The Full-Fat Paradox: Whole Milk May Keep Us Lean
npr.org
npr.org
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".
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.
You 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".
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.
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.
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.
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?
It may be a statistical bias...
Like "people who eat foie gras are leaner", which is probably true too.
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.
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...