It's just different. From whole to 2% to skim you have big differences in how rich the milk tastes. Once you get used to one, it's hard to go back to the others.
I always drank whole milk, so skim tasted like water. Then I started only drinking skim milk, and whole tasted like ice cream.
I don't have any dairy issues but it's very, very rare that I drink milk anymore these days, but I still enjoy it.
It tastes completely different, much thicker, much rich. 2% tastes almost like water compared to whole milk.
The first time I had whole milk was at an after school program I went to in elementary school. They fed us a snack first thing when we got there. One day they gave us (whole) milk with our snack. Almost everyone (including me) took a sip and complained the milk was bad/tasted funky. The head person of the place came out and told us the milk was fine, we were all just not used to drinking whole milk.
I still don't like the taste of any cow's milk too much, I prefer unsweetened soy milk. Soy milk also lasts forever in the fridge which is a big plus for me.
My 4 year old daughter was drinking a modest amount whole milk when the pediatrician recommended we switch to skim milk. We did, and her consumption of Milk more than doubled (skim milk is sweeter and lighter) and she got more irritable (more sugar?). We switched back.
Any pediatrician that recommends skim milk is a fucking idiot, plain and simple. Get a new doctor.
I'm not super impressed with the average doctor in the USA these days, but most decent pediatricians tell parents to give kids whole milk. If they are remotely educated on nutrition beyond decades old medical school knowledge, they are aware that current guidelines state that the additional fat soluble nutrients in whole milk are great for kids.
My son's pediatrician told us (when he was 2), "don't even waste your time with anything other than whole milk. Otherwise you get all of the sugar with little of the vitamins"
This is actually interesting. The American Association of Pediatrics recommends transitioning kids over to skim milk at age 2. This is because they are trying to fight the obesity epidemic. See recent publications on their HALF inititive: http://www.aap.org/en-us/advocacy-and-policy/aap-health-init...
As you can imagine, this has caused some controversy in the pediatrics world. The pediatrician we go to still recommends whole or 2% milk for our toddler. She actually makes a point to tell us any time her recommendations conflict with the official AAP recommendations and why, which I think is a really nice thing for a doctor to do.
Your doctor is awesome. "The AAP recommends this, but only because it's trying to fight childhood obesity. Your kid is nowhere near obese so let's give her the best diet for her as an individual."
Ha. Is that the same obesity and diabetes (and even potentially ADHD) epidemic that's been encouraged by low fat high carb hysteria for the last 30 years.
I just hope my kid can still get whole milk when he goes to kindergarten.
That's pretty mean. The recommendations given to doctors (doctors are not normally nutritionists, they just pass on recommendations) changed three times while I was raising kids. So maybe the doc was just behind the times.
Pump your brakes, here. clarkevans didn't say why the pediatrician recommended the switch. Maybe his four year-old was struggling with a weight-related issue? Maybe it had to do with trying to encourage increased milk consumption (clarkevans says she "more than doubled" her consumption). Or maybe you're right, and the pediatrician just wasn't up on current information.
Regardless, I think you should be a little more careful when making that kind of claim without any other additional information.
First of all he's talking about a 4 year old. Whole milk is highly recommended under 2 years of age. The doctor is not an idiot for suggesting a 4 year old that is drinking a modest amount of whole milk switch to skim milk. There are lots of good things in skim milk, vitamin D and calcium for one and if a kid drinks skim, 1%, or 2% milk he/she will be getting more of those things because he/she will drink more of it as it is less filling than whole milk. It could be there was some concern that the child was getting enough calcium. One way to increase calcium intake is to switch to a lower fat milk.
Also, some people may call 1% or 2% "skim milk". In Canada the labels on these milk products are called "partly skimmed milk".
I've tried it on and off but have trouble actually drinking a glass. Using it to make a rich hot chocolate works for me, but I can't drink a glass of plain, unflavored whole milk... just tastes gross, like I'm drinking some kind of butter-in-water mixture. Sort of how I like butter on toast, but not by itself on a spoon. (Warm whole milk, as is popular in some countries, is even worse.)
That's because milk _is_ tiny chunks of butter suspended in water. Agitating the milk causes the fat globules to collide and occasionally stick together.
Not really. There are many states that allow farmers to sell raw milk; some only for pet consumption. The illegal part is generally about 'smuggling' raw milk across state borders.
No, it isn't. It's illegal to sell it across state lines, or in some places to the general public. But in most states, you can buy it at a farm, or other licensed facility. It isn't like heroin, or even pot, and you won't get in trouble for possession.
Looks like I'm wrong, but it also looks like in most of the country where you can buy it you can only buy it from the farmer directly. So it's still not easy to get.
Wish I could upvote this more. The health difference between pasteurized milk and raw milk is roughly equivalent to the flavor difference between the two - huge. If you must drink pasteurized milk, full fat is your only option.
> middle-aged men who consumed high-fat milk, butter and cream were significantly less likely to become obese over a period of 12 years compared to men who never or rarely ate high-fat dairy.
What I would like to know is if those not eating high-fat dairy compensate with high-carbs dairy.
The way this article is written led me to think that eating fat would help people avoid obesity which is a very different story than "you should choose high-fat dairy instead of high-carbs dairy"
Anyhow, I'm glad fat is making a come back. There's this weird , untold thinking that eating fat automatically translates to storing fat which is nonsense.
