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Comment by brians | Hacker News Reader

The US FDA requires that schools not serve whole milk or any products containing normal and natural saturated fats, and instead serve “low fat” versions which literally remove the fats and replace them with sugar.

You say nobody is doing this, but all the subsidized meals for my kids do this.

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Skim/lowfat milk just... takes the cream out.

The same rule changes tightened the rules on added sugar.

Taking the cream out is (by some diet theories) bad. The fat in whole milk slows down the absorption of lactose, leading to a slower rise in blood glucose compared to skim milk. Whole milk is more satiating as well, because of the fat.

If you are trying to have some reasonable balance of fat, protein, and carbs in your diet, pushing kids from whole to skim milk is going to move the diet towards consuming more sugar/carbs, even if you have a seperate rule trying to tighten sugar consumption.

None of that makes "remove the fats and replace them with sugar" in the post upthread accurate.

When you take a high satiety, high fat item, and replace it with a non-fat, low satiety item, you are in effect replacing fat with sugar, because you will eat/drink more of it to get same number of calories, and same amount of fullness.

Milk is not high satiety, come on now.

Drink a glass of whole milk, then drink a cup of skim milk and tell me there is no difference. Try the same with full fat yogurt and non-fat yogurt. Big difference in satiety, but more importantly blood sugar response. Roughly the same amount of fat in a glass of whole milk as 1/4 pound burger.

I don't think anyone ( at least around me ) is drinking milk based drink twice as much just because they feel like they get less energy per drink from skimmed milk.

You are making an argument that people do so, do you have any evidence for this ?

>Big difference in satiety, but more importantly blood sugar response.

There is a negligible difference in glycemic index / glycemic load between the variations of M.F. milk products. Some analysis has skim milk as having a lower GI.

Unflavoured Milk is not relevant to the GI conversation.

>Drink a glass of whole milk, then drink a cup of skim milk and tell me there is no difference

Ok, there's no different.

Beyond that, Minor differents in glycemic load are irrelevant if you're consuming milk with a meal, like the kids in school are doing.

Skim milk is not "low fat". It is fat free. In the US milk labeled as low fat is 1% or 2% milk fat (usually 2%). Whole milk is around 4%. Skim milk rounds to 0%.

2% milk is a pretty good balance.

> Skim milk is not "low fat"

Read the slash as “or”, not “also known as”.

In my country the lowest fat milk has added lactose.

It did twenty years ago, when I noticed, I have not bought it since

Is it added deliberately or just concentrated as a side-effect? Say fat comprised, let me guess, 5% of whole milk volume. If you take away this 5% v/v component, now everything else in one liter of skim milk is 5% concentrated by comparison, unless they add water.

Listed as an ingredient

For the milk you don't add sugar directly, but you end up adding more carbs to the rest of the meal when you take out nothing but fat from the milk.

Whole milk is 4% milkfat, to skim's 0%. We're not talking much here.

The fat is about half the calories. Removing all the fat reduces the calories in milk, but now it's 60% sugar calories instead of 33%. It's much.

That's like saying a dollar bill is worth more if I give the rest of my money away.

It's saying it's you give all your change away and then replace it with new money then you increase your bill value.

The meal does not get smaller. The meal has a calorie target, and the milkfat gets replaced with new food. And almost never will that new food be a chunk of lard, so it will increase the carb ratio.

>which literally remove the fats and replace them with sugar.

This is not accurate.

No they didn't "replace" the fats with sugar. There is a chocolate milk option, just as there was before, but all options need to be 1% or low M.F., which nutrition and medical science overwhelmingly supports.

Is chocolate milk not ideal? Of course. We all know that. They shouldn't serve it either.

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