Are milk and calcium good for bone?

If I were to try to summarize briefly what I consider good dietary advice, I would say, "Eat like a caveman." The idea is to try to mimic the diet on which we as a species have evolved and to which we are best adapted. I think there are a lot of studies that strongly support that as a way to go. Although I appreciate that there will be those who reject the idea of ​​an original diet based on incorrect paradigms (in my opinion) that saturated fats are bad and grains are good. Here another anomaly is represented by dairy products. They seem to have been added to the diet quite recently (about 5000 years ago), so in theory they are not so important for health. Many nutrition commentators, however, tell us that they are essential for our bones. But records in bones more than 10,000 years old show that the bones were in good health. How did we manage to survive more than 2 million years without cow’s milk without suddenly needing it now? Maybe because we don’t need it at all. I decided to re-examine some research in this area recently. I found a lot of recent meta-analyzes (accumulation of similar studies) that looked for a link between milk consumption and the risk of hip fractures [1]. By the way, I think the risk of fractures is a much better criterion for estimating the value of dairy products than bone density. Supposedly the whole point of having thick bones is to prevent fractures, so it makes sense to examine that (rather than bone density). Neither women nor men found any association between milk consumption and the risk of fractures (higher milk consumption was not associated with a reduced risk of hip fractures). In another meta-analysis, the same group of researchers observed the relationship between calcium intake and hip fractures [2]. The results were the same - no reduced risk of fractures associated with higher calcium intake. This second meta-analysis also looked at intervention studies in which individuals were treated with calcium. Such types of studies undermine the epidemiological studies we have discussed so far, in that they can in fact prove "causality", ie. yes, say calcium causes fewer fractures. Looking at four trials in which the specific risk of hip fractures was assessed, it turned out that those taking calcium (compared to placebo) had a 64 percent increased risk of fractures. Oh. Maybe all this with milk and calcium, after all, isn’t exactly such a good idea.