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Milk:
Evidence & clinical trials
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For Western countries at least, the worst
socioeconomic extremes have been pretty much ironed out since the war. But
young people in the West keep on growing. Leroi
says: “I’m 6ft but if I go to Holland, there are these blond giants who
crowd me out in the trains — even the women are taller than me.
It’s predicted that by 2005 the average Dutchman will be another inch
taller.”
The northern European countries have genetically taller populations, but
height has also been linked with milk consumption: “The Dutch are the tallest people
in the world, and it has been suggested that it’s because they drink a
lot of milk. The tallest people in Africa
worship cows and drink vast amounts of milk. In effect, we are super-fuelling
our bodies and growing too tall.
http://www.you.com.au/news/371.htm
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Scientists are meanwhile trying to find out what
causes people to grow so tall. Is is a diet rich in
proteins with lots of cheese and milk? or the liberal education
which, according to some experts, acts as a ``psycho-sexual stimulus''?
http://expressindia.com/ie/daily/19980429/11950084.html
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I agree with Jing.
One of the reasons why the Dutch are the tallest people in Europe
is that they traditionally consume vast amounts of protein-rich foods like
milk and cheese. Even my manager, who is Indonesian-Chinese but
was born and raised in Holland,
towers over me. One day last year someone got bored and put a strip of paper
on the wall and had everyone mark their height on it -- and I learned that at
5' 10", I'm the third-shortest person in the office. Even one
of the Dutch women is taller than me! http://pekingduck.org/archives/002300.php
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Milk Industry Admits That Milk Made Japanese Kids
Grow Taller - And Brags About It!
by Robert Cohen
http://www.health101.org/art_milk_Japanese_growth.htm
The date was October 26, 1963. John F. Kennedy had less than four
weeks to live. The Japanese empire had been crushed by two nuclear bombs just
18 years earlier. Nearly forty years later (last night, November 25, 2002), I
came across an editorial while skimming through old issues of Hoard's
Dairyman, the "National Dairy Farm Magazine." In their 10/26/63
editorial, Hoard's was proud of this factoid:
JAPANESE TALLER WITH MILK
"The average
height of 15-year-old boys in Japan
has jumped 3 1/2 inches since World War II. According to the
Christian Science Monitor, clothing and school equipment manufacturers are
faced with the problem of revising size standards to keep pace with the
sprouting Nippers."
Talk about politically incorrect! I do not know what is the
viler act, verbal insult upon the Japanese race, or the arrogance of
what follows. Yes, it gets worse. Hoard's continues:
"Milk is credited as being the
primary cause of today's Japanese being taller and broader. According to the
'Monitor,' milk is sweeping Japan.
It is readily available in railway stations, in offices, and it seems more
common for young people to drink milk for refreshment than carbonated
beverages. Consumption is expected to rise 500 percent within 10 years."
OK, so America's
dairy industry admitted that the enormous growth spurt was due to cow's milk
consumption, and they did so without mentioning the "H" word,
hormones. Milk contains powerful growth
hormones. These steroid and protein hormones work. Japan is the largest
living laboratory study, an example of how an entire society changed in only
18 years.
Is taller better? Whether or not you believe in creationist theory
or evolutionary theory, you should agree that the original "plan"
is best. Humans were either designed with, or developed, just the right
skeletal system to hold a body's organs. Stretch the girders and compromise
the structure. That is exactly what man has done, with the help of dairy
cows. And dairy products help make these bigger bones weaker because of its
acidifying nature. Is it any wonder that osteoporosis plagues milk-drinking
nations?
The Hoard's editorial concludes:
"This report has some interesting ramifications. We could send a few of
our quick-shooting heart attack 'authorities' to Japan to scare the poor kids out
of drinking milk. Or we can suffer along with their headlines here and
arrange for a swap of clothing and furniture. Our kids could soon shrink to Nippon size if we followed the advice of the confused
cholesterol crowd."
What arrogance!
The latest heart advice, some 39 years and thousands of scientific studies
later, can be found here. I have
shared the Hoard's Dairyman editorial with the Japanese American Citizen's
league. I have also spoken to, and faxed a copy of the offending column to
Senator Daniel Inouye's office. I called Steve Larsen, editor of Hoard's
Dairyman, and read him the offending column. (Tel: 920-563-5551). I asked
whether he had an apology to issue, or a retraction, or a comment. His
comment, "No, we're not interesting in issuing a retraction." He
then hung up on me.