> What I would like to know is if those not eating high-fat dairy compensate with high-carbs dairy.
That's an interesting point. I have noticed that a lot of low-fat foods in the store seem to try to compensate for flavor losses by adding sugar. Totally non-scientific observation, but I wonder if there's something more to it.
All things considered, things that are low-fat/no-fat and low-sugar/no-sugar taste like cardboard and they're not very filling at all. I'm quite sure that our food overlords discovered that fairly quickly, and just as quickly they realized that consuming sugary bullshit had similar physiological effects compared to opiate addiction.
As an aside, why is that every time I've been to the USA I cannot seem to just buy fresh whole milk?
I always seem to find these massive containers, full of enriched this, and added that. Sometimes flavoured or low-fat.
If I wanted vitamin enriched low-fat something or other I'd be spoilt for choice... but if one wants regular milk, from a cow, untouched except by pasteurisation, well this seems quite difficult.
Before vitamin D fortification which began around the 1st great depression (1930s not 2007), bone deformities due to lack of vitamin D were the norm. Pro-fortification propaganda claims 90%+, anti-fortification propaganda glosses over it only being about half, and relatively minor. So the truth is probably in between.
Its very much like salt. If you know how and where you look you can buy nearly pure NaCl in a store (look in the canning aisle...) but anti-caking Mg salts and iodine are added. After that, gross levels of iodine deficiency were rare.
Or the TLDR is unless you're taking the proper supplements, you're better off not drinking "untouched except by pasteurization" milk. In some states its illegal to sell raw milk or in some states illegal to sell unfortified milk so if you really want to, you have a long evening with google to research which nanny state vs free state to visit and shop.
This is aside from the obvious issue that unless you're a baby cow, perhaps you're an adult human, you really haven't evolved to drink cow milk as an adult human so you almost certainly should not do so, at least not on a regular basis. Human milk would be much healthier balance of nutrients for a human to drink for obvious reasons, although culturally would be considered creepy, and your innards are way too old to be drinking milk anyway if you're posting to HN. Maybe you could industrially adulterate cow milk to make it nutritionally similar to human milk, that would be much healthier and not as culturally creepy as the real stuff.
The difference is not that great. The biggest difference is in the antibodies; most of the cow antibodies aren't going to help you since you can't catch the disease they protect against anyway.
The only adults who should specifically avoid milk are the ones without the lactase mutation, since they cannot digest the lactose in it. This applies to human milk as well.
> Before vitamin D fortification which began around the 1st great depression (1930s not 2007), bone deformities due to lack of vitamin D were the norm.
The UK doesn't fortify milk with vitamin D, yet they also saw a fall in the number of cases of rickets etc. That would seem to cast doubt on your causation.
As a German who lived near Minneapolis and Salt Lake City for a year this is exactly the same problem which I had. I _love_ milk, but it was near impossible to find good tasty milk. There was a deli shop which sometimes sold some milk which was ok, but the rest did taste different/worse than the milk which you can buy in Germany. What I also missed was cheese, bread, brötchen, croissants, ...
But on the other hand, almost everything related to meat, BBQ and burger was much more awesome than in Germany.
>but the rest did taste different/worse than the milk which you can buy in Germany
I think this might be the difference in how the cows are raised and how often they are milked, perhaps. And their diet. In the US we go for quantity over quality.
I don't know about milk but I know that for eggs it makes a HUGE difference. When I lived in Europe they only sold eggs that were higher quality. The yolks were bright orange and the taste was amazing. In the US most of the eggs have pale yellow yolks because of the chickens' diet being mostly corn soy instead of natural grass or whatever chickens eat and they are raised in stressful conditions. The taste is diluted.
I mostly buy my eggs straight from the farm here in the US. I can see the chickens when I go, they are wandering around on open pasture. The eggs are like the ones from Europe. In the grocery store buying the ones labelled "free range" gives you similar eggs.
Probably both this and homogenization. Homogenized milk doesn't taste as good as non-homogenized, in part because homogenized milk is often made of older batches blended into new. Depending on the store, sometimes it's hard to find non-homogenized milk.
Because we found out the cause of rickets, and there was an initiative to prevent it. I believe milk was probably chosen because calcium aids in vitamin D absorption and most Americans see milk as a dietary staple.
Most circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D originates from exposure to sunlight; nevertheless, many factors can impair this process, necessitating periodic reliance on dietary sources to maintain adequate serum concentrations. The US and Canadian populations are largely dependent on fortified foods and dietary supplements to meet these needs, because foods naturally rich in vitamin D are limited. Fluid milk and breakfast cereals are the predominant vehicles for vitamin D in the United States, whereas Canada fortifies fluid milk and margarine. Reports of a high prevalence of hypovitaminosis D and its association with increased risks of chronic diseases have raised concerns regarding the adequacy of current intake levels and the safest and most effective way to increase vitamin D intake in the general population and in vulnerable groups. The usual daily intakes of vitamin D from food alone and from food and supplements combined, as estimated from the US third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, 1988-1994, show median values above the adequate intake of 5 μg/d for children 6-11 y of age; however, median intakes are generally below the adequate intake for female subjects > 12 y of age and men > 50 y. In Canada, there are no national survey data for estimation of intake. Cross-sectional studies suggest that current US/Canadian fortification practices are not effective in preventing hypovitaminosis D, particularly among vulnerable populations during the winter, whereas supplement use shows more promise. Recent prospective intervention studies with higher vitamin D concentrations provided evidence of safety and efficacy for fortification of specific foods and use of supplements.
