THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, May 13, 1996 TAG: 9605110084
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Larry Maddry
LENGTH: Medium: 66 lines
MILK.
Our grade-school health books described it as nature's most perfect food, a builder of strong bones, teeth and tissue.
The health book contained a drawing, showing the food pyramid with a quart of milk at the pinnacle. The bottle resembled a white bowling pin with rays of glory shooting off it like beams radiating from the eye on a $1 bill.
Great. Drink lots of milk and get healthier than Superman. And I did. Felt healthy. Looked healthy. And it was lip-smacking good with peanut butter sandwiches or cookies.
Then I hit 50 years of age. Turned on the TV one morning and heard a doctor in a white coat talking about something I'd never heard of.
Cholesterol. Whoooweeeoooo. Bad stuff. Clogs your arteries like glop in your sink drain. Can kill you. Whole milk has cholesterol, the man said.
So I stopped. Figured my grade-school health book had been written by the Wisconsin Dairy Association in collaboration with the Mafia.
Oh, sometimes I picked up a quart of milk at the 7-Eleven. Always snuck it home in a brown paper sack so no one would know I wasn't living healthy.
Anybody stopped me and asked what I was doing with milk, I told them it was for the cat. Felt guilty when I drank it.
Fast forward to last week. Big news from the health front.
DALLAS - Middle-aged men who drink milk may reduce their risk of the most common type of stroke, a study has suggested.
The study was done on Japanese middle-aged men. The ones who didn't drink milk were twice as likely to have a thromboembolic stroke as those who did, the study said. About 80 percent of all strokes are thromboembolic strokes.
Un-uh. Where is the doctor on television who looked me square in the eyes and told me milk was a no-no?
Where is he now, huh? Bet he's living now in Argentina, under an assumed name, slinking off to milk bars after dark. Or maybe it's too late for him. Maybe he's already dead of a thromboembolic stroke - caused because of milk deprivation.
I tell you medical advice is a crap shoot these days. If health experts were wrong about milk, what's going to be next? It's just a matter of time before you pick up the paper some morning and read a story like this:
BOSTON - Men and women who eat up to four gallons of ice cream a day are less likely to have strokes and heart attacks than those who do not eat ice cream or eat it only in small quantities.
That was the result of a 10-year study published today in the New England Journal of Medicine. The study also showed that the risk of heart attacks was reduced even more if the ice cream was coated with a pint of chocolate sauce or whipped cream.
The study of 5,000 men and women is given more weight than usual nutritional studies because it seems to support a similar survey published in Prague only last week.
That study showed that eating a pound or more of cheese daily added 10 years to the normal life span and that stroke victims too ill to eat could be restored to health by massive doses of cheddar administered with a syringe.
Trust me, it's coming. Might be in tomorrow's paper. ILLUSTRATION: JANET SHAUGHNESSY
The Virginian-Pilot
by CNB