The dairy industry should take responsibility for bringing increased cancer,
osteoporosis, cardiovascular disease, asthma, and diabetes rates to a
population of Asians who were once the model of good health. With milk
consumption, came American-style diseases.
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Early Sexual Maturity and Milk Hormones
by Robert Cohen
http://www.health101.org/art_Milk_and_Girls.htm
Japan
had been devastated by losing a war and was occupied by American troops.
Americanization included dietary changes. Milk
and dairy products were becoming a significant part of the Japanese diet.
According to this study, the per-capita yearly dietary intake of dairy
products in 1950 was only 5.5 pounds. Twenty- five years later, the average
Japanese ate 117.4 pounds of milk and dairy products.
In 1950, the average twelve-year old Japanese girl was 4'6"
tall and weighed 71 pounds. By 1975, the
average Japanese girl, after changing her diet to include milk and dairy
products containing 59 different bioactive hormones, had grown an average of
4 1/2 inches and gained 19 pounds. In 1950, the average Japanese
girl had her first menstrual cycle at the age of 15.2 years. Twenty five
years later, after a daily intake of estrogen and progesterone from milk, the
average Japanese girl was ovulating at the age of 12.2 years, three years
younger. Never before had such a dramatic
dietary change been seen in such a unique population study.
Little girls do not take birth control pills. Little girls do not
inject steroids, and do not require estrogen replacement therapy. Little
girls are born with bodies that are genetically pre-programmed to transform
them into women. By consuming cow's milk and cow's milk products, little
girls become big girls long before Mother Nature intended. Is being taller,
having larger than normal breasts, starting your period earlier than you're
designed to, and increasing your risk of breast cancer worth it?
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Effect of cow milk consumption on longitudinal
height gain in children
American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Vol. 80, No. 4, 1088-1089,
October 2004
© 2004 American Society for Clinical Nutrition
Tomoo Okada
Department of Pediatrics; Nihon University School of Medicine
30-1, Oyaguchi-kamimachi; Itabashi-ku
Tokyo 173-8610 Japan
E-mail: tomo@med.email.ne.jp
http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/full/80/4/1088-a
Dear Sir:
Black et al (1) studied prepubertal children
who had a long history of AVOIDING consumption of cow milk and found that
such children tend to have short stature and high adiposity. Blanaru et al (2) confirmed that dietary arachidonic acid alters bone mass in piglets fed cow
milk–based formula. We are very interested in their results because in
a previous prospective study, we examined the effect of cow milk consumption
on longitudinal height gain in children (3).
The subjects were 122 children (60 boys and 62 girls) aged 9.5 ± 0.2 y
( ± SD). Standing height and weight were measured, and relative weight
was obtained according to the standard weight for sex, age, and height. Three
years later, we recruited the subjects for the second part of the study,
which included anthropometric measurements and the questionnaire about cow
milk consumption. The question was "How much cow milk do you usually
drink a day?" The possible answers were "<250 mL," "250–500 mL,"
"500–1000 mL," and ">1000 mL." We investigated the relation between cow milk
consumption and longitudinal changes in height, weight, and relative weight.
Ninety-two children (47 boys and 45 girls; 75.4% of the original sample)
volunteered to participate in the second series of examinations. There were
no significant differences in mean height, weight, or relative weight between
the participants and the nonparticipants at the
first examination. The participants were divided into 2 subgroups according
to cow milk consumption: high consumption (>500 mL/d;
16.5%) and low consumption (<500 mL/d; 83.5%).
The 3-y changes in height, weight, and relative weight in the high- and
low-consumption groups were 18.8 ± 0.5 and 21.3 ± 1.1 cm, 13.3
± 0.5 and 13.3 ± 0.8 kg, and –2.6 ± 0.8% and
–5.6 ± 2.9%, respectively. The difference between the 2 groups
was statistically significant for height (P = 0.042, Mann-Whitney U test) but
not for weight or relative weight.
Several previous studies showed an effect
of milk on height gain in pubertal children. In 1984 Takahashi (4) reported
an acceleration of growth in Japan
from the 1950s and suggested the importance of milk consumption.
