84 Joel Fuhrman, M.D.weight loss and are getting much publicity. Many Americans desire
to protect their addiction to high-fat, nutrient-inadequate animal foods.
These consumers form a huge market for such topsy-turvy scientific-
sounding quackery.
Today the link between animal products and many different dis-
eases is as strongly supported in the scientific literature as the link
between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. For example, subjects
who ate meat, including poultry and fish, were found to be twice as
likely to develop dementia (loss of intellectual function with aging)
than their vegetarian counterparts in a carefully designed study.^64
The discrepancy was further widened when past meat consumption
was taken into account. The same diet, loaded with animal products,
that causes heart disease and cancer also causes most every other dis-
ease prevalent in America including kidney stones, renal insuffi-
ciency and renal failure, osteoporosis, uterine fibroids, hypertension,
appendicitis, diverticulosis, and thrombosis.^65
Are Dairy Foods Protecting Us from Osteoporosis?
Dairy products are held in high esteem in America. Most people con-
sider a diet without dairy unhealthy. Without dairy foods, how could
we obtain sufficient calcium for our bones? Let's examine this ac-
cepted wisdom: is it true, or have we been brainwashed by years andyears of misinformation and advertising?
Hip fractures and osteoporosis are more frequent in populations
in which dairy products are commonly consumed and calcium in-
takes are commonly high. For example, American women drink thirty
to thirty-two times as much cow's milk as the New Guineans, yet
suffer forty-seven times as many broken hips. A multicountry analy-
sis of hip-fracture incidence and dairy-product consumption found
that milk consumption has a high statistical association with higher
rates of hip fractures.^66Does this suggest that drinking cow's milk causes osteoporosis?
Certainly, it brings into question the continual advertising message
from the National Dairy Council that drinking cow's milk prevents
osteoporosis. The major finding from the Nurses Health Study, which
included 121,701 women ages thirty to fifty-five at enrollment in
1976, was that the data does not support the hypothesis that the
consumption of milk protects against hip or forearm fractures.^67 In
fact, those who drank three or more servings of milk a day had a