NUTRITIOUS AND CHEAP

You may have noticed that the price of milk has gone up repeatedly since the first of the year. But it’s still a bargain, says Katherine O. Musgrave, professor emerita of food science and nutrition at the University of Maine.

She compares a quart of milk with a quart of bottled water, a sports drink, various fruit drinks and soda and finds that, regardless of the recent price rises, milk does much more for you while the others either don’t do much good and in some cases actually are harmful.

Dr. Musgrave had noticed a monthly column by Pennsylvania’s secretary of agriculture hailing milk as “the best deal in the supermarket” despite recent price increases. He had checked local markets and found that “the price of a gallon of milk is significantly less than a gallon of water or juice.” Milk has gone up since then, but his point still holds.

As for soda, Dr. Musgrave’s particular peeve, it may be cheaper per gallon than milk but look at what they both put into your body. A glass of milk gives you about a third of the daily calcium you need to build bones and protect against osteoporosis and heart disease. It contains the vitamin D that helps older people use the calcium plus eight other vitamins and high-quality protein. And it has as little as 1 or 2 grams of carbohydrate.

“The soda that I looked at had 39 grams of carbohydrate – 156 calories. Other brands may have 35-42 grams of carbohydrate. The diet soda does have zero calories, but they are sweetened with aspartame. We do not know of any adverse effects from aspartame, but we believe that the sweet taste makes one want more sweet food and drink. Many of them contain caffeine, which also has not been shown to do harm unless one drinks more than 1 liter per day. My biggest complaint against soda is its lack of vitamins and minerals – zero.”

She recommends skim milk except for young children, who need the saturated fat in whole milk for the growth of brain and nerve cells.

Milk prices vary, of course, and they go up and down. Supermarket prices are now running at about $4.50 a gallon – up from $4 in January. If that sounds high, think of the added medical costs for osteoporosis and other ailments that milk helps prevent.

So, keep drinking your milk for good health. And you might do well to count calories as you eat. Dr. Musgrave recommends a paperback, “Random House Webster’s Handy Diet and Nutrition Guide, Second Edition.”