SURPRISE: NO MILK = HEALTHY BONES!

Yeah, it's a big "surprise," all right. Some coverage of this study has focused only on the strict numbers on bone mass, missing the bigger picture, which the Globe, at least, gets: In a piece headlined "Strict vegetarians -- surprise -- have healthy bones," they report that "People who adhere strictly to raw food vegetarian diets are thin but have surprisingly robust bones, US researchers reported yesterday. Although nutritionists and the food industry have warned that a diet without dairy foods can lead to the bone-thinning disease osteoporosis, the team at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis found the vegans they studied had many of the signs of strong bones." The study, appearing in this week's Archives of Internal medicine, compared "18 average Americans with 18 strict raw food vegans ages 33 to 85. All ate a diet that included unprepared foods such vegetables, fruits, nuts, and sprouted grains."

But wait, there's more: "Fontana expected the vegans to have low vitamin D levels because they avoid all animal products including dairy. But in fact their vitamin D levels were 'markedly higher' than average." Huh? Why would that be? "These people are clever enough to expose themselves to sunlight to increase their concentrations of vitamin D," Fontana said. Oh, so raw veganism doesn't just help your bones, it makes you smarter - to the point that you get enough sun not only to make up for all the Vitamin D you're missing from dairy, but enough to give you more than milk-drinkers! It's either that or dairy foods make you stupid, and we know that's not possible, right?