And this increase in height was prominent during puberty. In a
cross-sectional study, Jirapinyo et al (5) reported that milk intake and parents'
height contributed to adolescent height in females. Bonjour et al
(6) found that prepubertal girls who consumed a
diet including calcium-enriched foods grew in height in a randomized,
double-blind, placebo-controlled study. In our longitudinal study, the mean height gain in the high-consumption group
was higher than that in the low-consumption group, and the difference in
height gain between the 2 groups was 2.5 cm/3 y.
Calcium itself has an important role in bone health, and many studies have
shown the contribution of cow milk or dairy products to bone mass and bone
mineral content. However, cow milk may have other components that promote
bone health. Insulin-like growth factor I,
which is present in much higher concentrations in cow milk than in human
milk, is important for bone mineral accrual on periosteal
surfaces. It is relatively stable to both heat and acidic
conditions; therefore, it survives the conditions of commercial milk
processing (7). Milk whey protein, especially milk basic protein, was
reported to promote bone formation and to suppress bone resorption,
and daily supplementation with milk basic protein significantly increases
bone mineral density independently of dietary intake of minerals and vitamins
(8). In addition, Blanaru et al (2) showed that
whole-body bone mineral content was elevated in piglets fed arachidonic acid and that liver arachidonic
acid was positively related to plasma insulin-like growth factor I and calcitriol. Furthermore, transforming growth factor
ß2 was also well preserved in human milk after holder pasteurization at
56.5 °C (9). Transforming growth factor ß2 inhibits the
differentiation of human adipocyte precursor cells
and reduces the activity of the lipogenic enzyme
glycero-3-phosphate dehydrogenase (10). This may
explain why Black et al (1) found a high proportion of obese children among
the milk-avoiding children in their study. In our longitudinal study, the
change in relative weight in the high-consumption group was lower than that
in the low-consumption group. Cow milk may also have some effect on adipose
tissue.
In summary, in our prospective study, we
observed a height gain in the children who consumed a high amount of cow
milk. Milk is regarded as the best nutritional support for neonatal growth
and development. In pubertal children, cow milk may also be an
important nutrient for growth and for achieving optimal bone mass to prevent
osteoporosis in later life. Finally, height gain in children may depend not
only on the calcium in cow milk but also on some of its bioactive components.
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Protein For Height?
http://cosmopolitan18.blogspot.com/2005_08_01_cosmopolitan18_archive.html
Well, if you’ve spent
some time in Holland,
you know that the Dutch drink prodigious quantities of milk. Easily 4-6 cups
a day as adults. Probably similar for kids. When not drinking milk they like
to have this wonderful fruit yogurt that comes in large milk cartons.
Add to that Gouda and Edam cheeses… Mucho protein. Compare
this to a typical Italian diet. A little bread with jam in the morning. A pasta with perhaps a cream dressing for lunch. Maybe a
salad. More pasta, maybe a little meat for dinner. Perhaps a gelato in
between. Some coffee, some wine and a couple of aperitivos…
So how much protein do we need? Well, I’m told that a
minimum for a woman of my height is 50 grams per day, and recommended is 120.
Have you every tried to eat 120 grams of protein a day? One way to do it is
to add protein powder to your food – protein enhanced smoothies, etc.
Another alternative is to drink lots of milk – 5-6 glasses a day.
Otherwise, it’s virtually impossible.
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You too can become a pituitary FREAK: Got Milk?
Robert Cohen author of: MILK A-Z
(201-871-5871)
Executive Director (notmilkman@notmilk.com)
Dairy Education Board
http://www.notmilk.com/forum/927.html
I love watching pro basketball, and live just 15 minutes away from
the arena at which the New Jersey Nets play their home games in the Jersey
Meadowlands. On Friday night, I watched the Nets become Eastern Conference
champs, and await the results of today's final between Los
Angeles and Sacramento to see who Jersey plays in the championship round.
Immediately preceding the tipoff of Friday night's
game, nationally televised on NBC, the dairy industry ran a milk ad. There
stood a ballplayer, holding his basketball. Calcium for growth. That was the
message. How deceptively unscientific.
Growth is genetically predetermined. The one factor that can counter
biologically pre-determined genetic coding is a growth hormone, not calcium.
