Masters of Health Magazine August 2019 | Page 10

purchase at the grocery store is pasteurized, which means it’s heated to up to 280ºF. While exposing milk to excessive heat does help to kill off harmful bacteria, it also damages the calcium content, making the mineral unusable by the body.

What if raw unpasteurized milk was available? It still wouldn’t give you enough magnesium needed for your body to absorb the calcium. The calcium to magnesium ratio in cow’s milk is 90 percent calcium/10 percent magnesium. Current studies show bones need a ratio closer to 50 percent calcium/50 percent magnesium.

When you look at plants, you can attain the perfect balanced ratio of calcium and magnesium. Sources like almonds, summer squash, sesame seeds, and spinach offer close to a 50/50 percent ratio of calcium to magnesium. This balance allows these two bone-building partners to do their job. Cow’s milk, pasteurized or not, does not help build strong bones.

There’s so many healthful and delicious dairy-free alternatives available for your cereal and recipes that require milk including cashew milk, almond milk, hemp milk, and coconut milk.”

How many calories is enough?

Should we count them?

“Fad diets come and go, but the most popular diet of the last century is calorie counting. It’s become the standard methodology for people wanting to lose weight. The problem with a calorie-counting diet is that it can put your body into a famine mode.

This causes you to gain back your original weight and sometimes even more. This is why calorie-counting diets are often referred to as a ‘yo-yo’ diet.

The biggest calorie-counting organization in the world is called Weight Watchers. They’ve been having people count calories for more than fifty years! Interestingly in 2011, David Kirchhoff, CEO of Weight Watchers, said in a Time magazine interview, “Calorie counting has become unhelpful. When we have a 100-calorie apple in one hand and a 100-calorie pack of cookies in the other, to view them as being ‘the same’ makes no sense.”