Will drinking milk help me live longer?

CrowdScience

BBC

Science, Technology

4.8 • 985 Ratings

🗓️ 5 September 2025

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Milk: drink a lot of it and we’ll grow big and tall with strong bones. That’s what many people are told as children, but just how true is this accepted wisdom? CrowdScience listener JJ in Singapore is sceptical. He wants to live a healthy life for as long as possible, and he’s wondering whether drinking cow’s milk will help or hinder him on this mission.

All mammals produce milk, and our mother’s milk is our very first drink as babies. So what actually is the white stuff? Mary Fewtrell, professor of paediatric nutrition at UCL, gives presenter Chhavi Sachdev the lowdown on just how fundamental breastmilk is to us all. But are we meant to continue drinking milk from other animals once we grow up? This behaviour of ours is rare among mammals… so Christina Warinner, professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard University, tells us when in our history cow’s milk entered our diet, and how we even came to be able to digest it.

And is there any truth in the accepted wisdom that cow’s milk will give us stronger bones? Karl Michaelsson, professor of medical epidemiology at Uppsala University, has researched just this – and the answer isn’t what you’d expect. Karl helps Chhavi sift through the complex evidence to see whether milk is actually any good for us.

Presenter: Chhavi Sachdev Producer: Sophie Ormiston Editor: Ben Motley

(Photo:Lady milking cow, Nadiad, Gujarat, India)

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Rory Stewart and I grew up wanting to be a hero and I'm still fascinated by the ideas of heroism.
0:09.0	In my new series, I'm taking in the long sweep of history from Achilles to Zelensky and asking, what is a hero?
0:16.0	Simply doing your job, being a decent human being.
0:20.0	A true hero is someone who just kind of shines by
0:23.1	their own light and that light is to be recognized by others. The long history of heroism with me,
0:28.6	Rory Stewart. Listen on BBC Sounds. All right, I'm at the neighborhood dairy.
0:40.1	This is right smack in the middle of a residential, lower-income neighborhood, very close to where I live.
0:49.8	I've passed this place at least a hundred times and obviously never stopped here.
0:55.7	You're listening to Crowd Science from the BBC World Service.
0:59.9	I've always been astounded that there's a place like this
1:03.0	where cows are just tethered by the side of a pretty busy road
1:07.6	and there's manure and hay just strewn all along the sidewalk.
1:16.1	Crowd Science is the show that ruminates over your science questions and then goes to
1:21.0	great lengths to answer them. Oh God, it really smells bad. Oh no, I just stepped into a cowplop.
1:30.5	Okay, let me find out about milking.
1:32.8	I'm Chavi Satchew, I'm in India in Prabha Devi Mumbai,
1:39.3	and I'm on a quest to find a cow to milk.
1:47.9	Oh, India. on a quest to find a cow to milk. These cows belong to Arun, whose family has basically had a dairy here.
1:53.0	For a hundred years, way before, there were big apartment buildings in this neighborhood.
1:58.9	So he's got 12 cows, there are six that are being milked this afternoon.
2:05.5	Raju, who's worked here for three years,
2:07.2	is now milking a black cow with a little white star on her forehead.
	...

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