If you want your kids to be taller, make sure they’re drinking the appropriate kind of milk.
Child consumers of soy, almond, rice or other alternative milks were shorter than their peers who favored cow’s milk, suggests a new study published Wednesday in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Specifically, if they drank a daily cup of non-cow’s milk, they were 0.4 centimeters (or about .16 inches) shorter compared to the average height for children their age. Drinking a cup of cow’s milk meant they would be 0.2 centimeters taller compared to the average.
Even a combination of cow’s milk and non-cow’s milk also meant the children were shorter than the average. The study didn’t look at the reasons behind the height difference, but the authors think that children who consume non-cow’s milk could be taking in a smaller amount of dietary protein and fat compared to cow’s milk-consuming children — meaning limited growth.
Two cups of cow’s milk is equivalent to 16 grams of protein, which the study says meets the daily protein requirement for a three-year-old. Two cups of almond milk usually contain about 4 grams of protein.
Researchers studied 5,034 children in Canada for the study, all from 2 to 6 years old. Thirteen percent drank non-cow’s milk every day compared to 92 percent who drank cow’s milk. All the children in the study were a part of the Applied Research Group for Kids, a collaborative program from Canada’s St. Michael’s Hospital and The Hospital for Sick Children.
A curious part of the finding: Exactly how much shorter they were correlated with the amount of milk they drank, reports CNN.
“It’s not like if you’re not consuming cow’s milk, you’re a little shorter,” Dr. Jonathon Maguire, study author of St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto told CNN. “It’s more like if you are consuming non-cow’s milk, with each cup that a child consumes, that child on average appears to be a little bit smaller, a little shorter. That’s a bit surprising.”
Does this shorter height in childhood carry into adulthood? As Maguire told CNN, “That’s one remaining question. We don’t know if the kids consuming non-cow’s milk, maybe they catch up over time, or maybe they don’t. Time’s going to have to tell,” he said.
As CNN points out, the study will keep the debate about dairy alternatives the elephant — err, cow — in the room.
“It’s just odd to me why we wouldn’t be looking at the overall diets of the children,” Amy Joy Lanou, a professor at the University of North Carolina-Asheville who didn’t work on the study, also told CNN. “If they’re making the claim that it’s because it’s the difference in the types of milk the kids are drinking, well, what else are they eating?”
“If products are being marketed as being equivalent to cow’s milk, as a consumer and a parent, I would like to know that they are in fact the same in terms of their effect on children’s growth,” Maguire said in a statement.
Evidently, people always find a way to milk a study for what they think it’s worth.
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Your Kids Might Be Shorter If They Drink Non-Cow’s Milk, Study Says originally appeared on usnews.com
