9 ms·

The Full-Fat Paradox: Whole Milk May Keep Us Lean

55 points by mattjaynes 13y ago

colinbartlett 13y ago
If you've been drinking 2% milk since childhood because that's what your family drank, I suggest you try whole milk. You might never go back because the taste difference is unbelievable.
- borplk 13y ago
  Please pardon my ignorance but what exactly is the difference?
  - bluedino 13y ago
    It's just different. From whole to 2% to skim you have big differences in how rich the milk tastes. Once you get used to one, it's hard to go back to the others. 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.
  - aestra 13y ago
    It tastes completely different, much thicker, much rich. 2% tastes almost like water compared to whole milk. 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.
- skywhopper 13y ago
  It's even better if you grew up drinking skim or 1/2%.
- clarkevans 13y ago
  My 4 year old daughter was drinking a modest amount whole milk when the pediatrician recommended we switch to skim milk. We did, and her consumption of Milk more than doubled (skim milk is sweeter and lighter) and she got more irritable (more sugar?). We switched back.
  - JPKab 13y ago
    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"
    - bhousel 13y ago
      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-initiatives/HALF-Implementation-Guide/Pages/About-HALF.aspx 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.
      - Consultant32452 13y ago
        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."
- _delirium 13y ago
  I've tried it on and off but have trouble actually drinking a glass. Using it to make a rich hot chocolate works for me, but I can't drink a glass of plain, unflavored whole milk... just tastes gross, like I'm drinking some kind of butter-in-water mixture. Sort of how I like butter on toast, but not by itself on a spoon. (Warm whole milk, as is popular in some countries, is even worse.)
  - db48x 13y ago
    That's because milk _is_ tiny chunks of butter suspended in water. Agitating the milk causes the fat globules to collide and occasionally stick together.
  - yoodenvranx 13y ago
    Have you ever tried warm whole milk mixed with honey? That's my favorite drink for cold days.
    - bhousel 13y ago
      Yes, this is good! Also try it with some cardamom and vanilla.
      - _delirium 13y ago
        Hmm, this actually sounds promising. I do like hot chocolate made with whole milk, so other variations on the spiced-milk idea might work too.
    - colinbartlett 13y ago
      Don't forget a little bit of salted butter in there, too!
  - JoeAltmaier 13y ago
    Its about expectation. Pick up a glass of milk thinking its orange juice, drink it - it's gross! Then you look - oh, OJ, that's ok then.
- omnibrain 13y ago
  And then try raw, unhomogenized, unpasteurized milk. :D It will feel like angels dancing on your tongue.
  - shiftpgdn 13y ago
    That's illegal in most if not all of the US.
    - 213424355352255 13y ago
      Not really. There are many states that allow farmers to sell raw milk; some only for pet consumption. The illegal part is generally about 'smuggling' raw milk across state borders.
    - drcube 13y ago
      No, it isn't. It's illegal to sell it across state lines, or in some places to the general public. But in most states, you can buy it at a farm, or other licensed facility. It isn't like heroin, or even pot, and you won't get in trouble for possession. http://www.farmtoconsumer.org/raw_milk_map.htm http://www.farmtoconsumer.org/raw_milk_map.htm
      - shiftpgdn 13y ago
        Looks like I'm wrong, but it also looks like in most of the country where you can buy it you can only buy it from the farmer directly. So it's still not easy to get.
  - actionscripted 13y ago
    With the added benefit of being able to chew it all day.
  - 213424355352255 13y ago
    Wish I could upvote this more. The health difference between pasteurized milk and raw milk is roughly equivalent to the flavor difference between the two - huge. If you must drink pasteurized milk, full fat is your only option.
- x0x0 13y ago
  and 1% or skim taste like dirty water
pothibo 13y ago
> middle-aged men who consumed high-fat milk, butter and cream were significantly less likely to become obese over a period of 12 years compared to men who never or rarely ate high-fat dairy. 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.
- aethertap 13y ago
  > What I would like to know is if those not eating high-fat dairy compensate with high-carbs dairy. 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.
  - ihsw 13y ago
    All things considered, things that are low-fat/no-fat and low-sugar/no-sugar taste like cardboard and they're not very filling at all. I'm quite sure that our food overlords discovered that fairly quickly, and just as quickly they realized that consuming sugary bullshit had similar physiological effects compared to opiate addiction.
buro9 13y ago
As an aside, why is that every time I've been to the USA I cannot seem to just buy fresh whole 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?
- joshuapants 13y ago
  Plenty of whole milk around me from a variety of dairies. Probably depends on where you were geographically and which stores in particular you went to
  - maxerickson 13y ago
    A large percentage of U.S. milk has vitamin D added.
- VLM 13y ago
  "full of enriched this" 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.
sambeau 13y ago
Another misconception is that skimmed and semi-skimmed milk would be better for lactose intolerance—it isn't as there is a similar (if not slightly higher) concentration of lactose in skimmed and semi-skimmed milk http://www.gihealth.com/html/education/lactose.html http://www.gihealth.com/html/education/lactose.html
VLM 13y ago
From a chemistry point of view milk is an emulsion of cow fats dispersed in water (and some proteins, and electrolytes, not relevant to this discussion). Shaking up milk or using a churn breaks the emulsion and you get solid butter. Strangely about 95% of the population has no idea where butter comes from beyond "it comes from the store". Ordinarily water and oil don't mix very well. Some really tasty foods (not just milk) involve oil/water emulsions, sauces, gravys, salad dressings, mayonnaise, to a greater or lesser extent raw baked good doughs, etc. 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.
- orjan 13y ago