We also found out about folic acid and how important it is for women to have enough right before she becomes pregnant and in the first couple days/weeks of the developing embryo. This would be before she knows she is pregnant. An adequate supply of folic acid prevents protect against a number of congenital malformations, including neural tube defects which are severe abnormalities of the central nervous system like spina bifida and anencephaly. They result in malformations of the spine, skull, and brain.
So we decided to fortify our grain products in an attempt to prevent this. The fortification is mandatory since 1998.
Conclusions:
A 19% reduction in NTD birth prevalence occurred following folic acid
fortification of the US food supply. However, factors other than fortification may have
contributed to this decline.
Another misconception is that skimmed and semi-skimmed milk would be better for lactose intolerance—it isn't as there is a similar (if not slightly higher) concentration of lactose in skimmed and semi-skimmed milk
From a chemistry point of view milk is an emulsion of cow fats dispersed in water (and some proteins, and electrolytes, not relevant to this discussion). Shaking up milk or using a churn breaks the emulsion and you get solid butter. Strangely about 95% of the population has no idea where butter comes from beyond "it comes from the store". Ordinarily water and oil don't mix very well. Some really tasty foods (not just milk) involve oil/water emulsions, sauces, gravys, salad dressings, mayonnaise, to a greater or lesser extent raw baked good doughs, etc.
So thats chemistry lesson 1, lesson 2 is "lots of stuff" in o-chem class prefers to partition itself in oil or water phase. So at least some ochem lab work involves a sep funnel which is a magic, yet simple, way to do liq vs liq extractions. Stuff moves from being dissolved in liq 1 to being dissolved in liq 2. Its a law of nature that its impossible for an undergrad lab involving a sep funnel to not have an accident or incident of some sort, usually more funny than dangerous. Not surprisingly one liquid is usually polar and one is usually non-polar because you can't do much of an extraction if liq 1 and liq 2 mix perfectly to create liq 3. And the sep fraction is often crazy, if you work the polar / nonpolar hard enough. I would imagine the sep fraction for salt or sugar in water/veg oil could be nearly a million, like the only salt in veg oil might be mechanical turbidity/suspension. Thats just a guess but I'm sure its ridiculously high if not a million. You can still have a "useful at lab scale" extraction if its only a factor of 2 or so, just pointing out its not shocking to be much higher.
Anyway the point of this chem discussion is there is no such thing as milk, there's a liquid that comes out of a cow and its got all kinds of crazy stuff in it, some of which STRONGLY partitions into either the polar or nonpolar phase. So the eventual discovery is probably going to be some kind of hormone, protein, mineral, herbicide, antiseptic, antibiotic, pesticide, solvent, "something" that strongly partitions / dissolves into fat and not into water. In the list above, hormones, herbicides, pesticides, and solvents tend to partition strongly into fat, the other stuff is a tough call one way or the other.
I would theorize that other animals living in the same contaminated conditions would partition the same way. Us mammals are not as biochemically different as some think. So its entirely possible you'd get the same effect from eating fatty meat, perhaps bacon, or foods cooked in (or made with) lard. Its worth some study.
I'm not a chemist so this was a bit difficult to parse for me. As I understand it, you're suggesting that the effect is not caused by the fat per se, but by some compound that is dissolved in the fat. Am I correct?
I think the point was is that when the fat is removed from milk, it is not only fat that is removed, but also compounds that readily dissolve in fat.
This means that any effects seen could be due to the additional compounds as well as the fats that have been removed. I am not sure it is possible to distinguish what is the major cause for the effects seen.
Not necessarily a substance already dissolved in the milk fat, but also potentially a substance already in other food or in the body itself that could be dissolved in the milk fat. A different kind of milk is going to have a different absorption profile, which could have interesting metabolic effects. While it's a bit counterintuitive that a higher-fat drink would be correlated to lower body fat, the body is a chaotic enough system that it's not entirely surprising.
I hope they're correcting for the reversed causation -- i.e., if you notice you're getting pretty overweight, you're more likely to avoid full-fat yoghurt, whereas if you are staying lean (for completely unrelated reasons), you're not nearly as likely to worry about it.
There's no mention of ruling this out in the article, though I didn't read the study itself to see how/if they addressed it.
Exactly. I kept waiting for that to come up in the story and it never did. Would love for someone less lazy than myself to look at the actual paper and find out if this is addressed.
Chemically it is insulin that triggers the signal in our body to store fat. Carbohydrates trigger a large insulin response while fats cause no insulin response (protein is somewhere in the middle)
The nutrients in dairy are all fat soluble and so there some things that specifically target the excretion of fat from our systems. Drinking full fat milk will have more of those nutrients as it comes in bound to fat.
There may be some amount of causation going on because of milk (Dairy calcium specifically).
> Chemically it is insulin that triggers the signal in our body to store fat.
