There is a lot of demand for milk alternatives, for a lot of reasons. Some of you are lactose intolerant or have tested positive to a dairy allergy. So I wanted to compare the alternatives for you, if you fall in either of these categories, to give you some facts on which to base your personal decision.
Before I move on to milk alternatives, a word about cow's milk.
I'm not pro- or anti- cow's milk. I simply want you to have the facts about all of your options and base your decisions on facts. Much of what is said about cow's milk is personal opinion, not based on peer-reviewed evidence. In fact, there is not a single peer-reviewed article in the National Library of Medicine database even mentioning any kind of relationship between PCOS and cow's milk.
What IS found in that database, is a study I often cite, written in part by respected Harvard researcher Walter Willett, in which it was reported that women who consume one fat-containing serving of dairy a day were actually more fertile than those who did not. The statistics used to evaluate this relationship were derived from data obtained in the Harvard Nurses' Health Study II, from 18,555 registered nurses over a period of 8 years. Those are pretty impressive credentials! So I find the conclusions to be worthy of your consideration. Keep in mind, these women were not advised to change the type of milk they drank, so they were not steered toward raw milk, organic milk, or any other variation. They were most probably drinking plain milk you get from the corner grocer.
The researchers corrected for vitamin D and lactose, meaning vitamin D and lactose in the diet in the millk drinkers was NOT the explanation for this finding. In their words, their conclusion was this: "High intake of low-fat dairy foods may increase the risk of anovulatory infertility whereas intake of high-fat dairy foods may decrease this risk."
If you've been avoiding cow's milk and vitamin D supplementation isn't doing the trick for your vitamin D levels, I strongly encourage you to consider a second reason for drinking cow's milk. If you've been eating yogurt assuing it's an appropriate substitute for milk, it's not. Most yogurts do NOT contain vitamin D. Try switching to milk (at least 1%) and see if it makes a difference.
For those of you drinking milk, I'd like to encourage you to consider antibiotic, hormone-free, organic, grass-fed. It's not something that is readily available (many organic brands are not grass-fed), but keep your eye out for it and grab it when you see it.
Like I said, I don't care if you do or don't drink milk. I just want to be sure of two things:
1. That your choice to drink or not drink cow's milk is based on fact and not on someone else's opinion who may not have a handle on YOUR personal physiology. Every single case of PCOS is different and it is not clinically sound for anyone to make a blanket recommendation about milk to all women with PCOS.
2. That if you choose to drink cow's milk, you know what kind is most supportive of hormone balance, and if you choose not to drink cow's milk, you know what adjustments you need to make to your overall diet in order to make up for deficiencies that eliminating an entire category of foods may be creating.
On that note, tomorrow I'll summarize the pros and cons of milk alternatives.