For her, milk should be hated with passion. May be reading her story you might understand. It all started when she was diagnosed with breast cancer and her desire to find out why she had the disease. She went back to school and started also to read. She was amazed to find the potential risk those that drink milk or take other dairy products had in developing breast cancer.

With her savings over the years, she then decided to pull together experts on cancer to brainstorm on this as well as find out if there was any iota of truth in milk predisposing to developing breast cancer, all and in a bid to ensure others do not have this cancer. The international meeting titled “ Milk, Hormones and Human health” met at Harvard Centre for Cancer Prevention in Boston, Massachusetts for about a week to consider milk and health.

Milk is one food item that is consumed in the whole world, though at the highest level in western countries and lowest in Asian countries. Dairy products, including milk contains a wide variety of things, including saturated fat, calcium, vitamin D, oestrogen - the female hormone, insulin-like growth factor and even chemical substances like pesticides and antibiotic residues.

The high increase in its consumption in western countries is partly due to a six fold increase in average milk production per cow due to genetic, nutrition and husbandry management. However, this had had its attendant problem on the quality of milk now on sale. The constituent of the milk because of all these had greatly changed from that which was before in the 1920’s. The changes in feeding and management, Gary Rogers of the University of Tennessee said has hard the greatest impact.

Experts like Akio Sato of the University of Yamanashi and Gary Rogers at the meeting said the milk we now have is richer in synthetic hormones, all cropping up in the bid to ensure the dairy cows produce more milk, an amount higher than nature even intended. It similarly had a higher calcium content. Also, many drugs (antibiotics) and larger quality of female sex hormone, oestrogen, are also now present in it, making the case worrisome.

Cow’s milk no doubt has nutritional benefits, but now giving the many genetic alterations and change in its management, when consumed it now has a lot of negative health effects many of the experts at he meeting pointed out. The reason why it is not appropriate for human consumption, Akio Sato for one pointed out at the meeting was its female sex hormones large quantity and higher calcium content. Cow’s milk calcium content is about four fold that in human breast milk.

Professor Clement Adebamowo of the University College Hospital, Ibadan, presented data supporting an association between dietary intake of milk and risk of teenage acne (pimples) in two cohorts’ studies too. He said several studies keep pointing to increased incidence of pimples with more “western” lifestyle, also synonymous with increase in diary products adding that the study was able to show that the main modifiable factor associated with acne were milk intake and its dietary correlates which are vitamin D and calcium.

A number of studies have also concentrated on the role of milk intake and the risk of prostate, ovarian, breast, testis cancers saying there are links. High intakes of dairy products, particularly milk, Swedish researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden said may increase the risk of developing ovarian cancer. The study found that women consuming more than two glasses of milk a day significantly increased the risk of the most serious form of the disease in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Even in Norway, where there is a wide variation in the pattern of milk consumption, researchers who studied 13,235 men and 2,679 women said in Nutrition Research Newsletter, that the “most striking result” in the study was the association of milk intake with lymphatic cancers. Neal D. Barnard, a cancer expert reviewing international and interregional correlational studies on milk consumption concluded saying that with several lines of evidence indicating that consumption of dairy products is associated with increased risk of prostate cancer incidence and deaths, avoidance of these products may offer a means of reducing one’s risk for this common illness.

However, Edward Giovannucci of the Harvard School of Public Health believes that the association may be more relevant to prostate cancer which he said may worsen ts incidence. Breast cancers have also been linked to consumption of dairy products according to Walter Willett of the Harvard School of Public Health. Consuming milk increases levels of a growth hormone, IGF-1, in the body. Increased IGF-1 levels are strongly implicated in all of these cancers, prostate cancer inclusive. A recent study showed that men who had the highest levels of IGF-1 had more than four times the risk of prostate cancer compared with those who had the lowest levels.

Milk is touted for preventing osteoporosis, yet clinical research shows otherwise. The Harvard Nurses’ Health Study, which followed more than 75,000 women for 12 years, showed no protective effect of increased milk consumption on fracture risk. In fact, increased intake of calcium from dairy products was associated with a higher fracture risk. Insulin-dependent diabetes is linked to consumption of dairy products. Studies in various countries show a strong correlation between the use of dairy products and the incidence of insulin-dependent diabetes. A specific protein in milk they believe sparks an auto-immune reaction, which is believed to be what destroys the insulin-producing cells of the pancreas.

Aside milk proteins, milk sugar, fat and saturated fat posing health risks for children leading to development of diseases such as obesity and formation of plaques in their blood vessel, leading to heart disease, children are also exposed to some synthetic hormones commonly used in dairy cows to increase this production of milk and antibiotics used in treatment of different. Even in terms of fertility risk, recent study also linked the current decrease in fertility level in Japan among children and men to milk consumption now known to be rich in the female sex hormone, ditto this sexual maturity.