A misleading oversimplification. Maintaing a net-energy-surplus is the causes of fat storage. Insulin is just one piece of the mechanics of how surplus energy gets stored as fat. There's no need to worry at all about insulin; just don't eat too much, and you don't get fat.
> Carbohydrates trigger a large insulin response while fats cause no insulin response (protein is somewhere in the middle)
ORLY? Show me a biochemistry text book that dares to tout this nonsense.
/// The results showed that both protein and fat reduced the glycemic response elicited by oral glucose in normal humans. The effects of protein and fat were independent of each other, but gram-for-gram, protein had a 2 to 3 times larger effect than fat. Fat reduced glycemic responses to a greater extent in subjects with low FPI, whereas protein had more effect in subjects with a high WC and a high intake of dietary fiber.
SOURCE: http://m.jn.nutrition.org/content/136/10/2506.full
/// These data indicate that protein given with glucose will increase insulin secretion and reduce the plasma glucose rise in at least some type II diabetic persons.
SOURCE: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6389060
It didn't take me long to find these two papers which find evidence of the antagonistic effect on glucose & insulin by the consumption of fat and protein. It doesn't look like nonsense to me.
Fat soluble vitamins and even chemicals like Caffeine or even Glutathione are absorbed more eficiently when mixed with fat.
Not that nature is perfect but it does get a lot of things right...whole fat milk seems to likely be more optimal than reduced fat milk.
Highly interesting! This is new info to me. It seems the Insulin Index may be a more reliable predictor of the insulin response of foods than either the glycemic index or the glycemic load index. You mentioned there is very little other than fat in beef but don't forget that there's mostly protein. Now we just need studies showing which Amino Acids are the 'worst offenders.' I tried finding any info about whether meat contains any actual insulin based on a hunch/hypothesis but did not find anything.
Anyway, from what I've read, both blood glucose & insulin should be kept at reasonably stable levels. (ie. not too high) Therefore, maybe a combination of glycemic load index and insulin index would be helpful. Also, knowing now the effect of beef on insulin, I think it means we should be careful to eat small portions of meat or limit how often we eat meat.
I'm really amazed that these findings are only now being made.
> You mentioned there is very little other than fat in beef but don't forget that there's mostly protein.
No, I meant that the experiment I linked to didn't test fat's insulin stimulating ability in isolation. I didn't mean to suggest there's little other than fat in beef.
Testing the various amino acids would probably not be very useful. Do not subjugate fundamental principles to minor details. Which is also important when considering the effects of insulin. Basically it's not important at all as long as you don't eat too much food. Eating appropriate amounts of food is a fundamental principle; worrying about insulin levels is a minor detail.
> I think it means we should be careful to eat small portions of meat or limit how often we eat meat.
No, it does not. That may be confirmation bias at play. Are you a vegetarian/vegan? Remember that one of insulin's roles it to move nutrients from the bloodstream and into cells. beef is a very nutritionally dense food; you would need to eat 5 pounds of broccoli to get he same protein in an 8oz steak (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=100g+steak+vs.+1000g+br...). So it makes sense that when more nutrients enter the bloodstream, more insulin is required to move it all into our tissues. Carbs are the macronutrient "closest" in form to cellular fuel (glycogen). It takes a LOT more work to use protein as fuel than it does to use carbs. This is known as the "thermal effect" of food; how much energy is required to convert food into cellular fuel. .... and now I'm rambling... :P
Thanks so much for your feedback. Clearly I've presented my understanding of things (with references to where that information came from)
While I'm not sure that "Taubes again sigh" is an argument I'm on board with (ad hominem fallacy?), nor is ORLY? A compelling argument (ad CAPS et meme fallacy?) I'm happy to adjust my understanding based on new evidence.
I'll happily read your reference and try determine if there is anything of value in it.
As well, fat solubility was presented to me as I passed it on in my comment, if my understanding is off I'd happily adjust to newer and better information.
You're right I shouldn't have been so crass. It's just that the more I learn the facts about nutrition science the more I rage at the mythology; and Taubes is a king of myth.
When I started learning, I fell for the fallacious claims of Lustig, Taubes, the low-carbers, the paloetards; damn I was convinced! But then I switched to biochemistry & nutrition college textbooks and now a couple years later I've shed most of my overconfidence-of-a-novice. But I get very frustrated to see so many other people like I was, believing things that are just not true.
The most important advice I've ever read about nutrition is: NO NOT SUBJUGATE FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES TO MINOR DETAILS. Net-energy balance is a fundamental principle. Obsessing over carb-types and insulin levels are minor details. It's like worrying about the candied-cherry on top of a HUGE piece of cake. The calories in the cake contribute 1000x more to your body-comp than the cherry. Another example is that adding every supplement you read is "good for you" will not contribute to your health anywhere nearly as much as a daily 45 min walk. Do not subjugate fundamental principles to minor details.
I was going to suggest this.. that people replace high fat foods with high carb foods which translate into gaining more weight. I've long said that fat doesn't make you fat, it clogs your arteries. Though the latter part of that is now up for debate based on more recent studies. You out-scienced me though.
Fat does not "clog your arteries". The buildup of plaque in arteries is a complex process. But it has much more to do with chronic inflammation and the immune system's response to it than dietary fat or cholesterol. In fact there is ZERO causative relationship between increased intake of dietary-cholesterol (e.g. lots of egg yolks) and increased blood serum cholesterol.
