A Reply to Mark Bittman's Milk Freak-out, part 1: don't be a weasel
In Saturday's New York Times, Mark Bittman tells the story of his heartburn, and how quitting dairy helped him lick a lifelong case of acid reflux. Turns out, after leaving off cow-juice for just a day, he found total relief.
I mentioned this to a friend who had the same problem, tried the same approach, and had the same results. Presto! No dairy, no heartburn! (A third had no success. Hey, it’s not a controlled double-blind experiment, but there is no downside to trying it.)
Bully for him. Some cheap self-experimentation sounds a lot better to me than a lifetime of antacids. But he should have taken the whole "it's not rigorous science" thing to heart, because the rest of his column is filled with bad arguments about dairy, and milk in particular, propped up with some highly dubious "experts".
Bittman starts out by noting that both government and the dairy industry have been promoting fluid milk as the greatest thing in a glass, which is certainly true. There's been plenty of valid criticism about the food industry's influence on government nutrition guidelines, although we seem to have made more improvements of late than he implies. But things start to sour when he pulls a quote from Dr. Neal Barnard, of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine:
'Sugar — in the form of lactose — contributes about 55 percent of skim milk’s calories, giving it ounce for ounce the same calorie load as soda.'
This statement caught my attention, because it's a very weasely way of combining two truths into one misleading factoid.
It's true that lactose is a kind of sugar, and that skim milk actually has about the same calories per cup as soda. Checking the nutrition info at CalorieKing, you'll find that one cup of skim milk has 91 calories, while one can (slightly less than a cup) of Coke has 90 calories. But the same serving of skim milk has only 12.3 grams of sugar versus a Coke's 25 grams. So skim has about half the sugar, something a casual reader certainly wouldn't get from Dr. Barnard's explanation.
To add to the confusion, Bittman makes no attempt to distinguish the sugars in soda. In a Coke sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup, the sugar is a mixture of fructose and glucose. In milk, it's all lactose—a different carbohydrate.
Things get worse when he starts pulling in evolutionary biology, by way of his personal doctor, general practitioner Sidney M. Baker:
'What’s clear is that the widespread existence of lactose intolerance,' says Dr. Baker, is 'a pretty good sign that we’ve evolved to drink human milk when we’re babies but have no need for the milk of any animals.'
Dr. Baker isn't a scientist, but he seems pretty confident restating utter nonsense. Contrary to what he asserts, it actually appears that humans evolved milk tolerance at least twice. But this is neither here nor there, because evolutionary success does not equal long life or good health for an individual member of the species. Just ask the short-lived, broken-boned, wildly successful opossum.
Fortunately, I happen to be married to a scientist, so I asked culture science adviser Dr. Minda Berbeco to build a similarly deceptive argument. As a biogeochemist, my sweetie isn't any more qualified to comment on human evolution than Dr. Baker, but agreed to be quoted as long as I use sarcasm italics:
"Bittman's Minimalist recipes contain far too few ingredients. Humans evolved eating a very diverse array of foods: rats, berries, mammoths, bugs... you know. We couldn't afford to be as picky as we are now. I never eat anything with less than fifteen, maybe twenty ingredients, just to be safe."
Sounds good coming from a PhD, right? But it's total BS.
Shocking lack of mammoth in the diet
I would add that humans didn't evolve eating broccoli either. Nor did we evolve eating potatoes or tomatoes (New World veggies, both), olive oil (product of late-breaking civilization), bread (ditto), lemons (a Frankenstein hybrid of citrons and oranges), chicken (or any other domestic farm animal, actually), sushi, Charleston Chews, Fig Newtons or most other modern foodstuffs.
This is all very frustrating, because it's important that we have informed conversations about what Americans eat. The obesity epidemic is real, our children are being fed lots of junk food in their schools, and industrial food and agriculture has amassed huge amounts of power over our political system, tipping the playing field to their advantage every legislative cycle.
But if we're going to dig out of this mess, the arguments we use have to be supported by evidence.
