Growing up, I remember constantly being bombarded by Drink Milk ads and fridge door nutritional guides that placed dairy products among the essential food groups needed for optimum health. Years later, I would realize that most of what I had heard about drinking cow’s milk was plain wrong and usually just the propaganda of the dairy industry.

Taking into consideration that 70% of the world’s population is lactose intolerant — including about 90% of Okinawans ( who live as long as sea turtles) — the question must be asked, since when did humans need to drink cow’s milk to remain healthy?

Increased calcium consumption is a leading selling point for marketing dairy products, yet the typical western diet gets less than 50% of its calcium from this source. Calcium is found in many vegetables like broccoli, parsley and cabbage, in nuts like almonds, and in a variety of seafood choices, but if you’re like me, and grew up around western culture, you’d hardly know that calcium was available outside of dairy products and food supplements.

Humans only started drinking milk relatively recently in terms of human history, which is why most populations are still lactose intolerant and why dairy allergies are one of the most common food allergies around. In addition, humans are the only mammals that consume milk after weaning, and are the only species that regularly drinks the milk of another. The evidence seems to indicate that dairy products are not as important to our health as marketers would like us to believe.

With an aging population, osteoporosis – a disease that decreases bone mass leading to painful fractures and immobility – has been used by the dairy industry to push calcium consumption via their products. It is interesting then, that the disease is common among American women, one of the largest consumers of milk products. Indeed, there is no evidence to suggest that consuming cow’s milk protects someone from this bone robbing disease. Even diets that are extremely high in calcium do not seem to ward off osteoporosis.

The traditional Inuit (Eskimo) diet is very high in calcium and yet this population experiences high rates of osteoporosis. This phenomenon has been linked to the Inuit’s high intake of animal protein. When animal meat is consumed, calcium is transferred from the bones to the digestive system to help counter the acid generated by this food group. Therefore, to maintain a healthy bone mass, one should consume calcium in reasonable amounts whilst limiting meat in their diet. In addition, regular exercise, magnesium, and vitamin D (sunlight) are also needed to maintain a healthy bone mass; drinking milk alone is not enough.

Now before I end this blurb sounding like a total dairy hater, I just want to disclose that although I’m not a huge milk drinker, I do eat yogurt almost every morning and I love my French bread with cheese – gouda, edam, or smoked cheddar preferably – so I’m hardly dismissing the appetizing pleasures of this food group. Also, I love eating meat! So I hope you don’t interpret this post as some sanctimonious rant on behalf of vegans and the 70% that get the squirts after taking too much cream with their coffee.

What are your thoughts on drinking milk? Do you buy into its promoted health benefits, or do you drink it simpy for enjoyment?

This past week was all about Google’s public beta of Chrome. Being primarily a Mac user, I was a little disappointed that no version of the browser was available for OS X, but fortunately I keep a copy of XP running under Parallels for just such occasions.

My first impression of Chrome was that it looked similar to what I would expect from a Google product: clean, simple and intuitive. I like the tabs-on-top design and the combined search and URL box. However, aside from those features, I didn’t find anything too compelling or innovative to make Chrome stand out from the pack.

Opening up multiple tabs and surfing around seemed smooth and uneventful, but I decided to cut my test run short when YouTube crashed and I figured I had seen enough. Currently, I am happy using Safari and Firefox, but I’ll be giving Chrome a serious chance when the OS X version makes its debut.

After my short stint with Chrome, I hit my favorite tech sites to see what others had to say about Google’s new browser. What I read was a lot of discussion about Chrome’s speed – particularly its JavaScript performance – but what really got my attention was its multithreaded architecture.

Chrome, like the IE 8 beta, runs as a multithreaded application, which means it’ll make better use of dual and quad core CPU’s that are common in today’s computers. Furthermore, each tab runs as a separate process, which means that if one browser tab crashes, the other tabs will not be affected. This is a wonderful feature for people who surf with many tabs opened at once or use web-based applications like Google Docs.

It seems that Chrome has been programmed to be both speedy and muscular, but such traits can come at a cost. For instance, Chrome eats up plenty of RAM and its multithreaded design allows it to hog the CPU like no browser before it. For power users seeking a faster and more stable web browsing experience, Chrome will likely satisfy their needs, but for users running power sipping laptops, bare bone netbooks or even less brawny smartphones, it remains to be seen how well Chrome can accommodate these platforms.

Despite the challenges ahead, I feel confident that Google will deliver a solid product across many platforms. In particular, I can’t wait to see the mobile version of Chrome running on Google’s Android platform for mobile devices. I’m sure it’ll be a worthy competitor to mobile Safari and mobile Opera. 

So, what’s currently your browser of choice? And am I the only one who wishes that Firefox plug-ins were available for more than just Firefox?

For most people, I assume, when they’re downloading videos or whatever with their bittorrent client, they simply queue up their torrents and let the program do its thing. This is how bittorent worked early on, before the advent of uTorrent, Bitcomet, Vuze and the many other clients that allow serious tweaking in the options menu.

Impatient as always, I have found myself tinkering with these settings any time a torrent is seemingly dragging its feet. The problem is, I have already set my client (I use Azureus) to optimal settings for my connection, but I can’t seem to stop myself from adjusting things like the upload speed and peer connections in the hopes that I can somehow accelerate the transfer.

The idea that I am somehow shepherding the file fragments onto my hard drive, like some RTS where I’ve sent my peasants out to chop wood and mine gold, is a thought I can’t easily put to rest. I realize that most of the time I’m probably not contributing very much to the outcome of the transfer, but it feels better than remaining passive through a long, arduous download.

Do you ever find yourself obsessively managing your torrents? Drop me a comment if you’ve turned file sharing into a computer game.