For years we have been told that Whole Milk is terrible for you and that we will get heart disease and die if we consume full fat dairy products.

I don’t consume dairy all that much anymore but when I do consume dairy it’s full fat.  My personal belief is that reduced fat and fat free products usually have harmful chemicals in them that do not produce a favorable hormone response.  I also believe that full fat versions of food will help us consume less because it’s nutrient dense and filling.

Perhaps a little background on how these guidelines about fat being the devil and why that’s not necessarily true maybe in order.

How Fat Came to be seen as evil

Ancel Keys

Ancel Keys was a scientist at the University of Minnesota who did a study on heart disease in the 1950’s.  He believed that heart disease was not just an inevitability of aging but that people could reduce their risk for heart disease by eating less fat.

Public Health Authorities took this this theory and ran away with it and by 1977 this was the official advice of the U.S. Dietary Goals (Washington Post october 2015)

Theory becomes “TRUTH”

Even though Ancel Keys research was observational and at best showed that saturated fat consumption was associated with heart disease, people took it to mean that saturated fat CAUSED heart disease and this just isn’t true.

The results of trading meat, butter, milk, and eggs for refined carbs and sugar have not been good.  Americans are fatter than ever and riddled with heart disease and diabetes.

What researchers are saying now

Here are some quotes from prominent scientists and medical journals about saturated fat and Heart Disease

“If we are going to make recommendations to the public about what to eat, we should be pretty darn sure they’re right and won’t cause harm.  There’s no evidence that the reduction of saturated fats should be a priority” – Dariush Mozaffarian, cardiologist, epidemiologist, and dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science & Policy at Tufts University

“There is no significant evidence for concluding that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of coronary heart disease,”  – American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2010

“Current evidence does not clearly support” guidelines linking saturated fat and heart disease, according to a review of experiments and observational studies published in the Annals of Internal Medicine

“Saturated Fats are not associated with mortality, heart disease,, strokes or type 2 diabetes, a major review in the British Medical Journal reported in July of 2015 (Washington Post Oct 2015)

What about Milk Research

So glad you asked!  According to a research study that was not funded by the dairy industry, people who consumed the most dairy fat were far less likely to develop heart disease compared to those who consumed the least (Washington Post October 2015)

Here’s what the leading researcher Jocelyne R Benatar of New Zealand said:

“There is no scientific basis for current dietary advice regarding dairy, ” Benatar said.  “Fears [about whole milk] are not supported by evidence.  The message that it is okay to have whole fat food,  including whole fat milk, is slowly seeping into consciousness.  But there is always a lag between evidence and changes in attitude” (Washington Post)

Their conclusion:  We don’t know.

It is good to see that attitudes about saturated fat are changing and that’s a good thing because the way we have been teaching people just isn’t working!!

Source:  For decades, the government steered millions away from Whole Milk.  Was that wrong? by Peter Whoriskey Washington Post October 6, 2015