Calcium is calcium; milk has no special key. A cup's 300 mg absorbs at the same rate as kale, tofu, or sardines with the bones ¹, and past a floor near 600 to 800 mg a day, more barely moves bone density. Above that floor, bone builds only in response to load and protein; extra calcium sits idle.

Two literatures, one direction. Thirty-plus supplement trials find calcium and vitamin D reduce no fracture endpoint in healthy adults ²; the USPSTF now recommends against taking them for that ³. And every extra daily glass in 61,000 Swedish women tracked with 9% more hip fractures ⁴; milk's small protective signal in American data disappears in unfortified Scandinavia ⁵.

A broken hip in your seventies kills one in five within the year ⁶, and it usually starts as a slip the leg muscles couldn't catch. Three things move that risk, none on a dairy carton:

Milk itself is optional: one or two cups if you like it, three unnecessary, zero fine if your floor is covered.

Don't drink milk? You're the majority. Two-thirds of the world's adults don't fully digest lactose, and everything above applies unchanged. Fortified plant-milks, calcium-set tofu, canned salmon, and greens like kale and bok choy all hit milk's 300 mg; spinach is the exception, its calcium bound up in oxalate ¹⁰.

Two groups still get the gentler rule: teenagers building peak bone mass, for whom milk is handy but not required ¹¹; and frail, housebound elderly with low vitamin D, where calcium plus 800 IU genuinely cuts fractures ⁹.

What you get for updating: milk stops being a daily duty, and the strength training and protein you may already do turn out to be the real bone protocol. Nothing new to add, one thing to drop.