Helps you lose weight.
The notion that you should drink reduced-fat milk is based on two theories that have zero scientific basis — that calories per se make you fat, and that saturated fat is bad for your heart. They’re both nonsense.
[Update a couple minutes later]
The author still gets that part wrong:
Whole-milk dairy products are relatively high in saturated fat. And eating too much saturated fat can increase the risk of heart disease. So many experts would agree that adults with high cholesterol should continue to limit dairy fat.
I repeat, there is zero empirical evidence that saturated fat increases the risk of coronary disease. It is based on the flawed theory that high cholesterol causes heart disease and that eating cholesterol increases your cholesterol. Again, neither is true.
I lost weight when I stopped drinking milk.
That is interesting for sure. While I have been pounding the drum that the government’s obsession with low fat diets and the carb-heavy food pyramid is unsound, I didn’t really consider milk in the equation because I don’t drink it.
I am not lactose intolerant or anything, I simply observed that no mammals except humans drink milk after they are weaned and maybe there is a reason for not drinking milk after a certain age.
I simply observed that no mammals except humans drink milk after they are weaned and maybe there is a reason for not drinking milk after a certain age.
I struggle to think of any adult animals that won’t drink milk if they’re familiar with it and it’s offered to them, Adult animals don’t consume it in the wild because it’s not available to them.
I struggle to think of any adult animals that won’t drink milk if they’re familiar with it and it’s offered to them,
It’s not that hard. For example, Asian humans. Most adult mammals are lactose intolerant. Only northern Europeans have really evolved an ability to digest it.
That’s a incorrect characterization of Asians. Some Asians are lactose intolerant, and that includes large numbers of southern Chinese. On the other hand, lactose tolerance is extremely common in the north of China. The mutation towards lactose tolerance in northern Europeans was not the only place something like this occurred. Somewhere around Mongolia a different mutation (on the next chromosome) occurred that had the same effect. This mutation spread far and wide in the north of Asia.
Out of curiosity, I followed up something else I suspected about another region of the world, and found the following story. Apparently among East Africans there are three different mutations that have the same effect, and they appear to be quite recent (within the last 3000 years). Clearly there’s some very strong selective pressure towards lactose tolerance, and quite a few genetic paths to get there.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/11/science/11evolve.html?_r=0
On the other hand, lactose tolerance in India seems to come from the same source as that in Northern Europe.
http://phys.org/news/2011-09-indians-europeans-milky.html
Tibetan lactose tolerance seems to be independently evolved (no link as article behind pay-wall sorry)
I keep finding the statistic on the web that 1% of Chinese are lactose tolerant. Somewhat better data suggests 93% intolerant, which is possible, but still sounds too low. The 1% figure came because they were testing for -13910T allele which is very uncommon in Chinese (it’s what gives Europeans the ability), but this doesn’t predict lactose tolerance in Asians. Rates among Mongolians are reported as lower than I expected (12% tolerant)… but there’s a big proviso to that. Many north Asians who are classified as intolerant can actually tolerate a class of milk without noticing any problems (about 200ml), so that would explain my own observations while in the area: plenty of milk consumption, but not in large quantities.
If milk doesn’t make you gain weight, why do babies drink it?
Thanks. Try the veal. 🙂
I have to avoid milk almost entirely (It’s high in sugar) but when I do have it, it’s full milk.
I’m glad to see stories like this, which undermine the simple-minded theories that have held sway for so long (Such as “all fat is bad”).
This has a bearing on the global warming (the Mannmade kind) issue; for too long, a simplified to the point of uselessness argument held sway; that CO2 (like fat) is the bogeyman, responsible for all the bad things sure to come.
Ya’ gotta like milk first ….
As a dairy farmer, and a naively honest one at that, I can tell you that milk is excellent for putting weight on calves – the later you wean them the heavier they’ll be, it’s also excellent for putting weight on pigs, if you rear pigs on waste milk you should cut the milk from their diet a few weeks before killing, or the meat will be buried in fat.