  I'm not a chemist so this was a bit difficult to parse for me. As I understand it, you're suggesting that the effect is not caused by the fat per se, but by some compound that is dissolved in the fat. Am I correct?
jtheory 13y ago
I hope they're correcting for the reversed causation -- i.e., if you notice you're getting pretty overweight, you're more likely to avoid full-fat yoghurt, whereas if you are staying lean (for completely unrelated reasons), you're not nearly as likely to worry about it. 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.
- netnichols 13y ago
  Exactly. I kept waiting for that to come up in the story and it never did. Would love for someone less lazy than myself to look at the actual paper and find out if this is addressed.
- alexc05 13y ago
  Chemically it is insulin that triggers the signal in our body to store fat. Carbohydrates trigger a large insulin response while fats cause no insulin response (protein is somewhere in the middle) 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 http://vimeo.com/m/18339967 Gary taubes http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lDneyrETR2o http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lDneyrETR2o and Robert lustig http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM talk about the carbohydrate hypothesis
  - jp555 13y ago
    > Chemically it is insulin that triggers the signal in our body to store fat. 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 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.
weddpros 13y ago
Maybe there's a category of people who eat healthier and are leaner, and they could buy whole milk because they consider it's healthier too. It may be a statistical bias... Like "people who eat foie gras are leaner", which is probably true too.
skywhopper 13y ago
Take this report with the same grain of salt it's recommending taking the conventional wisdom of avoiding dairy fat. These diet studies focus on extremely narrow questions and generally have homogenous (pun intended) population samples. Ignore the headlines. The best diet advice I've heard is Michael Pollan's: "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants."
- TelmoMenezes 13y ago
  > 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?
  - streptomycin 13y ago
    If you really study the scientific research (i.e. you don't just read a headline in a newspaper saying "SCIENTISTS SAY COFFEE IS GOOD" or "SCIENTISTS SAY COFFEE IS BAD" and you actually understand the limitations of nutrition study design and the conflicting results across seemingly similar studies), you'll come to about the same conclusion: there are tons of uncertainties in nutrition, and eating lots of plants is about the least uncertain advice out there.
  - skywhopper 13y ago
    Unfortunately, science is nowhere close to understanding the human body sufficiently to make any specific claims about "optimal nutrition". I'm not sure it will ever be possible. The human body is just far too complex and dynamic a system.
teh_klev 13y ago
One of the things that ruined full fat milk for me in the UK was the introduction of homogenised milk. It ruined my morning porridge where my dad and I would pour off the cream that settled at the top as a breakfast treat. Homogenisation spoiled that for us. 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.
- TausAmmer 13y ago
  You have some farms in UK where you can buy raw milk, expensive - yes, but worth it. I can drink milk again :)
- aestra 13y ago
  So wait, you can't just buy cream in the UK? What would be the difference than skimming it off the top? I'm also wondering if you can make your own non-homogenized milk by mixing the cream with the skim milk. Full fat milk is 4% cream.
  - teh_klev 13y ago
    Yes, you can buy cream on its own, but that wasn't what I was getting at. The point was that in non-homogenised milk, the cream naturally separated to the top of the bottle. It wasn't a lot, but just enough to make porridge better. It was a tradition/ritual thing. Also the cream wasn't as thick as say even single cream. I suspect (and no offence intended) you're a good few years younger than I am to have experienced these things. :)
    - aestra 13y ago
      Oh I know exactly what you're talking about. Just was making a suggestion. I am in my 30s I understand the physics completely and always did even before your post.
neverminder 13y ago
I'm quite involved in fitness and I know a thing or two about diet. Milk is not bad, it never was. The only significant difference of full milk and skimmed milk from my point of view is GI (Glycemic Index). Full milk has GI of 41 whereas skimmed milk has a GI of 32 [1]. Obviously the lower GI the better. [1] http://healthyeating.sfgate.com/milk-really-low-glycemic-4404.html http://healthyeating.sfgate.com/milk-really-low-glycemic-440...
- hrkristian 13y ago
  Then again, the fitness life has never really been considered the epitome of healthy living... 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.
  - neverminder 13y ago
    Well, the "fleshed out details" is obscenely vast subject that I just didn't want to contaminate this discussion with. If there are people practicing something more healthy than fitness then good for them. I am in it to look good and feel good.
mhb 13y ago
Why Nutrition is So Confusing: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/opinion/sunday/why-nutrition-is-so-confusing.html?hp&rref=opinion http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/opinion/sunday/why-nutriti...
forgottenpaswrd 13y ago
Well, this is not news at all. Americans used to consume 8 kilos of butter a year 40 years ago and lots of other fats too. 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.
- _delirium 13y ago
  Americans also used to use a larger proportion of the workday to do physical labor, walked more, and didn't use computers, among other things that have changed over the past 40 years.
w1zd0m 13y ago
the article quotes the president of the "dairy council" and ceo of a milk company.. uhhhh not sure were seeing the 'whole' picture here. lame
yoodenvranx 13y ago
In Germany it is actually quite hard to find skim milk. I guess at least 98% of the milk you see in a supermarket has either 3.8%, 3.5% or 1.8% fat content. In some supermarkets you can find 0.1% milk, but that is quite rare.
boon 13y ago
It's only a paradox if you believe in the first place that dietary animal fat is bad for you.
michaelbuddy 13y ago
organic whole milk is pretty much the only I can enjoy. The rest tastes awful.

