A cheeky ad campaign aimed at helping women and men deal with premenstrual syndrome by the California Milk Processor Board has been shut down after complaints over the content.

Titled “Everything I Do Is Wrong,’ the multi-platform campaign was a comedic spin on PMS, advocating how a steady diet of milk can reduce dreaded symptoms.

While PMS is the domain of women, the campaign directed its attack at men with a slew of ads of frightened husbands clutching cartons of milk with taglines like, “I’m sorry I listened to what you said and not what you meant,” or “I apologize for not reading between the right lines,” with “Milk can help reduce the symptoms of PMS” at the bottom..

“PMS and its symptoms are sensitive issues to discuss among couples,” Steve James, executive director of the milk board said in a statement at the campaign launch. “We hope that this campaign, through its message and humour, would empower both men and women to talk about this topic more openly and to take action by learning how to help relieve symptoms by drinking dairy milk.”

The campaign’s website launched July 11 and was supposed to run until the end of August but as of July 21 was no longer running.

When users type in everythingidoiswrong.org they are directed to gotdiscussion.org which lists comments and articles, as well as an apology from the board about the original campaign.

“Over the past couple of weeks, regrettably, some people found our campaign about milk and PMS to be outrageous and misguided – and we apologize to those we offended,” it says. “Others thought it was fun and educational.”

The campaign’s original website allowed users to locate stores in the California area that sell milk, find a “sensitivity vocabulary” for men – i.e. use the word “passionate” instead of “irrational” – and a mischievous “Global PMS Level”.

The milk board, who brought us the widely popular Got Milk? ads of the past decades, based its findings for the campaign on a number of milk and PMS studies when creating the campaign, which show in some cases calcium can help ease severe PMS symptoms.

A 1998 study led by New York endoncrinologist Dr. Susan Thys-Jacobs of St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital Center, tested the effectiveness of calcium in women suffering from severe PMS.

Her study tracked nearly 500 women, looking at their common PMS symptoms: bloating, food cravings, discomfort and mood swings over a period of a few months.

Some participants were then given a daily 1,200 milligrams of a calcium supplement while others took a placebo for three months.

Thys-Jacobs and her team found the overall severity of PMS symptoms was reduced by 48 per cent for those who took the supplement. The placebo group, however, had a 15 per cent increase in pain symptoms, the study found.

In a similar study referenced by the milk board, Dr. Elizabeth Bertone-Johnson of the University of Massachusetts studied the relationship between calcium and vitamin D and PMS. Her team compared the diets of 1,057 women between the ages of 27 and 44 who said they developed PMS over the course of a decade to 1,968 women who reported no PMS diagnosis or no minor PMS symptoms in the same timeframe.

“We found a lower risk of developing PMS over time among women who consumed high amounts of vitamin D, as well as in women who consumed high amounts of calcium,” Bertone-Johnson wrote in an email to the Toronto Star. “To my knowledge, an association between vitamin D and PMS had not been observed before.”

They also found somewhat stronger results for intake of both nutrients from food sources than from supplements.

Bertone-Johnson, who had no contact with the milk board prior to their ad campaign, stressed that both her study and Thys-Jacobs’ were done of women with clinically significant PMS and not just any premenstrual symptoms.

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“Clinically significant PMS is probably experienced by only 15-20 per cent of menstruating women, not the majority of women,” she said.

Requests for an interview with the California Milk Processor Board weren’t immediately returned.