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Comment by nullorempty | Hacker News Reader

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Did you just get in from the 90s? I haven't seen anyone pitch a fat-free diet since I was a child (barring a relevant health issue).

So we got smarter in the last 20+ years.

Stores still don't carry whole milk in canada.

I'm in Alberta (Canada), and I just saw some in the grocery store last week. I actually can't recall ever seeing a store without 3.25% milk here. It's usually called "homo(genized) milk" rather than "whole milk", but those two phrases both mean the exact same thing.

Whole refers to the fat content and homogenized refers to a process used to better suspend the fat in the milk to prevent separation. Almost all milk you buy is probably homogenized. They don't technically mean the same thing but if the only thing you see is homogenized on the container, it's probably whole milk.

You are correct that all milk undergoes a homogenization process, but for whatever reason, only 3.25% milk is labelled as "homogenized" in Canada. Even the ingredients/fine-print are like this too, so it's not just a marketing thing [0] [1].

This could be a regional thing though: out east milk typically comes in bags [2], but I'm in the west and have only ever seen milk in bottles, so it wouldn't surprise me if the term for 3.25% milk was different in the east too.

[0]: https://www.obviouslygoodmilk.ca/en/products/milks/lucerne-3...

[1]: https://www.obviouslygoodmilk.ca/en/products/milks/lucerne-2...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_bag#Canada

Dating someone in eastern Canada and seeing bagged milk was wild to my American brain - who puts milk in a _bag???_

3.25% is whole milk, they absolutely sell it in Canada.

Interesting, US grocery stores never stopped carrying whole milk. It was readily available amidst the 90s fat panic. It’s what my family always bought.

It’s convenient to buy fat-free products to lower caloric density of everyday food. Given mostly sedentary lifestyle, maintaining healthy caloric intake is pretty hard, and limiting fats (not only fat-free dairy, but also lean meats) and sugars really helps. Note limiting, not excluding — going extreme fat-free is definitely bad for health, and it also takes huge effort compared to just limiting.

Going fat-free will ruin your health and energy, going sugar-free will only improve it.

Probably the difference is that extracting as many calories as possible from food was a guarantor of survival for the neanderthals whereas that's not so true with the level of calorie abundance we have in the western world, partly because of analogous fat refining processes we also use.

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