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Hi Charlie,
 
I thought you might be interested in this article I came across.  My
son and I have been on a gluten and dairy free diet for 5 months now,
the diet mentioned here is the type of diet we follow.  It makes a lot
of sense to me.
                Helen
 
http://www.dsiegel.com/wiwd/diet/calcium.html
 
Calcium: White Gold
 
You may be interested to know that after I stopped eating chicken and fish,
for the first six months I felt like I wasn't getting enough protein.  I felt
tired and out of gas.  How can one feel protein-deficient?  Weight loss that
isn't caused by starvation is basically a loss of water and fat.  Muscle
deterioration comes with disuse, not protein deficiency--anyone who's ever
worn a cast knows that.  Feeling tired has to do with fuel, not parts.  If
your car is out of gas, do you drive to an auto parts store?
 
    This feeling of not getting enough protein shows how strongly I was
brainwashed into thinking protein was fuel.  My mother, my school, and
everybody else had always told me to get enough protein.  But now I know why
I felt so run-down.  I had become the dreaded lacto-ovo vegetarian:  one of
the most misinformed groups in town.  I was trying to eat complete proteins
to replace those I thought I was missing.  I was concocting meat-substitutes
to get that all-important protein the government said I needed.  So I was
drinking milk and eating cheese.  Lots of cheese.  Have you noticed how many
vegetarian cookbooks rely on dairy products to make their recipes taste good?
Even more important, I wasn't getting the carbohydrates I needed, so my
muscles were starved.  I was drinking two or three glasses of milk a day.
 
    Sorry, Rudy, but milk is a concentrated source of protein, fat, and
sugar, designed to help babies grow at the time in their lives when they need
the most protein.
 
    Can you think of one other species on the planet that drinks milk after
infancy?  Cow's milk is great, if you are a calf.  In humans, even skim milk
does more harm than good.  Of course, the more saturated fat a dairy product
has, the worse it is.  A woman's risk of getting breast cancer rises with her
intake of saturated fats.  Breast cancer affects 2.8 million women in this
country, accounting for $6 billion in health-care bills.  According to the
Physicians' Committee for Responsible Medicine, milk has no place in anyone's
diet, especially pregnant and nursing mothers.
 
    I gave up dairy about five years ago.  At first, it was "difficult."
Then I realized it was all in my head.  I could just let go of all that
protein brainwashing.  After a few months, I stopped craving cheese and my
face stopped looking puffy.  Your face will look less puffy, too, after you
give up dairy products completely.
 
    Milk is only good for one group of people.  Dairy farmers and their
families.  To them, milk is white gold.
 
The Calcium Connection
 
We all need calcium.  Every cell in our bodies needs calcium.  Would you be
surprised to learn that this goes for all mammals?  Where do you think
elephants, especially pregnant or nursing elephants, get enough calcium?
Calcium is an element, like iron.  You can't turn it into anything,and you
can't destroy it.  The amount of calcium going out always equals the amount
coming in, unless there is a deficit or a surplus.  There's more than enough
calcium in the grasslands of the African savannah to support all the animals
living there.  All animals need calcium, because we naturally lose it, but
humans on high-protein diets are especially good at losing calcium, which is
why they have to consume so much just to stay even.
 
    At the Mayo Clinic, a four year study conducted by Dr.  B.  Lawrence
Riggs concluded:  "There is a large body of evidence indicating no
relationship between calcium intake and bone density; We found no correlation
at all between calcium intake levels and bone loss, not even a trend."
 
    Any diet with more than ten percent of its calories as protein will
contribute to calcium and bone loss, leading to osteoporosis in older people.
The more dairy in your diet, the more calcium comes in, and the more calcium
goes out.  Drink as much milk as you want-you'll lose calcium.  Osteoporosis
is a rich-person's disease.  Osteoporosis and consumption of dairy products
go hand-in-hand.
 
    What is it about excess protein that causes loss of calcium?  Your
kidneys, which did not evolve to handle more than ten percent of your
calories as protein, especially after you are weaned, get rid of calcium as a
reaction to excess protein in a process called "buffering".  Your kidneys
eliminate calcium through the urine.  Too much protein also triggers the
release of iron, magnesium, zinc, potassium, and many other minerals.  By now
you won't be surprised to learn that people with high-protein diets get
kidney stones, and vegetarians rarely do.  The trick is to use what you get,
not pour more in just because you've found a leak.
 
    When you think of calcium, think of elephants and cows.  There is plenty
of calcium available in a fresh, green, low-protein diet.  Dr.  John
McDougall-a doctor who's written several books I think are helpful-writes:
"Calcium deficiency, caused by an insufficient amount of calcium in the diet,
is not known to occur in humans."  The minimum daily requirement (thanks to
our pals at the NRC) is completely skewed from data presented in the '50s and
'60s.
 
Osteoporosis
 
Nathan Pritikin studied Bantu women in Africa and found that they bear nine
children and breastfeed them for an average of two years on a strictly
vegetarian diet with about one-third of our Recommended Daily Allowance of
calcium.  They are not calcium deficient, never lose a tooth, and rarely
break a bone.  Bantus who move to affluent countries develop osteoporosis
just as the local populations do.  Pritikin studied the Bantus to come up
with his low-protein, no-fat diet.
 
    Eskimos, on the other hand, get almost twice the recommended daily
requirement of calcium (over 2 grams per day) and have one of the
highest-protein diets in the world.  Eskimos also have one of the highest
rates of osteoporosis in the world.
 
    Don't we need calcium supplements?  Do cows or gorillas need calcium
supplements?  Where do cows and elephants get all their calcium?  You think
it's different in cows and elephants than in people?  How would you know?
It's not.  The calcium mechanism is common to all animals, some are just
better at getting rid of excess calcium than we are.If we take the blinders
off, the Dairy Council and the Tobacco Institute are about the same, only the
Dairy Council is doing a better job.
 
    The most recent studies on osteoporosis, show that calcium loss and
osteoporosis are due to 1) a high-protein diet, 2) inactivity, 3) smoking,
and 4) excess salt.  Most books on osteoporosis are based on outdated
studies.  Those authors never suspected a protein connection.  The keys to
having strong bones all your life are to eat a low-protein diet with lots of
green leaves and get daily weight-bearing exercise.  If you want to avoid
osteoporosis, you will have to learn to reduce your calcium intake, not
increase it.
 
    Last year I had a neck operation.  I had a diskectomy, which is removal
of a disk.  This is also called a fusion, because the two vertebral bodies
rest on each other and fuse bone-to-bone.  I took no supplements, ate a
starch-and-salad diet, and my surgeon said, and I quote:  "I've never had a
patient heal this fast."  I was skiing six weeks after the operation.  No
joke.
 
    Bones and muscles respond to mechanical stress.  Normal walking isn't
strenuous enough to build bones.  If housework did the trick, we'd know about
it.  Strenuous, weight-bearing exercise--the equivalent of a short hike or an
aggressive, vigorous walk every day--adds bones and muscle.  Not exercising
loses bone mass.  Bones are built the same way callouses are built up.  One
of the biggest problems astronauts have is bone and muscle loss.  Vegetarians
who run and hike into their eighties generally do not get shorter or break
hips-they hardly lose any bone.  People who take hormones and calcium tablets
still have problems.
 
    Where do you get your calcium?  I get maybe 300-500mg per day (who's
counting?)  from leafy greens, preferably raw.  Salad.  Dark green and dark
yellow vegetables are loaded with calcium.  If you don't lose much, you don't
need much.  Contrary to what you may have heard, spinach has tons of
available, absorbable calcium.  Go for the dark greens and chalk up on
calcium.