
The Full-Fat Paradox: Whole Milk May Keep Us Lean - mattjaynes
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2014/02/12/275376259/the-full-fat-paradox-whole-milk-may-keep-us-lean
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jtheory
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.

~~~
alexc05
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
> 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.

~~~
alexc05
Thanks so much for your feedback. Clearly I've presented my understanding of
things (with references to where that information came from)

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.

~~~
jp555
You're right I shouldn't have been so crass. It's just that the more I learn
the facts about nutrition science the more I rage at the mythology; and Taubes
is a king of myth.

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.

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pothibo
> 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
> 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
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.

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colinbartlett
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.

~~~
omnibrain
And then try raw, unhomogenized, unpasteurized milk. :D It will feel like
angels dancing on your tongue.

~~~
shiftpgdn
That's illegal in most if not all of the US.

~~~
drcube
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
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.

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buro9
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?

~~~
VLM
"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.

~~~
phaemon
> 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.

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.

~~~
bhousel
True but plenty of other foods are Vitamin D fortified. Most cereals and other
dairy items like butter or margarine or yogurt.

------
teh_klev
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.

~~~
aestra
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
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
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.

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forgottenpaswrd
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
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.

------
skywhopper
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
> 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
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.

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weddpros
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.

------
VLM
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
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?

~~~
ifross
I think the point was is that when the fat is removed from milk, it is not
only fat that is removed, but also compounds that readily dissolve in fat.

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.

~~~
orjan
Thank you, that line of reasoning makes sense.

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neverminder
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-440...](http://healthyeating.sfgate.com/milk-really-low-
glycemic-4404.html)

~~~
hrkristian
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
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.

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sambeau
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)

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

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mhb
Why Nutrition is So Confusing:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/opinion/sunday/why-
nutriti...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/opinion/sunday/why-nutrition-is-
so-confusing.html?hp&rref=opinion)

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yoodenvranx
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.

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w1zd0m
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

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

