You don’t drink milk? What about your bones? You know you need calcium right? Didn’t
you watch those commercials? You gotta, y’know, get your calcium and stuff.
Milky white goodness.
That’s how you do it. Mmmm. I love you so much. You gotta savor the…savor the aroma
that comes out of it. Calcium? I didn’t even know ‘em!
Yeah!
Hi it’s Emily from Bite Size Vegan and welcome to another vegan nugget.
If you grew up in the United States, chances are your parents at some point told you to
drink your milk so you could grow big and strong and have healthy bones. So when you
think about going vegan, naturally the calcium concern arises. So when I spoke recently with
Dr. Michael Greger of Nutritionfacts.org, I was sure to ask about vegan calcium sources.
Another nutrient concern that people have when going vegan is calcium. Because,
we are kind of raised and indoctrinated to believe that we get our calcium from dairy.
You know, milk, cheese...and, I’m sure you’re going to be talking about this because some
of the insanity of that, looking at the actual, what dairy does within our body. But, could
you speak some about calcium within a vegan diet, and also the role that calcium plays
within the whole dairy industry?
Sure, so, I mean it’s true, you know dairy is the number one source of
calcium in the United States. Calcium...it’s also the number one source of saturated fat intake.
It's actually not beef but cheese primarily. Cheese and then chicken actually, more saturated
fat, cheese, chicken, donuts, and then basically pork. The..and so...food is a packaged deal.
Right? You know, as much as Burger King says that you can have it your way, you can’t
go, be like….yeah...could I get the protein and the iron but hold the saturated fat, cholesterol,
hormones, antibiotics, blah blah blah, it just doesn’t work that way, it comes as
a packaged deal. So, it’s like, where do you want to get your calcium from? You get
your calcium from dairy and the baggage that comes along with that calcium, like the saturated
butter fat, you know, hormones, etc. Or, you get your calcium from the source, like dark
green leafy vegetables. Where...what’s the baggage you get there? Oh, then you get the
fiber, and the folate, and the potassium, the proper nutrients, the iron and all these
wonderful things that you’re not getting...in the dairy source. So, you’re getting kind
of everything you want without all the stuff you don’t want. So, that’s really why
plant based source of calcium are so much healthier. Now, the most concerning thing
in terms of milk consumption was these series of studies, actually which will be profiling
soon on NutritionFacts.org, they actually found that those who drank more milk actually
had a higher hip fracture rate, so we’ve known that milk isn’t protective.
Whether we’re talking about older women, younger women, peak bone mass; any of that, milk just
has not be shown to protect bone health. But here for the first time you’re saying, well...actually
increases fracture risk as well as shortening the lifespan and increase risk for cardiovascular
disease. I think it’s actually the galactose, this sugar found in lactose, in milk sugar
that’s hurting the bones and increasing risk for death, and brain problems. And so...
that is not where we want to get our calcium, calcium is important but we should get it
from healthy foods, right? And healthy is probably dark green leafy vegetables and you
get some in everything from sesame seeds, and nuts, and you know, tahini is a good source.
Dried fruits, I mean you get a little bit throughout the day. I even encourage people
to get 800, not 800...600mg of calcium a day. I wouldn’t dip below 600 though, but 600
is...the average vegan gets over 600. But again if you’re restricting calories for
some reason, you’re just not eating a lot, you’ll want to make sure you have a lot
of calcium enriched foods in your diet.
I have heard of studies and I think it’s talked about a little bit in the China
study as well. But, where they’ve looked at the countries that have the lowest dairy
consumption also have the lowest rates of osteoporosis, and of course there’s a lot
of other factors that can be in play there. The idea that animal protein leaches calcium
from the bones in order to neutralize the acid, is there any validity behind that?
There’s been decreasing validity as...the research has come in. The study that
really changed it all was the study using radioactive calcium isotopes.
