SKIM MILK
…MAKES YOU FAT AND LEADS TO HEART DISEASE
No, this is no joke headline…there is no punch line to follow. Only a punch to the stomach for those (myself included for many years) who believed the inaccurate, misinformed dogma which has been fed to us over the past 50 or so years that whole fat milk is bad…and low fat and skim milk is best for a healthy diet.
Prior to World War II and into the 50’s and 60’s few Americans ever drank skim or lowfat milk. Drinking such a product to stay “thin and healthy” would have been laughable to our grandparents. Heck, my granddad would have tipped his glass of fresh milked whole fat milk, and said…hogwash! Americans then drank whole milk. In fact, the thinking was…the larger the “cream-line” on their milk bottle or glass, the higher quality the milk.
So, how did skim milk become recognized as a necessary “health food” in America? It all ties back to the war on saturated fats. Americans began to abandon butter and cream in droves about this time because studies had “apparently” shown that saturated fat was responsible for the growing number of heart disease cases in America. Animal fat / saturated fat became the devil in our diet. With Americans abandoning whole milk due to its high saturated fat content, skim milk was touted as the new heart healthy food. Americans bought the scam hook, line, and sinker. Skim milk was the new king of the dairy aisle.
This behavior pattern has continued for decades despite the average American getting fatter and fatter and the cases of heart disease showing no signs of abating. Later, with the beginnings of the childhood obesity epidemic, doctors even started to encourage parents to switch their children to skim or lowfat milk around age 2. This foolish recommendation has done nothing but make kids fatter….THAT’S RIGHT YOU READ IT CORRECTLY….FATTER!
A new study published on March 18, 2013 in the Archives of Disease in Childhood, a sister publication of the British Medical Journal studied 10,700 preschoolers. It found that kids drinking lowfat milk tend to be heavier than those drinking whole milk...
- children who drank skim (1%) milk were the fattest of all regardless of of race, ethnicity or socio-economic status.
- children who drank low-fat 2% milk drinking children had the next highest BMI (body mass index)
- children who drank whole milk were the leanest of all.
- There data also indicated that use of lowfat milk did not restrain weight gain in preschoolers over time.
A 2005 a study published in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine concluded that skim and 1% milk were associated with weight gain in children aged 9-14, but dairy fat was not. Another study, in 2010 published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, found that switching from whole milk to reduced-fat milk at age 2 years did not appear to prevent overweight issues in early childhood.
So, how does drinking skim milk make kids (and adults) fatter? This apparent paradox occurs when you reduce the saturated fat in a person’s diet and he/she turns to carbs (grains and sugars primarily) to fill in the gap. It is the grains and sugars that truly make you fat, not saturated fat.
If you drink skim milk, you will be missing out on the filling, satisfying, blood sugar and insulin steadying affects of saturated fat, so your body will automatically give you sugar and carb (grains) cravings to make up for it. The body is able to MAKE saturated fat out of sugars, hence the sugar cravings that are impossible to control when you eat a lowfat diet that includes skim milk.
At first glance it may be hard to understand for some why a diet high in carbs, ie flour and cereals, can lead to obesity. It’s really just simple chemistry. Turns out, your body makes fat from carbohydrates. It works like this: The carbs you eat (particularly starches and sugar) are absorbed into your bloodstream as sugar. As your carb intake rises, so does your blood sugar. The sugars stimulate the production of the hormone insulin. Insulin's job is to return your blood sugar to normal, but it also causes fat cells to go into storage overdrive. Your liver starts converting excess blood sugar to triglycerides, or fat, which is stored strategically around our bodies if not burned off with exercise.
Restricting carbs keeps insulin levels low, which lowers your internal production of fat and allows more of the fat you do eat to be burned for energy. On the other hand cream, the fat component of milk, steadies blood sugar levels for extended periods of time. There are no ups and downs in insulin when your diet has lots of wonderful saturated fat in it. It’s only when you eat low fat that blood sugar issues such as diabetes and hypoglycemia tend to rise.
There is another big reason to avoid skim milk. Most do not know the big secret that Big Dairy adds skim milk powder to skim milk. Here’s an excerpt from “Dirty Secrets of the Food Processing Industry” from the Weston A. Price Website:
A note on the production of skim milk powder: liquid milk is forced through a tiny hole at high pressure, and then blown out into the air. This causes a lot of nitrates to form and the cholesterol in the milk is oxidized. Those of you who are familiar with my work know that cholesterol is your best friend; you don’t have to worry about natural cholesterol in your food; however, you do not want to eat oxidized cholesterol. Oxidized cholesterol contributes to the buildup of plaque in the arteries, to atherosclerosis. So when you drink reduced-fat milk thinking that it will help you avoid heart disease, you are actually consuming oxidized cholesterol, which initiates the process of heart disease.
Take home lesson for parents? Give your kids whole milk like Grandma and Grandpa did.
Taking the fat out of milk doesn’t help one iota in reducing a child’s chances of overweight and obesity. On the other hand, giving a child whole milk appears to be protective of a healthy weight in childhood!
One parting fact: pig farmers love feeding skim milk to their pigs. Why? It makes them REALLY fat!