55 points by mattjaynes 13y ago

If you've been drinking 2% milk since childhood because that's what your family drank, I suggest you try whole milk. You might never go back because the taste difference is unbelievable.

borplk 13y ago
Please pardon my ignorance but what exactly is the difference?
- bluedino 13y ago
  It's just different. From whole to 2% to skim you have big differences in how rich the milk tastes. Once you get used to one, it's hard to go back to the others. 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.
- aestra 13y ago
  It tastes completely different, much thicker, much rich. 2% tastes almost like water compared to whole milk. 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.
skywhopper 13y ago
It's even better if you grew up drinking skim or 1/2%.
clarkevans 13y ago
My 4 year old daughter was drinking a modest amount whole milk when the pediatrician recommended we switch to skim milk. We did, and her consumption of Milk more than doubled (skim milk is sweeter and lighter) and she got more irritable (more sugar?). We switched back.
- JPKab 13y ago
  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"
  - bhousel 13y ago
    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-initiatives/HALF-Implementation-Guide/Pages/About-HALF.aspx 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.
    - Consultant32452 13y ago
      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."
_delirium 13y ago
I've tried it on and off but have trouble actually drinking a glass. Using it to make a rich hot chocolate works for me, but I can't drink a glass of plain, unflavored whole milk... just tastes gross, like I'm drinking some kind of butter-in-water mixture. Sort of how I like butter on toast, but not by itself on a spoon. (Warm whole milk, as is popular in some countries, is even worse.)
- db48x 13y ago
  That's because milk _is_ tiny chunks of butter suspended in water. Agitating the milk causes the fat globules to collide and occasionally stick together.
- yoodenvranx 13y ago
  Have you ever tried warm whole milk mixed with honey? That's my favorite drink for cold days.
  - bhousel 13y ago
    Yes, this is good! Also try it with some cardamom and vanilla.
    - _delirium 13y ago
      Hmm, this actually sounds promising. I do like hot chocolate made with whole milk, so other variations on the spiced-milk idea might work too.
  - colinbartlett 13y ago
    Don't forget a little bit of salted butter in there, too!
- JoeAltmaier 13y ago
  Its about expectation. Pick up a glass of milk thinking its orange juice, drink it - it's gross! Then you look - oh, OJ, that's ok then.
omnibrain 13y ago
And then try raw, unhomogenized, unpasteurized milk. :D It will feel like angels dancing on your tongue.
- shiftpgdn 13y ago
  That's illegal in most if not all of the US.
  - 213424355352255 13y ago
    Not really. There are many states that allow farmers to sell raw milk; some only for pet consumption. The illegal part is generally about 'smuggling' raw milk across state borders.
  - drcube 13y ago
    No, it isn't. It's illegal to sell it across state lines, or in some places to the general public. But in most states, you can buy it at a farm, or other licensed facility. It isn't like heroin, or even pot, and you won't get in trouble for possession. http://www.farmtoconsumer.org/raw_milk_map.htm http://www.farmtoconsumer.org/raw_milk_map.htm
    - shiftpgdn 13y ago
      Looks like I'm wrong, but it also looks like in most of the country where you can buy it you can only buy it from the farmer directly. So it's still not easy to get.
- actionscripted 13y ago
  With the added benefit of being able to chew it all day.
- 213424355352255 13y ago
  Wish I could upvote this more. The health difference between pasteurized milk and raw milk is roughly equivalent to the flavor difference between the two - huge. If you must drink pasteurized milk, full fat is your only option.
x0x0 13y ago
and 1% or skim taste like dirty water

