How a Lie Became Truth; Liars Exposed
by Robert Cohen
Today's expression is: "Hoisted by one's own petard."
Hundreds of years ago, the petard was an explosive device
used in naval battles. Often, a premature detonation would
literally blow a ship out of the water so that the yeoman
hoisting the petard would suffer the consequences of his
combative action. Interestingly, the original meaning of
petard was that bodily function resulting in both disagreeable
sound and smell from the rear end of the violator. In this
sense, this colorful phraesology can appropriately be applied
to America's dairy industry.
In May of 2007, the Physician's Committee for Responsible
Medicine (PCRM) was successful in their effort to have the
Federal Trade Commission (FTC) put an end to the dairy
industry's dishonest representation that drinking milk resulted
in weight loss. That put an end to the phoniest of claims made
in recent milk mustache advertisements.
The "lie" has been repeated so many times in advertising,
magazine articles, television and radio news reports, that
it has become a part of the collective psyche and culture
of the intentionally misinformed consumer. How did that lie
actually begin?
There are 250,000 journals on planet earth. Some are quite
good. Some are very bad. Some are extremely biased. I
rarely pay attention to the heavily marketed studies
published in the Journal of the American College of
Nutrition. This journal was founded by and is controlled
by America's Dairy and Milk Industry. I refer to the JACN
as the "Whore's Journal."
The first president and director of that journal was
Dr. Greg Miller. I've debated Greg three times; twice on
radio and once on the Fox Health News channel. Greg has
milk flowing through his arteries and veins, and is one
of the most powerful men employed by the dairy industry.
Although Dr. Miller no longer is the journal's President,
his name continues to appear on the masthead as a contributing
editor. The most recent issue (May, 2007) contains a
study claiming that Americans are not satisfying their
calcium needs. Uh, huh.
The etiology of the drinking-milk- results-in- weight-loss lie
can be found in a 2002 publication: Calcium and weight: clinical
studies. Journal of the American College of Nutrition, 2002;
21(2): 152Sâ€"155S. The senior author of that study is a name
long associated with dairy industry funding, Robert Heaney. I
first wrote about this dairy whore nearly seven years ago in
October of 2000:
http://health. groups.yahoo. com/group/ notmilk/message/ 310
Thanks to PCRM's legal efforts, the dairy industry has been
hoisted by its own petard.
Of course, JACN publishes biased milk studies, and has
the financial support of hundreds of millions of
dairy dollars. Which leads us to witness an enormous
surprise...
Funny thing happened on the way to the milk forum.
A few months before the dairy industry began to advertise
their most notorious lie: Drinking milk results in weight
loss...
The Journal of the American College of Nutrition, (Vol. 24,
No. 3, 210-216, 2005) reported the results of a most curious
weight loss study which compared soy milk consumption
to cow's milk consumption.
Scientists concluded that Soy milk use (over a 12-week period)
resulted in greater weight loss than than cow's milk use.
How could these dunderheads have blundered and allowed the
truth to be told? Beats me! How about that!
Robert Cohen
http://www.notmilk. com
i4crob@earthlink. net