However there is a significant causative relationship between becoming overweight and increased blood-serum cholesterol.
It's more that being fat "clogs your arteries" than eating fat.
Correlation doesn't imply anything about causation, though the article itself is all about how maybe full-fat dairy causes lower obesity.
My point is that perhaps obesity causes less consumption of full-fat dairy (because "I'm getting kind of overweight; I'll get the low-fat one") OR there may be another factor that's causing both effects -- e.g., organic yoghurt is much more likely to be "natural" (full-fat), and people who eat a lot of organic food as part of choosing their diet tend to eat heathier (less fattening) meals.
I'm making both of these up -- but both situations explain a correlation/association between full-fat dairy and lower obesity without full-fat dairy causing lower obesity. A good study needs to rule this kind of stuff out to be useful.
Often, unfortunately, the study itself mentions various confounding factors, alternate explanations, etc., and the reporting just ignores all that, cherry-picks the desired "result" and poses the headline as a question to be safe.
Sorry, I may be missing something; I don't understand how this addresses the correlation vs. causality problem.
If they're tracking two measurements, and observing a correlation, "people who get obese stop eating full fat yoghurt" needs to be ruled out of the effect, somehow.
Eh, I was surprised that the article didn't make any mention of this (any effort countering what seemed to me to be an obvious explanation), so I made a brief comment about it. I don't care enough to track down and comb through the study.
From experience, I tend to suspect the article is at fault, not the study, though the error of "spinning a study to make it appear to prove something it didn't" is unfortunately rather more common than something like "didn't mention anything about how the study showed causation".
Take this report with the same grain of salt it's recommending taking the conventional wisdom of avoiding dairy fat. These diet studies focus on extremely narrow questions and generally have homogenous (pun intended) population samples.
Ignore the headlines. The best diet advice I've heard is Michael Pollan's: "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants."
If you really study the scientific research (i.e. you don't just read a headline in a newspaper saying "SCIENTISTS SAY COFFEE IS GOOD" or "SCIENTISTS SAY COFFEE IS BAD" and you actually understand the limitations of nutrition study design and the conflicting results across seemingly similar studies), you'll come to about the same conclusion: there are tons of uncertainties in nutrition, and eating lots of plants is about the least uncertain advice out there.
Unfortunately, science is nowhere close to understanding the human body sufficiently to make any specific claims about "optimal nutrition". I'm not sure it will ever be possible. The human body is just far too complex and dynamic a system.
One of the things that ruined full fat milk for me in the UK was the introduction of homogenised milk. It ruined my morning porridge where my dad and I would pour off the cream that settled at the top as a breakfast treat. Homogenisation spoiled that for us.
Full fat homogenised milk also created a greasy slick on top of any hot drink you added it to.
Since then I've only consumed semi-skimmed milk. It's a shame we mess about with perfectly good natural products such as milk.
So wait, you can't just buy cream in the UK? What would be the difference than skimming it off the top? I'm also wondering if you can make your own non-homogenized milk by mixing the cream with the skim milk. Full fat milk is 4% cream.
Yes, you can buy cream on its own, but that wasn't what I was getting at. The point was that in non-homogenised milk, the cream naturally separated to the top of the bottle. It wasn't a lot, but just enough to make porridge better. It was a tradition/ritual thing. Also the cream wasn't as thick as say even single cream. I suspect (and no offence intended) you're a good few years younger than I am to have experienced these things. :)
Oh I know exactly what you're talking about. Just was making a suggestion. I am in my 30s I understand the physics completely and always did even before your post.
I'm quite involved in fitness and I know a thing or two about diet. Milk is not bad, it never was. The only significant difference of full milk and skimmed milk from my point of view is GI (Glycemic Index). Full milk has GI of 41 whereas skimmed milk has a GI of 32 [1]. Obviously the lower GI the better.
[1] http://healthyeating.sfgate.com/milk-really-low-glycemic-440...
Then again, the fitness life has never really been considered the epitome of healthy living...
Don't get me wrong, your focus on the GI index is definitely better than an obsession with low-fat, and something tells me your dietary program is much more than that even though you spared us the fleshed out details.
Well, the "fleshed out details" is obscenely vast subject that I just didn't want to contaminate this discussion with. If there are people practicing something more healthy than fitness then good for them. I am in it to look good and feel good.
Well, this is not news at all. Americans used to consume 8 kilos of butter a year 40 years ago and lots of other fats too.
Now they consume much less fat(but low quality like palm oil), much more sugar, and they are terribly overweight.
People also consume much less fresh products thanks to the refrigerator. Some things will taste similar but carry 10% or less enzymes and vitamins than the fresh thing right after recollection.
Americans also used to use a larger proportion of the workday to do physical labor, walked more, and didn't use computers, among other things that have changed over the past 40 years.
In Germany it is actually quite hard to find skim milk. I guess at least 98% of the milk you see in a supermarket has either 3.8%, 3.5% or 1.8% fat content. In some supermarkets you can find 0.1% milk, but that is quite rare.
97 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 151 ms ] threadYou might never go back because the taste difference is unbelievable.
I always drank whole milk, so skim tasted like water. Then I started only drinking skim milk, and whole tasted like ice cream.
I don't have any dairy issues but it's very, very rare that I drink milk anymore these days, but I still enjoy it.