pothibo 13y ago

> middle-aged men who consumed high-fat milk, butter and cream were significantly less likely to become obese over a period of 12 years compared to men who never or rarely ate high-fat dairy. 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.

aethertap 13y ago
> What I would like to know is if those not eating high-fat dairy compensate with high-carbs dairy. 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.
- ihsw 13y ago
  All things considered, things that are low-fat/no-fat and low-sugar/no-sugar taste like cardboard and they're not very filling at all. I'm quite sure that our food overlords discovered that fairly quickly, and just as quickly they realized that consuming sugary bullshit had similar physiological effects compared to opiate addiction.

buro9 13y ago

As an aside, why is that every time I've been to the USA I cannot seem to just buy fresh whole 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?

joshuapants 13y ago
Plenty of whole milk around me from a variety of dairies. Probably depends on where you were geographically and which stores in particular you went to
- maxerickson 13y ago
  A large percentage of U.S. milk has vitamin D added.
VLM 13y ago
"full of enriched this" 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.

sambeau 13y ago

Another misconception is that skimmed and semi-skimmed milk would be better for lactose intolerance—it isn't as there is a similar (if not slightly higher) concentration of lactose in skimmed and semi-skimmed milk http://www.gihealth.com/html/education/lactose.html http://www.gihealth.com/html/education/lactose.html

VLM 13y ago

From a chemistry point of view milk is an emulsion of cow fats dispersed in water (and some proteins, and electrolytes, not relevant to this discussion). Shaking up milk or using a churn breaks the emulsion and you get solid butter. Strangely about 95% of the population has no idea where butter comes from beyond "it comes from the store". Ordinarily water and oil don't mix very well. Some really tasty foods (not just milk) involve oil/water emulsions, sauces, gravys, salad dressings, mayonnaise, to a greater or lesser extent raw baked good doughs, etc. 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.

orjan 13y ago
I'm not a chemist so this was a bit difficult to parse for me. As I understand it, you're suggesting that the effect is not caused by the fat per se, but by some compound that is dissolved in the fat. Am I correct?

jtheory 13y ago

I hope they're correcting for the reversed causation -- i.e., if you notice you're getting pretty overweight, you're more likely to avoid full-fat yoghurt, whereas if you are staying lean (for completely unrelated reasons), you're not nearly as likely to worry about it. 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.

netnichols 13y ago
Exactly. I kept waiting for that to come up in the story and it never did. Would love for someone less lazy than myself to look at the actual paper and find out if this is addressed.
alexc05 13y ago
Chemically it is insulin that triggers the signal in our body to store fat. Carbohydrates trigger a large insulin response while fats cause no insulin response (protein is somewhere in the middle) 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 http://vimeo.com/m/18339967 Gary taubes http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lDneyrETR2o http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lDneyrETR2o and Robert lustig http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM talk about the carbohydrate hypothesis
- jp555 13y ago
  > Chemically it is insulin that triggers the signal in our body to store fat. 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 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.

weddpros 13y ago

Maybe there's a category of people who eat healthier and are leaner, and they could buy whole milk because they consider it's healthier too. It may be a statistical bias... Like "people who eat foie gras are leaner", which is probably true too.

skywhopper 13y ago

Take this report with the same grain of salt it's recommending taking the conventional wisdom of avoiding dairy fat. These diet studies focus on extremely narrow questions and generally have homogenous (pun intended) population samples. Ignore the headlines. The best diet advice I've heard is Michael Pollan's: "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants."

