Menopause seems to be an important trigger point for women when their circulating levels of estrogen decline. Estrogen is known to help protect against loss of calcium from the skeleton. I have another idea of why there seems to be this increased interest. Drink milk to build better bones and teeth, so the story goes. Using Pat Boone in the 1950s, the ads in the 1970s that 'milk does a body good', baseball Hall of Fame prospect Cal Ripkin in the 1980s, and those politicians, sports and entertainment personalities who wear the milk mustaches in the 1990s, the dairy industry has pictured for us what makes for the All-American look.
Milk is equated with growth, strength, beauty and success.
And I go back quite a long time, to the time I grew up milking cows, then to graduate school to do a doctorate on finding more efficient means to raise still more dairy cows. The tenacious power of the dairy industry has oozed from every pore of their few hundred offices of information across this country and utilized their few hundreds of millions of dollars to support education and research. Now is a different time because some very intelligent folks are asking some very intelligent and thoughtful questions and having the means to be heard. They are hearing that all that calcium that we supposedly need and that is supposed to come primarily from milk may not be all that necessary. They are hearing that societies of people who drink little or no milk also break little or none of their bones.