The first time I had whole milk was at an after school program I went to in elementary school. They fed us a snack first thing when we got there. One day they gave us (whole) milk with our snack. Almost everyone (including me) took a sip and complained the milk was bad/tasted funky. The head person of the place came out and told us the milk was fine, we were all just not used to drinking whole milk.
I still don't like the taste of any cow's milk too much, I prefer unsweetened soy milk. Soy milk also lasts forever in the fridge which is a big plus for me.
I'm not super impressed with the average doctor in the USA these days, but most decent pediatricians tell parents to give kids whole milk. If they are remotely educated on nutrition beyond decades old medical school knowledge, they are aware that current guidelines state that the additional fat soluble nutrients in whole milk are great for kids.
My son's pediatrician told us (when he was 2), "don't even waste your time with anything other than whole milk. Otherwise you get all of the sugar with little of the vitamins"
As you can imagine, this has caused some controversy in the pediatrics world. The pediatrician we go to still recommends whole or 2% milk for our toddler. She actually makes a point to tell us any time her recommendations conflict with the official AAP recommendations and why, which I think is a really nice thing for a doctor to do.
I just hope my kid can still get whole milk when he goes to kindergarten.
Regardless, I think you should be a little more careful when making that kind of claim without any other additional information.
Also, some people may call 1% or 2% "skim milk". In Canada the labels on these milk products are called "partly skimmed milk".
http://www.farmtoconsumer.org/raw_milk_map.htm
What I would like to know is if those not eating high-fat dairy compensate with high-carbs dairy.
The way this article is written led me to think that eating fat would help people avoid obesity which is a very different story than "you should choose high-fat dairy instead of high-carbs dairy"
Anyhow, I'm glad fat is making a come back. There's this weird , untold thinking that eating fat automatically translates to storing fat which is nonsense.
That's an interesting point. I have noticed that a lot of low-fat foods in the store seem to try to compensate for flavor losses by adding sugar. Totally non-scientific observation, but I wonder if there's something more to it.
I always seem to find these massive containers, full of enriched this, and added that. Sometimes flavoured or low-fat.
If I wanted vitamin enriched low-fat something or other I'd be spoilt for choice... but if one wants regular milk, from a cow, untouched except by pasteurisation, well this seems quite difficult.
Was I just going to all the wrong shops?
Before vitamin D fortification which began around the 1st great depression (1930s not 2007), bone deformities due to lack of vitamin D were the norm. Pro-fortification propaganda claims 90%+, anti-fortification propaganda glosses over it only being about half, and relatively minor. So the truth is probably in between.
Its very much like salt. If you know how and where you look you can buy nearly pure NaCl in a store (look in the canning aisle...) but anti-caking Mg salts and iodine are added. After that, gross levels of iodine deficiency were rare.
Or the TLDR is unless you're taking the proper supplements, you're better off not drinking "untouched except by pasteurization" milk. In some states its illegal to sell raw milk or in some states illegal to sell unfortified milk so if you really want to, you have a long evening with google to research which nanny state vs free state to visit and shop.
This is aside from the obvious issue that unless you're a baby cow, perhaps you're an adult human, you really haven't evolved to drink cow milk as an adult human so you almost certainly should not do so, at least not on a regular basis. Human milk would be much healthier balance of nutrients for a human to drink for obvious reasons, although culturally would be considered creepy, and your innards are way too old to be drinking milk anyway if you're posting to HN. Maybe you could industrially adulterate cow milk to make it nutritionally similar to human milk, that would be much healthier and not as culturally creepy as the real stuff.
The only adults who should specifically avoid milk are the ones without the lactase mutation, since they cannot digest the lactose in it. This applies to human milk as well.
* The statement that 'all adults should' is false.
* For any and every adult X, X should not.
The thought might repulse, but human milk at least contains things a child human needs and that other humans can benefit from.
Milk is strange... best not to think about it too much. Best also not to visualise it, which is kinda the problem with human milk.
If you eat meat or eggs, milk's just another animal product, though. Is it really any weirder than eating animal muscle?
Also, there's this: it's freaking delicious. That's usually a pretty good reason to eat something.
The UK doesn't fortify milk with vitamin D, yet they also saw a fall in the number of cases of rickets etc. That would seem to cast doubt on your causation.
But on the other hand, almost everything related to meat, BBQ and burger was much more awesome than in Germany.
I think this might be the difference in how the cows are raised and how often they are milked, perhaps. And their diet. In the US we go for quantity over quality.
I don't know about milk but I know that for eggs it makes a HUGE difference. When I lived in Europe they only sold eggs that were higher quality. The yolks were bright orange and the taste was amazing. In the US most of the eggs have pale yellow yolks because of the chickens' diet being mostly corn soy instead of natural grass or whatever chickens eat and they are raised in stressful conditions. The taste is diluted.
I mostly buy my eggs straight from the farm here in the US. I can see the chickens when I go, they are wandering around on open pasture. The eggs are like the ones from Europe. In the grocery store buying the ones labelled "free range" gives you similar eggs.