Internal secretions of hormones, the or introduction
of hormones by some external means, can alter the set of instructions
contained within the helical strands of DNA inside of the cell's chromosomes.
Human growth hormones and bovine growth hormones have both been used by
endocrinologists to promote human growth.
Once in every million or so births, a child is born with a badly
mal-functioning pituitary gland. By
kindertgarten age, that child grows taller than his
teacher. By third grade, the young man soars to the height of six feet. Then,
somebody hands him a basketball.
As the ball bounces, and as the child's pituitary gland secretes enormous
doses of chemical hormones sending signal to bones to grow out of control, that
young man's destiny becomes sealed. He will forever be the recipient of
not-so-funny "How's the weather up there?" jokes.
If the young man practices his skills, and is very lucky, his rare
physiological handicap becomes an asset, and he learns to play basketball.
Such a man was born in Barcelona,
Spain in
1980, and he nowplays for the National Basketball
Association's (NBA) Tennesse franchise. His skills
have been so refined, that this man has been named the NBA's "rookie of
the year."
Pau Gasol is tall and
skinny. Two hundred and twenty-seven pounds apppear
to have been spray painted onto his 84 inch frame. Basketball fans did not
see this seven footer play college ball because he didn't attend college, but
the dairy industry feels that pituitary freaks best exemplify the human
ideal.
One of the newest milk mustache ads:
http://www.businesswire.com/photowire/pw.053002/bb12.jpg
Seven foot tall caucasians are rarities,
indeed. One goliath of a freak might have fought David at the battle of Shocoh, but seven-foot tall white men do not become Watusi warriors. They do not even become Golden State
Warriors. They become Memphis Grizzlies.
Their inner strengths result from too many hormones. Milk mustache
ads for such pituitary freaks? How appropriate. Each sip of milk contains powerful
growth hormones. Cow's milk contains a lot of calcium because cows eat lots
of plants containing calcium. Do cows grow tall as a result of what they eat?
Each sip of milk contains estrogen and progesterone, hormones that
offer feminizing influences to those who drink body fluids from lactating
bovines. Cows are milked before they birth calves. The pre-birth milk sends
signals to mammary tissues of cows, instructing their milk-secreting glands
to grow.
Each sip of milk contains powerful protein hormones as
well as steroid hormones. The building blocks of protein hormones are
amino acids. When comparing the bovine growth hormone (bGH)
to the human growth hormone (GH), one finds many similarities. Both contain
the exact same number of amino acids, 191, although the sequence of these aminos differs by about 35%.
There is a growth hormone more powerful than even GH. That
hormone is called insulin-like growth factor-I (IGF-I). Each sip of milk
contains IGF-I. IGF-I in humans and cows both contain 70 amino acids. Human IGF-I is identical to bovine
IGF-I. The aminos occur in the same sequence. Much like
a key fitting into a lock, the growth hormones are identical.
Eat calcium and grow tall? That's nonsense.
Drink milk containing
powerful growth hormones and grow? That is true. Stretch your
bones beyond the degree that they were originally designed for? That's what
happens.
Perhaps that is why nations drinking the greatest amounts of milk also have
the highest rates of crippling osteoporosis.
It's all about
hormones. So, if you would like
your child to become a pituitary freak, give him (or her) cow's milk. Milk is
the ideal hormonal delivery system.
Perhaps your son will grow as tall as Pau
Gasol and not have to attend college, and play
professional basketball for the Memphis Grizzlies, and be blessed with a milk
mustache advertisement as his reward.
Sometimes the effects of milk hormones are subtle. That depends upon the
individual. An entire world has been changed by such subtleties, and few note
the differences between the little girls of the 70's generation, and today's sexually mature third graders who resemble mature
women.
As dietary changes result in the increased consumption of concentrated dairy
products (cheese, ice cream, pizza), so too does the evolution of a new
species of homo sapiens, the homoleche man.
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Vietnam plans to
make bigger people through milk power
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2004/11/09/2003210313
GROWTH SPURT: The impoverished communist country is hoping to give
its citizens a more nutritious diet, increasing its national stature,
literally
AP , HANOI. Tuesday, Nov 09, 2004
HANOI - During long years of war and severe
poverty in Vietnam,
milk and meat were true luxuries only the rich could afford. Many children
went blind from lack of vitamin A. Countless others experienced stunted
growth that has kept the whole population short and thin. But after 30 years
of peace, the communist country has overcome many of these problems and is
now boasting unprecedented economic growth that it hopes will translate into
building a taller, stronger people.
