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Comment by purerandomness | Hacker News Reader

Alternative hypothesis: People who choose to trade flavour for lower milk fat tend to also be more risk-aware, prefer a healthier lifestyle (don't smoke, work out) which contribute to slower telomere shortening.

People who chose flavour over lower milk fat would probably self-describe as "living the moment", likely tend to favour short-time gratification more, and do more activities that lead to faster telomere shortening.

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Obviously this is an anecdote, but what's ironic is that in my life, the "generally healthier" people all opt for either whole-milk or alternative kinds of milk (almond, oat, etc.), whereas the overweight people I know almost always opt for skim milk.

I am a pretty active person and health-conscious, and in my group, we all typically agree that we aren't fond of the substitutes made in skim milk.

I have observed the same thing. Drink skim milk, diet soda and then ear ice creams, burgers and fries. It's to lie to themselves, I think.

I don't think it's lying, I think it's getting the lower-calorie product where it's good enough, but there simply aren't good low-calorie fries.

"I'mma have a soda. Coke and Coke Zero have equal flavor value for me. Might as well get the Coke Zero."

"I'mma have a side dish. Kale and Fries do not have equal flavor value for me. I'll get the fries."

No doubt. If I could get a diet burger and diet fries, same quantity, about the same taste, sure I would. Diet soda seems just as good from what I can tell. A veggie burger is nowhere near as good as a fat greasy hamburger.

Anecdotal, of course, but this is exactly the way I viewed things before I fully dedicated to the change in my diet.

That's why it's so hard to figure out the long term effects of a lot of foods. People who do/don't eat X, tend to make other choices as well, which can easily have a bigger impact than X itself. Plus people are notoriously unreliable in accurately reporting what they eat and do.

We'd need to have long term randomized controlled trials where the only difference between groups is the one variable. Which there's no ethical way to accomplish.

So unless we figure out some other method, I suspect we'll never really know about many things in nutrition until we have fully accurate human simulations...

You could totally be drinking whole if you wanted to.

Whole milk is where it is at! Full flavor while leaving you feeling satisfied.

the researchers took steps to mitigate the potential effects of confounding variables:

https://new.hindawi.com/journals/omcl/2019/1574021/

Serious question - would it make these studies more accurate if in addition, the scientists were also able to control for differences in dna? ie, maybe protein absorption is not as good in a significant amount of the tested population for this study.

They did, but you can only control what you know.

My thoughts exactly. Does that 1% of extra fat really have such a negative effect o your body?

I drink milk almost daily. Over a lifetime it might.

You win!

I also think it should say “correlates with” rather than account for.

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