When I was a teenager, I drank a lot of milk. That made my bones strong, which is why I’ve been able to avoid fracturing my hip now that I’m over 50. Hooray for milk!
Except wait. Science™ has intruded on this idyllic marketing fantasy:
Researchers followed people for 22 years to see if drinking milk as a teenager affected the rate of hip fractures during the study period. What did they find? There were more than 1200 hip fractures in women and almost 500 hip fractures in men in the follow-up period. But it turns out that each additional glass of milk per day as teenagers was associated with a 9% HIGHER risk of hip fractures in men later in life. Drinking more milk had no effect in women.
In other words, regardless of what the ads say, as a teen there’s no protective effect of your “bones getting stronger” in terms of preventing hip fractures later in life by drinking milk. In fact, the evidence shows that it may make it more likely that males will develop hip fractures.
That’s a helluva thing, isn’t it? That Aaron Carroll is a real killjoy.
