Calcium and Bone Strength

If former UK Health Columnist of the Year, Dr. John Briffa, had to condense good nutritional advice into a simple soundbite, it would be this: Eat like a caveman. The idea being to emulate the diet we evolved on and are best adapted to.

If former UK Health Columnist of the Year, Dr. John Briffa, had to condense good nutritional advice into a simple soundbite, it would be this: Eat like a caveman. The idea being to emulate the diet we evolved on and are best adapted to.

Dr. Briffa acknowledges that some people reject the primal diet theory but he believes that their logic is based on faulty paradigms such as saturated fat is bad and grains are good. Another anomaly, says Dr. Briffa, is dairy products. “Many nutritional commentators tell us they are almost essential for our bones. Yet, the bony record from before about 10,000 years ago shows good bone health. How did we manage for more than 2 millions years without cow’s milk and now [we] suddenly need it?”

Dr. Briffa believes that fracture risk is a much better judge of the value of dairy products than bone density and, having looked at a quite recent meta-analysis of the relationship between milk consumption and the risk of hip fracture (1), he says that higher milk consumption is not associated with reduced risk of hip fracture. In fact another study (2) shows that those taking calcium (compared to placebo) turned out to be at 64% greater risk of fracture.