On Food and Cooking

bone.
The best insurance against osteoporosis
appears to be frequent exercise of the
bones that we want to keep strong, and a
well-rounded diet that is rich in vitamins
and minerals, moderate in salt and meat,
and includes a variety of calcium-
containing foods. Milk is certainly a
valuable one, but so are dried beans, nuts,
corn tortillas and tofu (both processed with
calcium salts), and several greens — kale,
collards, mustard greens.
Milk Proteins Become Something More We
used to think that one of the major proteins in
milk, casein (p. 19), was mainly a nutritional
reservoir of amino acids with which the infant
builds its own body. But this protein now
appears to be a complex, subtle orchestrator
of the infant’s metabolism. When it’s
digested, its long amino acid chains are first
broken down into smaller fragments, or
peptides. It turns out that many hormones and