An ambitious plan submitted for government
approval last month aims to increase the average height of men and women by
about 2 1/2 inches over the next 25 years with milk as the main ingredient
powering that spurt. "The Vietnamese people on average are
shorter than many people in the world as well as compared with people in the
region, and they're also weaker physically," said Duong Nghiep Chi, director of Vietnam's Sport Science Institute
in charge of the strategic plan. He noted that the Japanese went through a
similar growth spurt after World War II.
Since the Vietnam
War ended in 1975, the average height of men has shot up from 5-feet-2 to
5-feet-4 and in women from 4-feet-9 to 5 feet. Weights have also increased an
average of 18 pounds for men and about 6 1/2 pounds for women over the past
30 years, with food becoming more widely available only in the past decade.
In comparison, adults in the United States, who were bigger to begin with,
gained about an inch over the past 40 years, with men now an average height
of 5-feet-9 1/2 and women about 5-feet-4.
But studies in Vietnam
have found that despite the recent leap in size and fast-growing milk sales
over the past decade, many children still aren't drinking enough milk or getting
all the vitamins and minerals they need, such as calcium and zinc. It's
partly because of limited resources in a nation where the average income is
still only about $420 a year, with poverty concentrated in the countryside
where most of Vietnam's
82 million people live. Perhaps an even bigger challenge will be promoting
knowledge and awareness. Nutrition experts say many adults think milk and
cheese are just for young children, who often stop eating dairy products
after age 2. Some new mothers also don't believe they produce enough breast
milk, leading them to substitute their own milk with formula.
Chi's plan hopes to overcome those misconceptions by providing nutritional
guidelines about what children should eat and how much. A pilot project, if approved by the prime minister,
also would select 10,000 children ages 6-18 throughout the country and supply
them with free milk for two years to see how much they grow compared to those
not drinking milk. "If this program is approved, we will launch awareness
campaigns among parents on how to give children a better diet,"
Chi said. "We will hold more campaigns to help create habits for the
Vietnamese people to drink more milk. In the past, they did not understand
the importance of this and they also did not believe that milk was an
important factor for their growth."
But as Vietnamese wealth continues to rise — mainly in the capital of Hanoi and southern Ho
Chi Minh City — some
parents who may themselves have gone hungry during the war or in the years of
isolation that followed, are determined to see their children grow bigger.
Mothers are often spotted stuffing spoonfuls of food into their children's
mouths. And last year before Vietnam
hosted a major sporting event, many local newspapers wrote articles questioning
whether a famous Vietnamese pop singer should perform because she was too
short and thin to represent the country.
At the same time, some experts fear that Vietnamese children could follow the
fat trend seen in other southeast Asian countries, such as Singapore and Thailand, which are now
struggling to keep youngsters' weight in check. "It's often rich
families with very good economic conditions — they have a very good
house, air conditioners and microwaves," said Nguyen Thi
Lam, deputy director of Vietnam's
National Institute of Nutrition charged with tackling the overweight and
obesity issue. "They have very sweet food available like Coca-Cola and
other sweet drinks, and chocolate is more available than in the normal
group."
Chi says it's vital that Vietnam
not leap from undernourished to overweight but that its people instead work
toward a healthy in-between with a balanced diet that now includes more rice
and meat. In addition, he said the national plan will also provide guidelines
to ensure that children are getting enough exercise and maintaining active
lifestyles.
"Many rich people in Vietnam,
they don't know what should be the best way to feed their children even
though they have money to spend," he said. "If we do not have a
proper approach as the country is getting more prosperous economically, the
people will not be as strong built as their parents or older
generations."
--------Another Article-----------
Vietnam aims to
boost drinking of milk
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3700725.stm
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/patrick.guenin/cantho/vnnews/milk.htm
Vietnamese people are smaller, on average, than other East Asians.
The Vietnamese Government has launched a new initiative to make its
population taller. The $40m programme, which is
designed to promote better nutrition and healthy living, will be introduced
to schools across the country.
