- Drinking whole or full-fat milk could help us to reduce our risk from diabetes by up to 46%
- Drinking skimmed or low-fat dairy products no better for you than drinking full-fat variants.
Drinking skimmed milk or low-fat dairy products has often been part of a diet plan to reduce fat but a recent assessment of weight or obesity suggests that drinking whole milk may be a better plan. The scientists in two studies appear to demonstrate that low-fat milk is not the healthier option either and those women who consume full-fat dairy products actually gain less weight. The study also suggests that type-2 diabetes could be reduced by up to 46% too if whole milk is drunk too.
The problem of diabetes is ever increasing – the World Health Organisation recently explained that over 422 million of us worldwide are now suffering the condition and it is not slowing down either. The number with the condition has quadrupled in the last 34 years and now 1 in 11 has it. Diabetes is a very serious, chronic disease that occurs when the pancreas does not produce enough insulin, which is the hormone that regulates blood sugar or glucose.
Obesity is also a major health problem. The US NHANES states that one-third (35%) of their population was obese in 2012 and that poor diet and low exercise were the major contributory factors (Ogden et al., 2012).
Dietary guidelines may yet need a revision to reverse some of the thinking that has influenced dietary choices. High fat dairy products have always been associated with too high a level of both calories and saturated fatty acids which contribute to weight gain that leads to cardiovascular disease. In fact the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for the USA report that we should consume 2 to 3 cups of low-fat dairy products daily (USDA, 2010). However, too few studies were suggesting that dairy consumption could prevent chronic diseases and research was focused on low-fat dieting.
A piece of research finds that neither low-fat nor whole-fat dairy foods were found to have any major impact on traditional heart disease risk factors. Researchers at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, at Tufts University reported in the journal Circulation that people consuming full-fat dairy products had as much as a 46 percent lower risk of developing diabetes (Yakoob et al., 2015). They had looked at 15 years’ worth of dietary information from 3,333 people of ages between 30 and 75 who consumed skimmed milk, low-fat cheese and yogurt. They examined blood borne biomarkers associated with fat.
A study of about 18,000 elderly or middle-aged women in the Women’s Health Study conducted between Brigham University (USA) and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden also found that those who ate more high-fat dairy had an 8 percent lower chance of becoming obese over time compared to those eating less fat. No association was seen with a low-fat dairy intake (Rautiainen et al., 2016).
The two pieces of evidence need to be placed in context and these is still a dearth of studies supporting these findings. It is known though that there are healthy and unhealthy fats, that cholesterol is a biomarker for heart disease but not as securely as it was once thought and that fat might be a way to reduce satiety.
References
Ogden, C.L.C.M., Kit, B.K., Flegal, K.M. (2012) Prevalence of obesity in the United States, 2009–2010. NCHS data brief, no 82. Hyattsville (MD): National Center for Health Statistics.
Rautiainen, S., Wang, L., Lee, I-M., Manson, JA, E, Buring, J.E., Sesso, H.D. (2016) Dairy consumption in association with weight change and risk of becoming overweight or obese in middle-aged and older women: a prospective cohort study. Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 103(4) pp. 979-988
Yakoob, M.Y., Shi, P., Willett, W.C., Rexrode, K.M., Campos, H., Orav, E.J., Mozaffarian, D. (2015) Circulating Biomarkers of Dairy Fat and Risk of Incident Diabetes Mellitus Among US Men and Women in Two Large Prospective Cohorts. https://circ.ahajournals.org/content/early/2016/03/22/CIRCULATIONAHA.115.018410.abstract
US Department of Agriculture and US Department of Health and Human Services (2010). Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2010. 7th ed. Washington (DC): US Government Printing Office; 2010.
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