Milk Relieves Exercise Pain

I have an old page on my website called Questions Even I Couldn't Answer.

One was on whether lactose intolerance (LI) could cause back pain. I've never seen any studies that would lead me to think that there could be any relationship. The only connection would be something tangentially mentioned by someone in an email, that intestinal pain might be felt in the back. That's not very scientific, though.

I was reminded of this only because I ran across a medical study that came to the reverse conclusion: Milk helps exercise recovery: researchers by Shane Sterling at NutraIngredients.com.

The study, "Acute milk-based protein–CHO supplementation attenuates exercise-induced muscle damage," by Emma Cockburn, Philip R Hayes, Duncan N French, Emma Stevenson, and Alan St Clair Gibson, appeared in Applied Physiology, Nutrition and Metabolism, volume 33(4): 775–783 (2008).

"At 48 hour post-EIMD [exercise-induced muscle damage], milk and milk-based protein–CHO supplementation resulted in the attenuation of decreases in isokinetic muscle performance and increases in creatine kinase and myoglobin," the researchers wrote.

"This study supports the growing volume of literature which suggests that milk is a powerful post exercise recovery aid," said Dr Judith Bryans, a registered nutritionist and director of The Dairy Council in the UK.

"Previous research has shown milk to be an effective rehydration solution, while this is the first study to suggest that drinking milk following muscle-damaging exercise may decrease muscle damage."

EIMD occurs when protein structures break down within the muscle, and reduces muscle performance.

"The results found that, when consumed immediately after resistance-based muscle damaging exercise, both semi-skimmed milk and milk-based CHO-P helped to preserve more muscle than either the sports drink or water," the Dairy Council said.

Sports drinks are mostly expensive sugar water, just like vitamin drinks, in my opinion, so there's little surprise in finding that other liquids are superior. But who would have thought milk would be best? Not PETA, I'm sure.