Time to stop milking it?

As the government desperately scans through it’s extensive list of expenditures looking for areas in which it can make cuts, the spotlight fell on the ‘free milk for kids’ scheme. Scrapping it could save around £60m per year, and yet almost as soon as it was suggested publicly, No 10 hastily released a statement saying the scheme would remain. But the damage has already been done and the usual militants are stepping in, shrieking with outrage that such a proposal could even have crossed anyone’s mind.
Yet if you suppress the initial knee jerk reaction and look at the science behind it one can see that it’s actually a perfectly sensible, even advisable idea. The scheme is the only remaining part of what was known as the Welfare Food Scheme, first introduced in 1940 to protect pregnant women and young children against wartime food shortages, but now, in this time of gross nutritional excess, is an outdated and unnecessary idea. Indeed scientific evidence is amassing that suggests regular consumption of milk may be bad for you, by not only by causing some diseases but also by failing to prevent others for which it has traditionally been seen as a panacea.
Experts now say that after the first year of life children require no milk of any type. The former director of paediatrics at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine estimated that half of all iron deficiency in US infants results from cows' milk-induced intestinal bleeding. He proposed that infants drink so much milk (which is very low in iron) that they have little appetite left for foods containing iron; at the same time, by inducing gastrointestinal bleeding, milk causes iron loss. The same certainly applies to British infants too.
Cow's milk is simply just that: for cows. Man is the only animal that drinks milk into adulthood. It’s higher in sugar than humans need, and although high in calcium, only around 30% of it is available for use by the body, as compared to 60-70% for fruits, grains, legumes, nuts, roots, seeds, and vegetables.
There is also a theory that a protein found in milk mimics closely a protein found on the insulin producing cells of the body. If the body develops an allergic reaction to this milk protein then it is also stimulated to destroy the insulin cells through an autoimmune attack, a possible cause of diabetes.
The pro-milk lobby will scream ‘osteoporosis’ in their defence. But whilst milk is often sited as being key in the development and maintenance of strong bones, even this has now been questioned. When looked at globally it can be seen that the countries with the highest rates of osteoporosis, also have the highest consumption rates of milk and dairy products –it does make you think. Milk proteins contain phosphorous and sulphur compounds that acidify the blood. In order to correct this acidity, the body actually draws calcium from the bones, weakening them.
Instead of recommending multiple servings of dairy to ward off the dreaded osteoporosis, we would probably do better to advise women, and especially teenage girls, to take more exercise. A 15-year study published in the BMJ found that exercise may be the best protection against hip fractures, and that a reduced intake of dietary calcium does not seem to be a risk factor.
So perhaps it really is time to re-evaluate this dinosaur of a tradition and ask ourselves the question: is providing our kids with free milk actually doing more harm that good? Current evidence suggests that it might be.