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Comment by JPKab | Hacker News Reader

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"

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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.

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".

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.

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