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/80/6/1710S.full
Most circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D originates from exposure to sunlight; nevertheless, many factors can impair this process, necessitating periodic reliance on dietary sources to maintain adequate serum concentrations. The US and Canadian populations are largely dependent on fortified foods and dietary supplements to meet these needs, because foods naturally rich in vitamin D are limited. Fluid milk and breakfast cereals are the predominant vehicles for vitamin D in the United States, whereas Canada fortifies fluid milk and margarine. Reports of a high prevalence of hypovitaminosis D and its association with increased risks of chronic diseases have raised concerns regarding the adequacy of current intake levels and the safest and most effective way to increase vitamin D intake in the general population and in vulnerable groups. The usual daily intakes of vitamin D from food alone and from food and supplements combined, as estimated from the US third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, 1988-1994, show median values above the adequate intake of 5 μg/d for children 6-11 y of age; however, median intakes are generally below the adequate intake for female subjects > 12 y of age and men > 50 y. In Canada, there are no national survey data for estimation of intake. Cross-sectional studies suggest that current US/Canadian fortification practices are not effective in preventing hypovitaminosis D, particularly among vulnerable populations during the winter, whereas supplement use shows more promise. Recent prospective intervention studies with higher vitamin D concentrations provided evidence of safety and efficacy for fortification of specific foods and use of supplements.
We also found out about folic acid and how important it is for women to have enough right before she becomes pregnant and in the first couple days/weeks of the developing embryo. This would be before she knows she is pregnant. An adequate supply of folic acid prevents protect against a number of congenital malformations, including neural tube defects which are severe abnormalities of the central nervous system like spina bifida and anencephaly. They result in malformations of the spine, skull, and brain.
So we decided to fortify our grain products in an attempt to prevent this. The fortification is mandatory since 1998.
http://189.28.128.100/nutricao/docs/ferro/impact_folic_acid_...
Conclusions: A 19% reduction in NTD birth prevalence occurred following folic acid fortification of the US food supply. However, factors other than fortification may have contributed to this decline.
http://www.gihealth.com/html/education/lactose.html
So thats chemistry lesson 1, lesson 2 is "lots of stuff" in o-chem class prefers to partition itself in oil or water phase. So at least some ochem lab work involves a sep funnel which is a magic, yet simple, way to do liq vs liq extractions. Stuff moves from being dissolved in liq 1 to being dissolved in liq 2. Its a law of nature that its impossible for an undergrad lab involving a sep funnel to not have an accident or incident of some sort, usually more funny than dangerous. Not surprisingly one liquid is usually polar and one is usually non-polar because you can't do much of an extraction if liq 1 and liq 2 mix perfectly to create liq 3. And the sep fraction is often crazy, if you work the polar / nonpolar hard enough. I would imagine the sep fraction for salt or sugar in water/veg oil could be nearly a million, like the only salt in veg oil might be mechanical turbidity/suspension. Thats just a guess but I'm sure its ridiculously high if not a million. You can still have a "useful at lab scale" extraction if its only a factor of 2 or so, just pointing out its not shocking to be much higher.
Anyway the point of this chem discussion is there is no such thing as milk, there's a liquid that comes out of a cow and its got all kinds of crazy stuff in it, some of which STRONGLY partitions into either the polar or nonpolar phase. So the eventual discovery is probably going to be some kind of hormone, protein, mineral, herbicide, antiseptic, antibiotic, pesticide, solvent, "something" that strongly partitions / dissolves into fat and not into water. In the list above, hormones, herbicides, pesticides, and solvents tend to partition strongly into fat, the other stuff is a tough call one way or the other.
I would theorize that other animals living in the same contaminated conditions would partition the same way. Us mammals are not as biochemically different as some think. So its entirely possible you'd get the same effect from eating fatty meat, perhaps bacon, or foods cooked in (or made with) lard. Its worth some study.
This means that any effects seen could be due to the additional compounds as well as the fats that have been removed. I am not sure it is possible to distinguish what is the major cause for the effects seen.
There's no mention of ruling this out in the article, though I didn't read the study itself to see how/if they addressed it.
The nutrients in dairy are all fat soluble and so there some things that specifically target the excretion of fat from our systems. Drinking full fat milk will have more of those nutrients as it comes in bound to fat.
There may be some amount of causation going on because of milk (Dairy calcium specifically).
BBC documentary talks about the calcium thing here:http://vimeo.com/m/18339967
Gary taubes http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lDneyrETR2o and Robert lustig http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM talk about the carbohydrate hypothesis
A misleading oversimplification. Maintaing a net-energy-surplus is the causes of fat storage. Insulin is just one piece of the mechanics of how surplus energy gets stored as fat. There's no need to worry at all about insulin; just don't eat too much, and you don't get fat.
> Carbohydrates trigger a large insulin response while fats cause no insulin response (protein is somewhere in the middle)
ORLY? Show me a biochemistry text book that dares to tout this nonsense.
Bust insulin mythology: http://weightology.net/weightologyweekly/?page_id=319
Gary Taubes again.... sigh....
> The nutrients in dairy are all fat soluble
Sorry but I don't think those words mean what you think they mean.
/// These data indicate that protein given with glucose will increase insulin secretion and reduce the plasma glucose rise in at least some type II diabetic persons. SOURCE: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6389060
It didn't take me long to find these two papers which find evidence of the antagonistic effect on glucose & insulin by the consumption of fat and protein. It doesn't look like nonsense to me.
