If your kids drink cow’s milk, you might want to stick to the full fat version. This new study shows children drinking low-fat milk tend to be heavier.
Another study shows women who “consume high-fat dairy products following breast cancer diagnosis increase their chances of dying from the disease years later.”
So you might think, I’ll just avoid the whole low-fat/high-fat issue and skip the dairy. But then this study says college kids who don’t drink the recommended three servings of dairy per day, are more likely to have metabolic disorder, which is defined as a person with three of the following: abdominal obesity, high blood pressure, high blood sugar and unhealthy cholesterol and lipid levels.
All of these articles have recently been in the news and freely accessible to anybody who searches for anything related to milk, cancer, metabolic disorder, or childhood obesity.
We have three reports; one says drink whole milk (as a child for proper weight), another than says high-fat dairy causes increased mortality in breast cancer patients, and a third that says if you don’t drink your milk, you’re more likely to have 3 of several serious risk factors to poor health. It might be easy over simplify it to this: low-fat dairy cause’s obesity, high-fat dairy cause’s cancer, and you definitely need to drink your milk. So which milk would you choose after reading these three studies?
Let’s break it down a little bit. In the first study, the children who drank whole milk tended to be less hungry after consuming the higher calorie milk and therefore apparently ate less snacks. Getting real calories from a decent quality food source full of its original vitamins and minerals is definitely going to lead to a healthier body weight.
The second study delves a little into why high-fat dairy could be the cause of cancer, with its estrogenic and growth hormones. Milk naturally has growth hormones because it’s supposed to help calves grow. Imagine that! This study had a decent sample size (1,893 women at the start) and followed them for 6-12 years. But there’s no information on how well women who didn’t consume any dairy, or how they fared. It was also based on a food questionnaire which have a history of not being very accurate. Some of the patients could have fudged the numbers, or they may just forget how much high-fat dairy they ate. Do you remember what you ate last Tuesday?
The study about increased incidence of metabolic disorder is pretty poorly done. They took a small sample of a homogenous population who has a higher frequency of poor lipid profiles and obesity, isolated the fact that they don’t consume a lot of dairy, and made a conclusion for the masses. Milk isn’t a big part of Mexican culture, some have a genetic predisposition to poor lipid profiles and obesity, and college kids tend to drink more soda and sugar sweetened beverages. It’s pretty easy to blame their metabolic syndrome on a lack of milk. Or anything else you might replace milk with, like: lack of exercise, lack of vegetables, increased stress from college and leaving their home country, poor food choices from a school cafeteria, or a host of other factors.
If you tolerate milk without developing acne or getting gas and bloating, drink some milk. I’d recommend getting milk as unprocessed as you can. Straight from the cow would be ideal, but if you can find organic, grass fed, full fat milk in the store that’d be good too. It’s a good source of calories, Vit D, calcium, and goes great in some coffee or tea. Avoid the ultra-homogenized, uber-pasterized fat free stuff as it’s practically white water and not worth your time. Don’t be afraid of dairy, but it should be more of a treat or supplemental calorie source, and not the backbone of your diet.