Speaking of which, I've got more to say about Mark's unfortunate column in part 2... tomorrow soon.
PS: Minda wanted me to remind you: she was joking about the whole fifteen ingredient thing. Anyone other than a paleontologist who talks about how humans "evolved to eat x" is most likely talking out of their butt.
Mark Bittman photo via Sally Stein
Mammouth CA photo via Benny(I am empty)
Milk is never bad for health
Milk is never bad for health unless some extra ingredients are mixed with it. Some milkmen use illegal products to increase the milk productivity, or to add more taste to it. This might be the reason for mark bittman’s illness. I suggest you to buy pure dairy products so that you will not suffer from this problem again.420
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Tell that to the billion
Tell that to the billion Chinese people who cannot digest milk. In those cultures where milk is heavily used in foods, people have addapted to tolerate milk. And that doesn't necessarily mean it's healthy.
Something for everyone...
Bittman's Minimalist recipes have a place in that they taste good, have few ingredients and are quick and easy to prepare. His Heartburn being cured by not consuming dairy products ...ehhh good for him... each of us have foods we tolerate and foods we don't and the truth is the diets that work for human beings are as many and as varied as individual humans. Each of us needs to find a diet that sustains and nourishes ourselves with as minimal impact on the environment as possible so that we may feed our growing population. Bittman's Minimalist column is great an it's simplicity is elegant. However the same minimalist context when applied to the overall human condition loses its elegance and unfortunately becomes overly simplistic....
Bittman's Assertions
That whole "humans didn't evolve to eat X" argument is totally spurious. The reason our ancestors survived to eat at all is testimony to how easy it was to switch food sources when one ran out or something better came along. The truth is that H. sapiens can eat everything that is not acutely toxic. Moreover, when we find something that is difficult to digest we can usually find a technological way to pre-digest it (e.g. cutting, cooking, mashing, lysing with acids et al) or a population shift in our intestinal flora occurs such that we are able to digest.
The phylogenetic tree of life is full of dead branches that represent species that became extinct because they were overly dependent on a very few food sources. Bitman and his doctor really need to brush up on their knowledge of paleoecology and the fossil record.
Just wait. Soon Bitman is going to be spouting the same nonsense about meat and wheat flour.
On a more compassionate note, I think the guy is starting to feel old and is becoming desperate to find a diet that will extend his life. That happens to a lot of people.
But he really should think twice about expressing his anxiety in ways that might do damage to someone else's well being. Simply put, he should think more deeply about how his nattering about his "cure" for acid reflux affects people who make their living from producing one of the best foods available to humans. And if he doesn't, well then, that's what blogs like this are for.
I loved the post, BTW. Thanks!
Good points, and I definitely
Good points, and I definitely agree on feeling a bit of compassion for Bittman. He does seem to be grasping for something beyond mere orthorexia.
Gotta repeat, though, that "we evolved eating x, so we should eat x" arguments aren't bogus because we're omnivores, although we are. They're bogus because the evolutionary process doesn't reward individual organisms with long life or good health.
Opossum's evolutionary strategy includes living only about two years while getting mangled by predators while they play dead. Although that's made them the only successful marsupial in North America, it doesn't mean that an individual opossum needs to get chewed up by the neighborhood dog in order to live a long and happy life.
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Exactly. His primary
Exactly. His primary readership probably northeast. Most milk for fluid consumption stays within region produced. Products on other hand like cheese travelling. MPCs big ingredient for junk food coming into US from other side of globe. Federal Order One that supplies northeast. has loads of small and medium-sized dairy farms, 13,000 with herd size average 100 cows. Fluid milk price most important component of our ultimate price. The more bittman can destabilize fluid milk prices, the faster he can drive out smaller farms. Most are operating on northeast grasslands.
milk
Bittman also gives NYC readers bad info about the milkshed that supplies the City. So harmful to the farmers.
I'd like to address that
I'd like to address that issue in part 2: Bittman's column seems to be saying that big dairy = all dairy = fluid milk, when the picture is a lot more complicated.
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