TelmoMenezes 13y ago
> 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?
- streptomycin 13y ago
  If you really study the scientific research (i.e. you don't just read a headline in a newspaper saying "SCIENTISTS SAY COFFEE IS GOOD" or "SCIENTISTS SAY COFFEE IS BAD" and you actually understand the limitations of nutrition study design and the conflicting results across seemingly similar studies), you'll come to about the same conclusion: there are tons of uncertainties in nutrition, and eating lots of plants is about the least uncertain advice out there.
- skywhopper 13y ago
  Unfortunately, science is nowhere close to understanding the human body sufficiently to make any specific claims about "optimal nutrition". I'm not sure it will ever be possible. The human body is just far too complex and dynamic a system.

teh_klev 13y ago

One of the things that ruined full fat milk for me in the UK was the introduction of homogenised milk. It ruined my morning porridge where my dad and I would pour off the cream that settled at the top as a breakfast treat. Homogenisation spoiled that for us. 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.

TausAmmer 13y ago
You have some farms in UK where you can buy raw milk, expensive - yes, but worth it. I can drink milk again :)
aestra 13y ago
So wait, you can't just buy cream in the UK? What would be the difference than skimming it off the top? I'm also wondering if you can make your own non-homogenized milk by mixing the cream with the skim milk. Full fat milk is 4% cream.
- teh_klev 13y ago
  Yes, you can buy cream on its own, but that wasn't what I was getting at. The point was that in non-homogenised milk, the cream naturally separated to the top of the bottle. It wasn't a lot, but just enough to make porridge better. It was a tradition/ritual thing. Also the cream wasn't as thick as say even single cream. I suspect (and no offence intended) you're a good few years younger than I am to have experienced these things. :)
  - aestra 13y ago
    Oh I know exactly what you're talking about. Just was making a suggestion. I am in my 30s I understand the physics completely and always did even before your post.

neverminder 13y ago

I'm quite involved in fitness and I know a thing or two about diet. Milk is not bad, it never was. The only significant difference of full milk and skimmed milk from my point of view is GI (Glycemic Index). Full milk has GI of 41 whereas skimmed milk has a GI of 32 [1]. Obviously the lower GI the better. [1] http://healthyeating.sfgate.com/milk-really-low-glycemic-4404.html http://healthyeating.sfgate.com/milk-really-low-glycemic-440...

hrkristian 13y ago
Then again, the fitness life has never really been considered the epitome of healthy living... 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.
- neverminder 13y ago
  Well, the "fleshed out details" is obscenely vast subject that I just didn't want to contaminate this discussion with. If there are people practicing something more healthy than fitness then good for them. I am in it to look good and feel good.

mhb 13y ago

Why Nutrition is So Confusing: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/opinion/sunday/why-nutrition-is-so-confusing.html?hp&rref=opinion http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/opinion/sunday/why-nutriti...

forgottenpaswrd 13y ago

Well, this is not news at all. Americans used to consume 8 kilos of butter a year 40 years ago and lots of other fats too. 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.

_delirium 13y ago
Americans also used to use a larger proportion of the workday to do physical labor, walked more, and didn't use computers, among other things that have changed over the past 40 years.

w1zd0m 13y ago

the article quotes the president of the "dairy council" and ceo of a milk company.. uhhhh not sure were seeing the 'whole' picture here. lame

yoodenvranx 13y ago

In Germany it is actually quite hard to find skim milk. I guess at least 98% of the milk you see in a supermarket has either 3.8%, 3.5% or 1.8% fat content. In some supermarkets you can find 0.1% milk, but that is quite rare.

boon 13y ago

It's only a paradox if you believe in the first place that dietary animal fat is bad for you.

michaelbuddy 13y ago

organic whole milk is pretty much the only I can enjoy. The rest tastes awful.