Fat soluble vitamins and even chemicals like Caffeine or even Glutathione are absorbed more eficiently when mixed with fat.
Not that nature is perfect but it does get a lot of things right...whole fat milk seems to likely be more optimal than reduced fat milk.
Anyway, from what I've read, both blood glucose & insulin should be kept at reasonably stable levels. (ie. not too high) Therefore, maybe a combination of glycemic load index and insulin index would be helpful. Also, knowing now the effect of beef on insulin, I think it means we should be careful to eat small portions of meat or limit how often we eat meat.
I'm really amazed that these findings are only now being made.
No, I meant that the experiment I linked to didn't test fat's insulin stimulating ability in isolation. I didn't mean to suggest there's little other than fat in beef.
Testing the various amino acids would probably not be very useful. Do not subjugate fundamental principles to minor details. Which is also important when considering the effects of insulin. Basically it's not important at all as long as you don't eat too much food. Eating appropriate amounts of food is a fundamental principle; worrying about insulin levels is a minor detail.
> I think it means we should be careful to eat small portions of meat or limit how often we eat meat.
No, it does not. That may be confirmation bias at play. Are you a vegetarian/vegan? Remember that one of insulin's roles it to move nutrients from the bloodstream and into cells. beef is a very nutritionally dense food; you would need to eat 5 pounds of broccoli to get he same protein in an 8oz steak (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=100g+steak+vs.+1000g+br...). So it makes sense that when more nutrients enter the bloodstream, more insulin is required to move it all into our tissues. Carbs are the macronutrient "closest" in form to cellular fuel (glycogen). It takes a LOT more work to use protein as fuel than it does to use carbs. This is known as the "thermal effect" of food; how much energy is required to convert food into cellular fuel. .... and now I'm rambling... :P
While I'm not sure that "Taubes again sigh" is an argument I'm on board with (ad hominem fallacy?), nor is ORLY? A compelling argument (ad CAPS et meme fallacy?) I'm happy to adjust my understanding based on new evidence.
I'll happily read your reference and try determine if there is anything of value in it.
As well, fat solubility was presented to me as I passed it on in my comment, if my understanding is off I'd happily adjust to newer and better information.
When I started learning, I fell for the fallacious claims of Lustig, Taubes, the low-carbers, the paloetards; damn I was convinced! But then I switched to biochemistry & nutrition college textbooks and now a couple years later I've shed most of my overconfidence-of-a-novice. But I get very frustrated to see so many other people like I was, believing things that are just not true.
The most important advice I've ever read about nutrition is: NO NOT SUBJUGATE FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES TO MINOR DETAILS. Net-energy balance is a fundamental principle. Obsessing over carb-types and insulin levels are minor details. It's like worrying about the candied-cherry on top of a HUGE piece of cake. The calories in the cake contribute 1000x more to your body-comp than the cherry. Another example is that adding every supplement you read is "good for you" will not contribute to your health anywhere nearly as much as a daily 45 min walk. Do not subjugate fundamental principles to minor details.
However there is a significant causative relationship between becoming overweight and increased blood-serum cholesterol.
It's more that being fat "clogs your arteries" than eating fat.
Correlation doesn't imply anything about causation, though the article itself is all about how maybe full-fat dairy causes lower obesity.
My point is that perhaps obesity causes less consumption of full-fat dairy (because "I'm getting kind of overweight; I'll get the low-fat one") OR there may be another factor that's causing both effects -- e.g., organic yoghurt is much more likely to be "natural" (full-fat), and people who eat a lot of organic food as part of choosing their diet tend to eat heathier (less fattening) meals.
I'm making both of these up -- but both situations explain a correlation/association between full-fat dairy and lower obesity without full-fat dairy causing lower obesity. A good study needs to rule this kind of stuff out to be useful.
Often, unfortunately, the study itself mentions various confounding factors, alternate explanations, etc., and the reporting just ignores all that, cherry-picks the desired "result" and poses the headline as a question to be safe.
If they're tracking two measurements, and observing a correlation, "people who get obese stop eating full fat yoghurt" needs to be ruled out of the effect, somehow.
But why don't you just go find an explicit flaw in their methodology, rather than assuming there must be an obvious one there?
From experience, I tend to suspect the article is at fault, not the study, though the error of "spinning a study to make it appear to prove something it didn't" is unfortunately rather more common than something like "didn't mention anything about how the study showed causation".
It may be a statistical bias...
Like "people who eat foie gras are leaner", which is probably true too.
Ignore the headlines. The best diet advice I've heard is Michael Pollan's: "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants."
So it's better to accept these fuzzy arguments from authority than to try to develop a model of optimal nutrition from actual scientific research?
Full fat homogenised milk also created a greasy slick on top of any hot drink you added it to.
Since then I've only consumed semi-skimmed milk. It's a shame we mess about with perfectly good natural products such as milk.
Don't get me wrong, your focus on the GI index is definitely better than an obsession with low-fat, and something tells me your dietary program is much more than that even though you spared us the fleshed out details.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/opinion/sunday/why-nutriti...
Now they consume much less fat(but low quality like palm oil), much more sugar, and they are terribly overweight.
People also consume much less fresh products thanks to the refrigerator. Some things will taste similar but carry 10% or less enzymes and vitamins than the fresh thing right after recollection.