"We are still much shorter than other Asian countries like China
and especially Japan," said Dung Nghiep Chi,
the man behind the scheme.
"We are now working on a programme of
nutrition and physical exercise, to boost the height and weight of young Vietnamese
people," he told the BBC's World Today programme.
According to Ha My, from the BBC's Vietnamese service, many people in Vietnam want to gain that extra
few inches.
She said that young people consider height
a mark of beauty, and it is one of the top considerations for teenage girls
looking for boyfriends and even friends.
There are also height restrictions which prevent small people from taking
part in beauty contests or becoming air hostesses.
Older people associate height less with beauty and more with nutritional
status - and an indication that their children are healthy and strong.
"My mother is very short, but I'm not too bad as I have been given
highly nutritious food and plenty of milk," said one woman.
Another man was more direct. "I want to be 10cm taller. I think tall
people are beautiful," he said.
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She is 54 years old, she is one of the world's
top experts on calcium, and she rarely takes a calcium supplement. “I
don't have to,” says Connie Weaver. “I drink plenty of
milk.”
While her three boys were growing up, the world-renowned researcher had one
unwavering mealtime rule: milk for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Call
her the dairy queen, but the old-fashioned dictum was a direct result of
evolving research on a mineral that is clouded by confusion and
misinformation.
http://www.eatingwell.com/articles_recipes/nutrition/table_talkdj06_calcium.html
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Drink milk for a healthy heart
http://www.health24.com/dietnfood/General/15-742-773,13222.asp
Milk consists of 3 % saturated fat. Other constituents of milk
might act against the saturated fat and counter-balance the bad effects.
"It may be that men who did not drink milk were replacing it with
something else, such as butter or salty food.
It is also possible that the men who drank more milk also drank
more as children. "Children who drink milk grow more, and taller
people have less heart disease."
Those who drink more milk, have a healthier lifestyle than
non-milk drinkers. People who drink a little milk were shorter, are more
likely to drink alcohol and smoke and were from lower social groups than the
milk drinkers.
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Hormones in Your Milk
Janet Raloff
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20031101/food.asp
EXCERPT………
Two decades ago, scientists at Cornell University
pioneered studies of treating dairy cattle with injections of natural bovine somatotropin (BST). Work by researchers there and
elsewhere showed that the hormone alters how cows use nutrients—causing
them to divert more of their energy intake into milk generation rather than
growth (SN: 5/5/84, p. 284). Indeed, early
studies in New Zealand
had shown that cows that naturally produce more milk than others in their
herd do tend to secrete more of the natural form of this pituitary hormone.
Cows now getting a genetically engineered version of the hormone typically
produce at least 10 percent more milk than other cows do.
Over the years, some scientists have worried that the hormone
treatments seed milk with rBST residues. According
to the International Dairy Foods Association (IDFA), all milk "contains
naturally occurring BST. Milk from rBST-supplemented
cows contains no more BST than milk from cows not supplemented with rBST."
Critics of the therapy have also argued that milk from rBST-treated cows may develop elevated concentrations of insulinlike growth factor-1 (IGF-1). This protein is important
to milk production, bone growth, and cell division in all animals, including
humans.
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Got milk?
John Scott takes a look at
the Dutch love affair with all things milk based. A UK national,
John has written about current events and business affairs for more than ten
years.
http://www.expatica.com/source/site_article.asp?subchannel_id=64&story_id=113&name=Got+milk%3F+
The Netherlands is probably one of the few places in the world
where milk is served at breakfast, lunch and dinner, both at business
meetings and social gatherings. And the white liquid is not just
an offering for children. I have witnessed
grown men drink pints of milk in the pub. For someone brought up
to put milk on cereal in the morning and the odd dash in a cup of tea or
coffee, this seems a strange state of affairs.
Top of the dairy pile. Anyone visiting
the Netherlands
will soon notice that the Dutch population is - putting it diplomatically - generally tall and well built, with full and fleshy
features. All evidence of a healthy diet of calcium, protein and fat -
something that milk has in abundance.
But believe it or not, the Netherlands
is not top of the European milk drinking league in terms of per capita
consumption. That honour goes to Scandinavia and Ireland, but at 130 litres
per capita consumption - over half a pint of milk a day for every man, woman
and child in the country - the Netherlands is not far off the
top.