We've known, god, for decades, that if you eat a steak, all of a sudden you pee in all this calcium,
and say hey, where’s the calcium coming from? Calcium is stored in our bones, so we
must be peeing our bones down the toilet. It turns out if you actually radiolabel calcium
in a meal, and you eat that steak, you get a big burst of calcium in your....it turns
out the calcium’s radioactive. It’s actually the calcium in your diet and not your bones
that you were peeing out. So, what protein does is actually increases calcium absorption.
So, by eating a steak you would get more calcium with whatever you were eating with that steak,
and your body’s like ‘whoa!, what’s with all this calcium?’, and just pees out
the excess. So, that gave the sense that there was this, you know...this kind of, calcium
recess with this loss of calcium in the urine cause and they thought it was this kind of buffering
thing. That does not seem to be the case. Again, that doesn’t mean that dairy products
aren’t bad for the bones but it just...this kind of sense that meat was the reason for
the high rates of osteoporosis...has not panned out.
There’s this sense ‘oh, I don’t need to get calcium, I’m vegan, I’m not
eating animal protein’. No, we need to get...600mg of calcium; it’s easy to do. We should all
be eating dark green leafy vegetables, so there’s that one way to do it. Um, you know...you
can use to sweeten things with black cherry molasses, there’s a lot of calcium in it...
...calcium solidified tofu. All sorts of things have lot s of calcium but we should just make sure we get it.
With some nutrients you can have toxicity. I guess it’s important to ask too, with
calcium...can you over do it or is that something the body is just going to process out?
It would be very difficult to overdo. I mean, so if you take two {{??}} supplement
forms, and if you take a bunch of calcium at once, you’re just not going to absorb it.
Your body is just going to kick it out and you just wasted money. But it’s...yeah
you don’t think of people taking too much calcium, I mean you can wind up with kidney
stones I guess. But um...it’s not something you hear about, but people shouldn’t be
supplementing with calcium anyway. Anything mineral, we should get it from whole plant foods.
Oh yeah, I meant, I didn’t word that...well, today I’m looking at my...intake for the
day. I put it into Cron-O-Meter just to see and my calcium for today is 1,580.7mg, which
it says is 158% of my RDA.
Again it’s the source, right? If you did that all because you were
eating Tums all day, I’d say let’s cut back on the Tums, right? But if you said
'I did that because I ate this awesome kale salad and I’ve been eating figs, and I’ve been...’,
you know, then...you go girl.
Yeah, it was mandarin oranges, dates, lot of romaine and broccoli.
Wow, that is...that is some awesome broccoli intake, I’m jealous.
{{laughs}} Yeah, it was a huge pot so...
I hope you enjoyed hearing from Dr. Greger on this issue. As he so aptly pointed out,
even if dairy and other animal products do contain desirable nutrients, they come
as a package deal with plenty of undesirable elements. So skip the middle cow and get your
calcium from plants- you get all of the nutrients and none of the saturated fat, antibiotics
and pus. Yes. There's pus in milk.
Makes you wonder what the mustache really consists of.
Now this video is focusing on health and nutrition, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least
mention that outside of the entire health detriments of dairy, it is also possibly the
cruelest of all the animal products industries. You can learn more about what exactly dairy
involves in either one of these videos but suffice to say, a glass of milk contains far more
suffering than a pound of beef.
Now to be sure you’re getting your daily calcium, check out Cronometer, the awesome
software that I use to track my own nutrition- it’s totally free and pretty fantastic.
So fantastic in fact that they’re sponsoring this video. Be sure to use the link in the
description to go make your profile so they know that Bite Size Vegan sent you.
Cronometer, it does a body good.
The milk people are going to sue me.
Now I’d love to hear from you on the calcium issue- where do you get yours from? Did you,
or do you, believe the dairy hype? Let me know in the comments!
If you enjoyed the video, be sure to give it a big thumbs up and share it around to
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on your phones or tablets. Now go live vegan, get in your greens, and I’ll see you soon.
You gotta get your calcium and stuff. It’s all up in there.
Milky white goodness.
This smells really good. It’s almond milk. Very fragrant. It’s quite lovely actually.
I love you. I love you so much. I want you inside me right now.
Alright that might be one of the weirder things I’ve done.
Subtitles by the Amara.org community