’s going to find that it doesn’t cause obesity. Or if the Dairy Council does a study on milk, it’s going to find it’s good for your bones and it’s good for exercise and everything else. But actually it’s pretty frightening.
So anyway I was in this show and the trainer had these two Q cards by the camera. There were these giant Q cards which had all the talking points which were all wrong about why dairy is a post-workout food. And I was ‘Whoa, why are you doing this?’ She said, ‘Well, the producer said the Dairy Council is funding this segment of the show.’ And I was just flabbergasted.
So we think we’re getting straight up information. We’re just not. We need to know this. The whole Got-Milk campaign, you know, the moustache thing where you had all the Health and Human Services secretary, all the athletes, all the celebrities, you know, wearing the milk moustache – that was funded in part by the government, something called the Check Up Program and the Dairy Council. And it was promoting all these claims like it’s great for your bones and it’s great for this, and it’s great for that, but it’s not.
And so, the Fellow Trade Commission actually made them take the ads off the air and out of magazines – that’s why you don’t see them anymore, because there was no scientific basis for the claims. And it was false advertising. So this is a government literally funding millions of dollars to tell us stuff that wasn’t scientifically true. So anyway, the bottom line here is that milk is not good for your bones. And you don’t need milk for strong bones. Everybody knows we need milk for stronger bones. That’s what we were taught. Drink your milk. Grow big, tall and strong. And you need calcium. And without it children won’t grow to be big and strong. Adults will get hip fractures and most people would be getting osteoporosis. And their bones will crumble to dust as they age but there’s absolutely no evidence that we need milk to strengthen our bones.
For example, countries with the lowest milk consumption have the lowest rates of osteoporosis and fractures. Those with the highest dairy consumption and calcium, have the highest rates of osteoporosis and fractures. How do you make sense of that?”
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