And the consumption of cheese in the Netherlands,
at 17kg per capita or almost 50g a day, puts the country near the top of the
pile again, but behind France,
Greece and Germany. But putting cheese and milk consumption together,
the Dutch are pushed to the top of the overall dairy consumption pile.
"We are a small country, but in terms of per capita we are a big
producer," Dutch Dairy Bureau spokesperson Aad
Vernooy said.
In fact the country produced 11 billion litres of
milk in 2000. Half of this goes to the manufacturer of cheese — the
Dutch are the world's biggest exporter of cheese, exporting 500 million
kilograms last year.
For the love of milk
"We are a low country, it is wet and the soil is better suited to cattle
then corn," Vernooy said.
"We have a very long tradition of cattle and milk producing. We are also
good at trading so taken together, both make for a big exporting
country."
In fact, the black and white Holstein, the world's highest yielding cow in
terms of milk production, was originally nurtured in the north of Holland. The cow
produces around 20 litres of milk a day.
"Our farms tend to be close to
cities, so there has always been a culture of fresh milk being delivered to
the cities in the morning," he said.
"The
Dutch can't live a day without milk."
………Excerpt………..But
that doesn't explain why similar campaigns elsewhere in Europe and the US have not attracted the level of success
seen in the Netherlands.
At the end of the day, milk is a relatively inexpensive source of calcium,
protein, potassium and other vitamins and minerals. While drinking 10 pints
of the stuff every day will probably clog your arteries, taken in moderation
it could actually be good for you.
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"The Dutch are currently tallest, measuring
about two inches taller than Americans," Steckel
said. "Why? They have very high income levels, they have perhaps the
best pre-natal and post-natal care in the world, and they have a relatively
equal distribution of income."
Even
the Japanese, who were the smallest in height of any industrialized country
in 1950, have increased their height by about eight centimeters in the last
50 years. "If you're in Asia
today, the intergenerational differences in height are striking," Steckel said.
"I've asked geneticists how long it will be before we can estimate the
genetic potential for growth of particular individuals. We can take a blood
sample or a mouth swab, get your DNA, determine your height, and conclude how
tall you should end up. If we know each person's growth potential and
discover that they're falling below that, then we know something is wrong.
"Then
we can design personal diets for people: you need extra protein, I
need more iodine, she needs additional iron to grow adequately," he
said. "This would revolutionize pediatrics, and the technology should be available in
five to ten years. We know that health in early childhood is a
predictor of longevity, so this is the time to intervene."
http://www.oberlin.edu/alummag/oamcurrent/oam_may99/tall.html
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Chinese kids desperate to outgrow Japanese
Culture/Society News. Source: Chicago Sun-Times\Sunday Telegraph
Published: 4-2-01 Author: DAMIEN MCELROY
Posted on 04/03/2001 01:12:11 PDT by jordan8
April 2, 2001. By Damien Mcelroy
BEIJING--The young in China are going to desperate
lengths to get taller, urged by a government ashamed that the Japanese stand
taller than the Chinese.
Authorities
encourage Chinese adolescents to drink milk as a way of promoting growth,
while magazines feature pictures of lanky models and basketball stars.
One of the greatest influences has been the success of Huang Xinye, a 14-year-old schoolgirl. The 6-foot-1-inch teen
was spotted by the international modeling agency Elite and flown to Europe. Her glamorous new life has inspired thousands
to try to grow.
"I have received many letters from people saying that, because they were
born short, they have suffered and are looking for some solace," said Xia Hetao, a doctor who
lengthens legs. Xia slices a thigh bone in half and
inserts a steel rod supported by a metal frame on the outside of the bone.
The patient cranks the mechanism wider every day, forcing the leg to grow
longer. Most can't stand the pain for long, but one young man gained 6 1/2
inches.
For
centuries, the Chinese have referred to the Japanese as "dwarfs,"
which is why the news that the average Chinese is now smaller caused
distress.
The
explanation is the better nutrition enjoyed in Japan,
so Beijing
has made it compulsory for every schoolchild to drink a quarter-pint of milk daily.
However, the order to drink milk is not popular with children, most of whom
(as with the majority of Chinese) are lactose-intolerant. It has been
accepted by all, however, as a necessary evil if modern Chinese people are to
achieve the goal of a taller nation.
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